Miyamoto of the Graduate School of Medicine, Juntendo University, is aware of the "knowledge of ignorance" that recognizes new encounters and experiences gained in daily life as "new" in the area called the frontal pole at the tip of the frontal lobe. Research groups such as Researcher Kentaro, Assistant Professor Takahiro Nagata, and Specially Appointed Professor Yasushi Miyashita have identified it. It was the first time in the world that the mechanism of the brain that produces "ignorant wisdom" was elucidated, and it was published in the electronic version of the American academic journal "Neurons".
The ability to judge an event unknown to oneself as "new" has been thought to be peculiar to humans because it requires advanced cognitive information processing ability, but the research group used past primate macaques. Experiments have shown that the frontal lobe has some parts that contribute to the determination of confidence in known events.
Therefore, the research group experimented with monkeys to see if they remembered a certain figure, and measured the neural activity of the brain during the experiment by magnetic resonance function imaging. I found.
In addition, administration of drugs to suppress frontal pole activity prevented monkeys from making confident judgments on unknown figures.However, there were no signs that the frontal pole contributed to the determination of confidence in known events.
The research group believes that frontal pole activity plays a role in creating self-consciousness for ignorance, and that the human ability to be aware of "ignorant wisdom" has an evolutionary origin in the primate cerebrum.
Paper information:[Neuron] Reversible silencing of the frontopolar cortex selectively impairs metacognitive judgment on non-experience in primates
