Curious Minds: How Do We Make Everyday Decisions?

Hot coffee or cold brew? Pizza or pasta for dinner? These are the decisions that guide our everyday lives. What computations do our brains make when weighing these choices?

At Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, Akram Bakkour, PhD, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Shohamy lab, investigates the ways in which our brain incorporates our memories and past experiences into the everyday decision-making process. He and his Zuckerman Institute collaborators, including Principal Investigators Daphna Shohamy, PhD, and Michael Shadlen, MD, PhD, recently found that the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, plays a central role in this deliberation process. These findings were published in the journal eLife.

This video is part of Curious Minds, a video series highlighting students and early-career scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.