Why Animals can predict lotto numbers better than most of us

This has led to the discovery of numerous studies that attempt to assess whether humans are hardwired to detect patterns.

So is there a fundamental emotional component to learning about probability? Perhaps.

But one of the most intriguing claims is that the very act of predicting is emotionally and cognitively pleasurable for the same reason gambling and playing chess are.

Empathy: Research has shown that people can 'feel' where other people are in their probability models

‘It's not like you're winning a lot of money by predicting these numbers,’ said Emre Turkcan, a computational psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

‘But it is actually a very cool thing to predict because people do get pleasure out of it.’

Some studies show that people from a kind of shared brainpower for probability judgments.

People are ‘like a hive mind’ when they're trying to predict something, says Turkcan, whose study of the poker-playing beekeeper was published this month in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Turkcan points to research showing that when people can't come up with a good guess, the brain zaps more dopamine in an area called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA.

Dopamine is known to be the pleasure chemical in the brain, and may also be responsible for the feeling of dopamine rushes associated with sex and drugs, and powerful memories.

But Turkcan thinks there may be another reason why we learn about the likelihood of an event in the first place, and the pleasure it may bring.

‘Humans are very strongly motivated by the notion that other people have their best interests in mind,’ Turkcan says.

So our brains react differently to events if people are predicting something good for us, than if they're trying to harm us.

Turkcan has been working on a theory that the VTA is excited when we try to predict the success of someone we care about.

In particular, the more empathy we have for someone, the more rewarding the prediction becomes.

Turkcan conducted the study while he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where researchers have found that mice seem to have something like the brain wiring of humans when they view the world.

Turkcan has found that rats, mice, and humans make statistically predicted decisions about the likelihood of a number of different events

He has also shown that a region of the brain called the cerebellum seems to play a key role in predicting outcomes.

But what can our emotional reactions really tell us? It's not always clear that predictiveness itself is a good thing.

Turkcan points to research showing that parents with kids with congenital amusia have difficulty reading others' facial expressions.

‘They are very good at predicting whether something is going to be good or bad, but they don't know why,’ he says.

As with gambling, Turkcan suggests that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Turkcan says that if you're trying to predict someone's behavior and future, then a brain scan of someone with an activity-congruent VTA will reveal that their brain does things like make fast calculations.

They might also have a stronger tendency to follow cues from people around them.

‘So I might predict, for example, that a person will like this song, but I can't predict whether they will really like it,’ Turkcan says.

‘So their VTA might be excited, but not because I think they are going to love the song.’

Turkcan and his team are now investigating how these predictions work. They are using fMRI to look at brain activity in the right VTA while participants watch videos that are related to what they are predicting.

A thought, be it for a product, a face, or a friend, might go through our heads at some point and subsequently be noticed by a nearby neuron (a type of brain cell). When this happens, another neuron makes a decision about what to do, by flipping between a state called being ‘on’ and being ‘off’. Pictured is a scanning machine (A) that shows what the brain is 'thinking' when we are paying attention

Turkcan has found that mice seem to have something like the brain wiring of humans when they view the world (stock image)

‘We do not know if a specific process occurs for predicting that an event is going to be good for us, or if we have two processes,’ Turkcan says.

He also found that the firing of neurons in the VTA depends on how good the prediction is and whether the prediction is predictive of the participant's own happiness.

‘The same activity is happening in the sub-regions of the VTA that are related to reward, which is surprising,’ Turkcan says.

‘This shows how the activity in the VTA is connected to the systems that govern the emotions.’

The other interesting finding that Turkcan has made is that even a fleeting thought is enough to provoke a reaction.

He discovered that a mere flash of mental curiosity can be enough to activate a biological response.

‘I wondered whether there was a way to measure that there is an activity that corresponds with imagining something,’ he says.

‘For example, when you think about a conversation that you had with a friend, a rapid recording of your activity is already there in your brain.

‘The question was, could I use it to predict behavior? And that's exactly what we did.’

In this study, Turkcan tested the ability of participants to make these brain predictions by asking them to choose whether or not to follow the bouncing ball, and then measure how the activity in the VTA responded.

‘Just looking at the activity in the VTA we can predict whether a person is going to accept or reject the red ball,’ Turkcan says.

‘What's really cool about this, though, is the use of fMRI. If we ask the participants to look at the red ball and then scan their brains while they are doing so, we can actually predict their behavior.

‘And this is not as simple as flipping a switch.

‘There are multiple predictions. For example, the more certain they are that the ball will bounce, the higher the activity is. The activity is higher when the participants are more uncertain when they have a lot of information.

‘The activity increases even before they start paying attention to the red ball.’

Turkcan and his team are now looking at how the brain can predict which candidate to trust.

He says that if there is a pattern that becomes stronger and stronger as a person learns more about a person, it might lead to an increase in activity in the VTA.

Turkcan says this might explain why people with psychopathic tendencies show signs of increased activity in this part of the brain, as they are more likely to come to conclusions about a person that are very strong.

The findings also hint at the possibility that this might mean that we might see better performance from those people who have had training in other regions of the brain.

'These are interesting, fun findings of a region of the brain that has not received a lot of attention,' Turkcan says.

‘But I hope that we can come up with new, more sophisticated neuroscientific methods that will help us understand the wiring of the brain, and provide important information on the origins of human behavior.