The scientist held an experiment where participants had to compare probabilities without thinking about actual numbers. If people tried explicitly to do the math, they failed, said Kenneth Norman, professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI).
"Our brains are horrible at arithmetic. Our implicit computations are so much better than our explicit computations," Norman explained.
Within the study, Norman and his colleagues observed how brains of the students participating in the experiment worked while they were exploring a virtual safari park. The park was divided into four parts marked with different colors. Each zone was inhabited by elephants, giraffes, hippos, lions and zebras. The task forced the brain to use previous observations of these animals in order to decide in which colored zones various groups of the animals were likely to be found.
According to the scientists, such important features of human intellect as mental alertness and quick adapting to a new situation, depend on the configuration and activity of the orbitofrontal cortex. The research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.