Inside Duke Medicine

Duke has DIBS on how the brain opts for risks

By Kelly Malcom

The current economic crisis has many people thinking about risky choices.

The burgeoning field of neuroeconomics, which combines neuroscience, economics and psychology, examines how people make decisions.

Turns out that many of its top investigators are right here at Duke. Scott Huettel, Ph.D. and Michael Platt, Ph.D., of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience published a paper entitled “Risky Business: The Macroeconomics of Decision Making Under Uncertainty” published earlier this year in Nature Neuroscience, outlining how the brain responds to such situations.

The researchers have recently teamed up with colleagues from the Fuqua School of Business and the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology to further explore the biological and psychological underpinnings of risky decision-making.

This interdisciplinary collaboration is made possible by Duke’s newest strategic initiative, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, or DIBS, which was created last year.

“One of the goals of DIBS is to provide an avenue for communication within the Medical Center and to build bridges between brain researchers and people who may not readily identify themselves as brain scientists,” said David Fitzpatrick, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology and director of the center.

“DIBS makes it possible to step beyond the traditional disciplines of neurobiology, psychiatry and psychology for study of brain-related science in areas such as pediatrics, business, and genetics,” said Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D., assistant director of DIBS.

One way it’s accomplishing this is with a set of Research Incubator Awards, one of which funds the neuroeconomics project. Another funded project –- from a team that includes researchers Alison-Ashley Koch of the Department of Medicine and the Center for Human Genetics, Guoping Feng of the Department of Neurobiology, Nicole Calakos of the Department of Neurology and William Wetsel of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences -– is examining the genetic and neurological roots of bipolar disorder.

It builds on earlier research identifying a gene called SAPAP3 that has implications in behavioral disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“It is a very exciting study, and truly interdisciplinary. All the faculty have different expertise and we believe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” said Koch.

The incubator award will allow that team to collect critical preliminary data so that they can ultimately be competitive for a program project, she said.

An important part of the DIBS mission is education, both of faculty and of the lay public. DIBS has sponsored a workshop examining the challenges in relating issues of societal importance to research into the neural mechanisms of behavior, and a second looking at the latest research approaches to schizophrenia.

“At that workshop, we had clinicians who are not at the research bench describing what schizophrenia was from their perspective and basic scientists who are working on molecular aspects of the disorder but who may not be as informed about what it’s like on the clinical side,” said Fitzpatrick.

An inaugural DIBS symposium, to be held this month, will examine music and the brain. Presenters will include leading scientists, including Duke’s Dale Purves, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and musicologists investigating how the brain is impacted by music.

Finally, DIBS will sponsor talks by brain scientists at their Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Seminar Series held in various departments around Duke—from ophthalmology to biomedical engineering, as a way to play a role in bringing people to duke who are approaching brain-related topics from interdisciplinary angles.

Said Johnson: “The idea is to bring people together that are interested in the brain to start to form a common language.”