Brain imaging studies from drug-addicted individuals show physical changes in areas of the brain that are critical to judgment, decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control.
Brain images featured on the National Institute on Drug Abuse NIDAA) website (14, 15, 16) show impairment and physical damage in areas important to judgment, decision-making, learning, memory, and behavioral control in many types of addiction.
The impact assessment scale included ten categories ranging from high positive impact (enhanced clinical decision-making, learning something new, updating knowledge or recalling something forgotten), moderate positive impact (reassurance or confirmation), no impact to negative impact (too much information, too little information, disagreement with information or potentially harmful information).
Feasible and acceptable management alternatives are needed for decision-making, learning, and adaptation.
This reasoning predominantly rests on the premise that the brain and a neural system are required to realize the complex computational processing that enables faculties such as anticipation, awareness, memory, self-reference, motivation, decision-making, learning, communication and more, which are, broadly speaking, attributes of what we call, the mind.
Chronic use of amphetamine has been associated with a wide range of cognitive deficits, involving domains of attention, inhibitory control, planning, decision-making, learning and memory [ 5].
These processes are crucial in decision making, learning and memory.
In sum, homeostatic regulatory processes may account for the automatic and continuous self-regulatory nature of prediction error analysis, decision making, learning and memory.
This reduction of flexibility and adaptability could result in rigid and suboptimal decision making, learning, and memory as is seen in cases of addiction (e.g., Monterosso et al., 2012), and neurological diseases such as Alzheimer∼s and Parkinson∼s disease.
If this is the case, the underlying organization and detailed neural mechanisms of predictions are likely foundational for complex cognitive functions like decision making, learning and memory, and thus likely to be highly conserved across species (Watson and Platt, 2008; Adams et al., 2012).
A genetic algorithm-based engine can provide awareness-processing, decision-making, and learning for cognitive radios [26, 27].
