London - If your colleague steals one of your ideas, don’t blame their ambition. Blame their paracingulate sulcus.
Scientists have pinpointed this as the part of the brain key to distinguishing truth from reality.
They found that when it is underdeveloped, people are more likely to claim others’ ideas - and stories - as their own. But as they are unlikely to realise there is anything wrong with their memory, any plagiarism will be unintentional.
It could lead them to believe, for example, that the fantastical events in a story they heard in the pub actually happened to them. Dr Jon Simons gave 53 men and women well-known word pairs such as “Laurel and Hardy” or incomplete pairs such as “Laurel and ?” and asked them to imagine the missing word. Then, they or the scientist had to read the word pair aloud.
Later, the volunteers were asked to remember whether they had seen or imagined the second word of each pair and who read the words out.
Those with a well-developed paracingulate sulcus were right 85 percent of the time, while those where it was underdeveloped were correct in only 75 percent. Dr Simons wrote in the Journal of Neuroscience that this suggests an underdeveloped paracingulate sulcus makes it harder to remember, leading to the blurring of lines between real events and what you’ve been told. - Daily Mail