How we Decide

How we Decide by Jonah Lehrer (Book Review #1)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3860977-how-we-decide

                 Should I buy the shirt, or the shoes? A ticket home for spring break, or a trip with the roommates? Going on the late-night restaurant excursion or catching up on sleep? If there’s one thing I’ve learned in college, it’s that decisions are an integral part of nearly everything we do. If you’ve ever wondered how the process works, how to make better decisions and why, this book is a good layman’s resource!

                 Any time we’re faced with two or more conflicting choices, our brain filters massive amounts of information and offers an emotional response, largely based on release of the chemical dopamine. Dopamine is released in response to stimuli, generating patterns (often cause-effect) based on data collected by the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Any time we face a situation which relates to past experiences, our brain projects a response derived from this information that yields the best possible result. The brain is constantly weighing excitation of the NAcc (nucleus accumens) against the insula, ultimately presenting a consensus response even if the cost-benefit analysis is very close. This is an incredibly useful process, honed through millions of years of evolution, and operates extremely efficiently. In a case study involving four decks of cards, with corresponding rewards (two of which had smaller rewards, but a much better average return), people’s “gut” reaction (their physical stimuli, such as perspiration or increased heart rate) indicated pattern recognition some four times faster than the rational brain could produce. While such studies seem to indicate the necessity of “following our inclinations,” they fail to capture a few key blind spots: truly random processes, simple decisions, and processes that are unprecedented in prior experience.

                To illustrate this, we look at patients whose dopamine activity is increased—patients with Parkinson’s disease, for example, who take drugs to increase the activity of their current dopamine chemicals to compensate for extensive loss in quantity. In such subjects, the propensity to gamble is wildly increased, because dopamine rewards unpredicted success. A slot machine, for example, becomes intoxicatingly fascinating for its anomalous payouts, which represent a mystery that refuses to be solved. Truly random events, consequently, are best left to the rational brain.

                Simple decisions testify to the utility of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), found in the frontal lobe and far more developed in higher primates than any other animals in the world. The PFC permits that a wide variety of data can be processed, repackaged, and applied to novel situations. This is a relatively new (evolutionarily speaking) but exceptionally useful process, which permits development of forward looking counterfactuals (how will this affect me in the future?). An unfortunate limitation is the human working memory, which can only process between 5 and 9 pieces of disparate data at any given time. Thus, the PFC is more efficient than emotions at differentiating between a couple pieces of data (which type of oatmeal should I buy), and far less efficient in very complicated situations (should I ask the girl out? Do I want to take job A or job B?). It is also extremely useful in novel situations, where past experience is irrelevant (piloting a crashing airplane before flight simulators).

                So how should we make decisions? The best uniform advice is to trust your gut in very important decisions, like buying a car or choosing a wife. It’s important that you let your rational brain take in the convoluted information (read reviews, learn about features, go on a serious number of dates), but there should be a period of incubation or distraction of the rational brain while the emotional half churns through information. Consumers who were given too much data before making a car purchase selected the (objectively) best vehicle only 25% of the time, but when they were distracted by a memory game in-between, their success rate was well over 60%. In simple decisions, like buying groceries or having another cup of coffee, the rational brain is your tool of choice. When in doubt, metacognition (thinking about thinking) can save us from impulsive decisions, or allow us to give ourselves the space to let our emotional supercomputer take the lead.

Hope this helps! Questions, corrections, and comments are encouraged!

Sean