How We Decide -- Take 2

This is another one of those cognitive science books which have been so popular lately, with me and everyone else.  Like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, it's full of fun facts and ideas that I immediately wanted to tell someone else, so we could talk about how cool/weird/unusual it was.  So here I go!

As the title suggests, Jonah Lehrer's book is an analysis of how we make decisions. He begins with an investigation into the snap decision processes of people who don't have time to think - quarterbacks, major league batters, soldiers choosing whether or not to take a shot when they have only fractions of a second to consider the circumstances.  What we learn is that our brains, specifically the anterior cingulate cortices (or ACCs), are trained to recognize certain patterns in your environment before you even realize what it is you're seeing.  The recognition is completely subconscious.  With time and practice, your brain can become quite good at making these decisions.  You'll know where to throw the football, when to swing, and whether to shoot.

That's probably not a surprise to anyone.  We've all heard that "practice makes perfect."  What I didn't know though - this is one of those fun facts - is that it's confusion in the ACC that causes seasickness!  It's used to your body being on solid, unmoving ground.  When you're on a boat or ship and pitching around, your ACC gets confused.  Your eyes are telling your brain that you're upright and standing still, but the signals coming from the balance center in your inner ear are telling your brain that you're tipping all over the place.  These conflicting signals cause dopamine levels in your brain to rise and overwhelm the receptors in the ACC - your brain doesn't know what motion to expect next.  Over the course of a few hours, as your dopamine receptors adjust to the motion of the ocean, seasickness recedes.  (If you can't wait that long or have especially sensitive semicircular canals, motion sickness patches block the communication signals that reach your brain via the vestibular nerve so your dopamine levels don't rise in the first place.)

Interestingly, dopamine also affects the nucleus accumbens, the primitive "greed center" of the brain.  Follow that argument out to Lehrer's final conclusion and we learn that, more or less, lack of dopamine regulation makes for terrible stock trading decisions, poor personal investments, and uncontrolled credit card spending.  Other articles back this up and I've heard the same argument other places, so I'll leave it at that.  (Surprise, surprise, the nucleus accumbens is also the pleasure center for addictive drug users.)

From there we move to the prefrontal cortex - now we're talking about how we think about decisions, the conscious ones.  Among other crises, Lehrer examines the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire.  There is an extensive analysis of the probable path of the fire and actions of the firefighters here (as well as in the book Young Men and Fire, if you're really interested), so I'll try to keep that to a minimum.  Suffice it to say, a crew of smokejumpers found themselves just a few hundred yards from a fire they couldn't outrun or control.  The younger fighters were scared, responded to their emotions, and tried to run nonetheless; they were consumed by the flames.  The foreman also knew he couldn't outrun the fire, but unlike his younger and less experienced comrades, he controlled his emotions.  He didn't run.  He considered his options.  He did something that had never been done before (but has been used often since): he started an escape fire at his own feet.  He burned the grass and shrubs in the area near him so that when the big fire came roaring through, it would find no fuel there and would pass over him.  Somewhat miraculously, it worked.  The foreman's ability to reason through the crisis, to exercise executive control over his instincts, saved his life.

But sometimes executive control isn't the best choice; it's terrible when it comes to self-awareness.  That's when emotions should rule the day since it turns out that, in many circumstances, self-analysis leads to less self awareness rather than more.  For example, when picking which variety of strawberry jam you like, which painting is your favorite, or even which house you should buy, people who "went with their gut" were happier with their selection over the long term than people who took the time to weigh the pros and cons.  The more time people spent deliberating about a decision, the more tied up they got in their own process and the less frequently they were satisfied with their choices.  Sometimes, I guess, you just know what you like.  (Note to self: remember this!)

The same logic also often applies to physical actions: more information and analysis leads to worse performance.  Have you ever overthought your golf swing or allowed one bad performance to make you nervous before every performance for the next year? Sometimes it's better not to think; just do it.

Your brain is at constant war with itself, seeking pleasurable rewards and trying to avoid costs and pain. Often, the avoidance behaviors win out: this is why you have pols who support their candidate's platform even when that candidate's position is anathema to what the party normally believes or is in conflict with their own personal opinion.  It's easier to blindly support a candidate than it is to examine the disconnect. "We all silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance."  We distort our own thought processes until we reach our desired conclusion, which is easier to justify because it's what we want.

The gist of the book (after all that recounting of fun stories) is this: when people have to make complex subjective choices, they are more satisfied in the long term if they let the choice marinate in their subconscious brain and do what feels right. If the choice is rational and can be solved purely by analysis of information, the conscious brain wins out - it makes better choices when the variables are quantifiable.  This seems counter-intuitive, so I'll say it again: simple problems require reason; complex ones need a little gut instinct.

One last example to illustrate this.  Poker.  In tournaments where there are clearly players worse than you and the stakes aren't that high, the decisions are simple.  Stick with the statistics, play the numbers.  But when the going gets tough in the final table at the World Series of Poker where all the players are great and you're playing for millions, a good player will listen to that voice that says "this doesn't make any sense, but do it - it feels right."  The game is complex and there are lots of variables - multiple decks, piles of chips, bluffing, bluffing that you're bluffing, tells, fake tells, and so on.  Go with your gut.

Weird, right?  But cool.  Aren't you glad we talked about it?