Comments on: Decisions, Decisions

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:41:39 +0000

Wow, what great comments on this site. Two issues I would like to follow up on. Jonah raises the issue of knowing when to trust your gut. This is something I have been thinking about. The problem is that you want to trust your gut when you have strong emotions. But, you should not trust these emotions when you think that they might be sparked by something inappropriate. So the key to deciding when to trust your gut is to be able to think about the forces that might be driving your emotions. If any of these forces – experiences that might be misleading, previous judgments or decisions that might be irrelevant, inappropriate self-interest or attachments – then you should not trust your gut. You need to do extra analysis or involve someone else (see my book Think Again).

Andrew Luke’s description of his inability to decide appears initially to be because he is thinking too much. But his last comment “I feel pretty much ambivalent towards each possible choice” seems to reveal the true source of his difficulty – no strong emotional tags. Maybe he does not want to go to college at all. Maybe he does not like studying so his subconscious is giving him ambivalent signals about all the majors.

This raises the question about whether Lisa GS’s daughter is really thinking too much or ambivalent. Sometimes when my wife asks me “do I want more desert”, I find it hard to answer because I have no positive or negative emotional trigger. Maybe my mind was focused on something else. But this is not the prime reason. It is just that I do not know what to answer.

By: Andrew Luke

Andrew Luke — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:17:44 +0000

Hi Jonah,

I’ve been “pathologically indecisive” about choosing a college major or career path for awhile. While I don’t think I have a damaged emotional brain (I can easily choose a breakfast cereal or what color pen to use), I have changed my major like fourteen times.

Here is an attempted summarization of the internal dissonance:

I usually consider each college major in depth one at a time and during this process, it seems like my NAcc and Insula become two opposing parties in a court room drama. Concurrently, my prefrontal cortex assigns one lawyer to represent each party and also acts as the attentive judge. The meta-cognitive part of my brain, whatever that is, is the jury. This jury is never able to reach a verdict, so I have a hung jury on my hands for every college major I consider.

…In other words, I feel pretty much ambivalent toward each possible choice so its hard to even begin to compare them.

What would you do in this situation?

PS – Sorry if I butchered neuroscience with my court room metaphor.

By: Harn

Harn — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:59:59 +0000

I’m interested in decisions that try to balance our interests and abilities: what to study in college, for example. There’s lots of data out there about insufficient numbers of trainees in professions like engineering and medicine and the teaching of math. On the other hand the liberal arts seem popular. What are some of the key factors motivating the decisions students make to study this or that field? Or if I can put it another way: is there a shortage of prospective engineers in the US at the primary level, are they there but the US edu system is just failing to groom them properly, or do other professions simply appeal more to the base of potential engineers? Or is it more complicated than any of that?

By: Jonah

Jonah — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:48:26 +0000

To briefly follow-up on David’s comment: Yes, I would argue that metacognition is a defining feature of the human mind. It’s worth taking a second to appreciate just how strange this talent is. Imagine that M.C. Escher drawing of a hand drawing a hand, or a video camera making a movie of itself. The human cortex is the same way, as it constantly transforms the subject at the center of consciousness⎯you⎯into yet another object contemplated by consciousness. Of course, like all things meta, the process can quickly spiral out of control. When a mind thinks about metacognition, it’s thinking about how it thinks about how it thinks. And so on.

However, I’d argue that, most of the time, metacognition is a pretty essential talent. For starters, it allows us to realize when we’re thinking badly, so that we can avoid common biases and mental mistakes. It also allows us to tailor our thought process to the task at hand. We can stop and figure out if we should trust our gut or exercise reason, and then we can adjust our thinking accordingly. That kind of cognitive flexibility depends on metacognition.

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:47:46 +0000

The opposite of the “emotional” brain is the non-emotional brain. This is the trade-off that I see along the autism spectrum, a trade-off of a “theory of mind”, for a “theory of reality”. Because the infant brain is limited in size at birth, and because the “best” time to optimize brain function is while that brain is wiring itself, that is when the trade-off occurs, in utero. I explain my hypothesis in great detail on my blog.

http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2008/10/theory-of-mind-vs-theory-of-reality.html

It is the emotional brain that sees things in anthropomorphic terms. Those are type 2 errors, false positives. Reality is not well described by anthropomorphic metaphors, but if your only thinking tool is a “theory of mind”, that is the only way you can perceive your environment.

By: Ben Wiehe

Ben Wiehe — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:39:51 +0000

What is the opposite of the “emotional brain?” Is there really any way to make a decision that is not in the end embedded in the context of our experience? I’m not sure any other kind of “brain” exists…is there an example you could provide?

By: Jan Grygier

Jan Grygier — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:20:44 +0000

While I tend to use intuitive decisionmaking where I have a lot of expertise (in my work, or when racing my sailboat), I can get bogged down in trying to maximize when making decisions that have long-lasting consequences where I am a novice – like all the decisions involved in building a house, or just deciding which vacuum cleaner to buy. So for those decisions I do the research and narrow down the choices, and then my wife goes with her gut to pick the winner. It worked great choosing schools for our kids and building two houses, though it still took forever to choose colors for the second one!

By: LisaGS

LisaGS — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:41:38 +0000

I think in the case of my eldest, it’s more about not wanting to make the wrong choice. She’s cautious and reserved by temperament, so I think her hesitancy fits in with that.

By: dk

dk — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:22:39 +0000

It occurs to me that it may be that meta-cognition — thinking about thinking — may be one key way humans are different from animals. That ability to separate yourself from the immediate seems like something animals do very little of.

am I right on that?

By: Jonah

Jonah — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:11:54 +0000

That’s a great question about meditation, elsa. While I’m not aware of any studies that have looked at meditation and decision-making in particular, there have been numerous experiments that investigated the effect of meditation on the brain. There are too many fascinating results to describe here – Richard Davidson, at the University of Wisconsin has led much of the research – but I think one interesting way to look at meditation is as a form of metacognitive practice. In other words, people are training themselves to think about thinking, and thus gain better control of their mind. As I detailed in my recent article on Walter Mischel and the marshmallow task, that skill can have big payoffs.