How We Decide [Kindle Edition]

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The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help you us make best decisions.

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they re discovering that this is not how a mind works. Our best decisions really are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason along with the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it's best to permit our unconscious mull in the many variables. However when we're picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The key is to determine when to use the various parts in the brain, and to accomplish this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us using the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well since the real-world experiences of your wide range of deciders from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage from the new science to create better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions which are of interest to merely about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does a persons mind make decisions? And how will we make those decisions better?
A Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, Author of how We Decide
Q: Why did you want to write a novel about decision-making?

A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm a tremendously indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle with the supermarket, wanting to choose relating to the apple-cinnamon and honey-nut varieties. It was an embarrassing waste of your time nevertheless it happened to me all the time. Eventually, I chose that enough was enough: I want to to comprehend the thing that was happening inside my brain when i contemplated my breakfast options. I soon realized, of course, that new science of making decisions had implications far grander than Cheerios.

Q: What are a few of these implications?

A: Life is ultimately only a compilation of decisions, from your mundane (what must i eat for breakfast?) to the profound (what should I really do with my life?). Until recently, though, we didn't have idea how our brain actually made these decisions. As a result, we used untested assumptions, like the assumption that people were rational creatures. (This assumption goes completely to Plato as well as the ancient Greeks.) But now, to the first time in human history, we can look within our mind and observe how we actually think. It turns out that people weren't designed to get rational or logical and even particularly deliberate. Instead, our mind holds a messy network of numerous areas, many of which are participating with all the output of emotion. If we make a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even if we try being reasonable and restrained, these emotional impulses secretly influence our judgment. Of course, by understanding how a human mind makes decisions--and by learning about the decision-making mistakes that we're all vulnerable to--we can learn to generate better decisions.

Q: Can neuroscience really teach us how to create better decisions?

A: My answer is a qualified yes. Despite the claims of countless self-help books, there exists no secret recipe for decision-making, no single strategy that will work in every situation. The real life is way too complex. The thought processes that excels in the supermarket won't pass muster inside Oval Office. Therefore natural selection endowed us which has a brain that's enthusiastically pluralist. Sometimes we have to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities. And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions and gut instinct. The secret, of course, is understanding when to use different styles of thought--when to trust feelings so when to exercise reason. In my book, I devoted an instalment to looking in the world over the prism of the game of poker and located that, in poker as in life, two broad kinds of decisions exist: math problems and mysteries. The initial key to making the right decision, then, is accurately diagnosing the challenge and figuring out which brain system to rely on. Should we trust our intuition or calculate the probabilities? We always need to be contemplating the way we think.

Q: Are you currently a good poker player?

A: After I was at Vegas, hanging out with a number of best poker players within the world, I convinced myself that I'd absorbed the tricks in the trade, i could use their advice to win some money. And so i went with a low-stakes table with the Rio, put $300 around the line, and waited for that chips to accumulate. Instead, I lost my profit less than an hour. It was a costly but valuable lesson: there's a huge difference between understanding how experts think and being capable to think like an expert.

Q: Why write this book now?

A: Neuroscience can feel abstract, a science preoccupied with questions about the cellular information on perception as well as the memory of fruit flies. In recent years, however, the field continues to be invaded by some practical thinkers. These scientists wish to make usage of the nifty experimental tools of contemporary neuroscience to explore some from the mysteries every day life. How should we select a cereal? What areas in the brain are triggered in the shopping mall? How come smart people accumulate bank card debt and sign up for subprime mortgages? How can you utilize the brain to describe financial bubbles? For the first time, these incredibly relevant questions have rigorously scientific answers. It all goes time for that classical Greek aphorism: Know thyself. I'd argue that this discoveries of recent neuroscience allow us to understand ourselves (and our decisions!) in an entirely new way.

Q: how We Decide draws through the latest research in neuroscience yet also analyzes some crucial moments inside the lives of the number of "deciders," in the football star Tom Brady to a soap opera director. Why did you adopt this approach?

A: Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, famously compared our mind to some set of scissors. One blade, he said, represented the brain. The other blade was the precise environment by which our brain was operating. If you wish to view the function of scissors, Simon said, then you've got to look at both blades simultaneously. Some Tips I wanted to do in The Way We Decide was venture out with the lab and in the real world in order that I can start to see the scissors at work. I talk over some ingenious experiments within this book, but let's face it: the science lab can be a startlingly artificial place. And so, wherever possible, I tried to explore these scientific theories inside context of everyday life. Rather than just writing about hyperbolic discounting and the feebleness with the prefrontal cortex, I spent time with a debt counselor within the Bronx. when I became interested inside the anatomy of insight (where do our plans come from?) I interviewed an airplane pilot whose epiphany within the cockpit saved a huge selection of lives. That's whenever you really commence to appreciate the power of this new science--when you can use its tips to explain all sorts of important phenomena, including the risky behavior of teenagers, the amorality of psychopaths, and the tendency of some athletes to choke under pressure.

Q: What do you are doing in the cereal aisle now?

A: I was about halfway through writing the ebook when I got a lttle bit of great advice from your scientist. I was telling him about my Cheerios dilemma when he abruptly interrupted me: "The secret to happiness," he said,"is not wasting time on irrelevant decisions." Of course, this sage advice didn't let me determine what type of cereal I actually wished to eat for breakfast. So I did the only logical thing: I purchased my three favorite Cheerios varieties and combined them inside my cereal bowl. Problem solved.

(Photo © Nina Subin, 2008)


“As Lehrer describes in fluid prose, the brain’s reasoning centers can be fooled, often making judgments according to nonrational factors such as presentation (a sales pitch or packaging)...Lehrer is a delight to read, this also is often a fascinating book (some which appeared recently, in a slightly different form, inside New Yorker) that can help everyone better understand themselves in addition to their decision making.” —Publisher's Weekly, starred review