I once bought a pair of shoes that didn’t fit. I blame my brain. I was a victim of a dopamine rush. That pesky neurotransmitter had been primed by previous shopping highs to flood my brain with the desire to take another hit. High as a kite, I made a stupid decision. I knew the shoes didn’t fit as I was buying them and, a few days later, too ashamed to go back to the shop, I chucked them away.
I learnt nothing from this. I still chuck away almost new stuff. This is because dopamine is stronger than my will. It likes the shopping high and there’s no way it’s going to let my pathetic ideas of common sense, rationality or correct shoe size get in the way.
Don’t get all superior with me. I’m not even a shopaholic; I’m just normal. Your dopamine probably makes you play fruit machines. Listen carefully. You cannot win: you are 100% certain to lose — in the long term. You know this but you still do it. The only reason I don’t play the things is I’ve never actually won so, at the sight of a fruit machine, my dopamine just shrugs and looks for more shoes.
That’s what dopamine does. It rewards successful strategies and, as soon as it finds one, it looks for more. So here’s the problem: dopamine is rational — it finds things that work and tries to do them again. But that makes you take irrational decisions.
The message here is: decisions are never what we think they are. Western civilisation has laboured under a delusion that runs from Plato to Lieutenant Commander Data, the robot in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The delusion is that suppressing our emotions is the best way to make decisions. Data has no emotions and makes perfect decisions. When they give him an “emotion chip”, he breaks down, unable to decide anything.
Emotionless Data is a fantasy, though. Ask Elliot, a patient of the neurologist Antonio Damasio. Doctor and patient met a few months after a tumour had been removed from Elliot’s brain. In the process, his orbitofrontal cortex was damaged. This is the area that handles emotions: now Elliot had no emotions. He was Data made flesh.
Before the surgery he had been a model father and husband, with a management job in a large corporation. The operation changed everything: he was still highly intelligent, but he was incapable of taking a decision. Deciding where to eat lunch paralysed him. Without emotions you can’t make decisions.
This example comes from an important and lucid new book by an infuriatingly young — he’s 27 — American neuroscientist turned writer, Jonah Lehrer. The book is The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. There are many pop neuroscience books around at the moment, which almost all — like, say, Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology, about “neuromarketing” — come to glib, premature and unsustainable conclusions, usually on the basis of making people do tasks while stuck in an MRI machine having their brain scanned. Since people don’t live their lives inside MRI machines, the results are, to say the least, of dubious applicability.
Lehrer comes to no such conclusions and he goes to some lengths to point out to me that neuroscience is in its infancy and we know next to nothing about how the brain works. What we do know, however — usually from real-world as opposed to MRI experiments — chimes with my deep-seated sense that we’re unbelievably tricky creatures with dodgy wiring.
And, since we are in the middle of a crisis caused by the dodgy wiring and dumb decisions of various crazed alpha males, it might be as well to think about how decisions come to be made.
Lehrer started the book after he returned to America from Oxford — he was a Rhodes scholar. He went into a supermarket with his wife. “As great as Sainsbury’s is,” he says, “the American supermarket takes the surreal abundance of capitalism to a whole new level.”
At the checkout, the Lehrers realised they had forgotten to pick up breakfast cereal and his wife sent him to get some Cheerios. Faced with an aisle full of different cereals, he was paralysed. He didn’t know which to choose: “I started wondering: what’s going on inside my head?” He ended up buying basic Cheerios. “Wrong choice — I saved a dollar but they tasted like cardboard. I’ve now settled into a perfectly satisfying solution: I buy both multigrain and honey nut and mix them in the bowl.”
The point is that at the level of the trivial and the not-so-trivial, decisions are at the heart of who we are. So what can we conclude about how we should behave?
Well, first, be careful what you say to your children. An experiment by the psychologist Carol Dweck in New York City schools involved giving children tests in which there was only one variable. After the test some were told they were clever; others were congratulated for working hard.
Those told they were clever slumped into a kind of intellectual torpor; those told they had worked hard bounded ahead. In one group the scores of those called clever dropped by 20% and the scores of those called hard-working rose by 30%. There’s a big point here about how they chose: they self-corrected. While the clever group thought all they had to do was turn up, the hard workers considered their own mistakes. This is an aspect of something called metacognition. I’ll come back to it.
Another sound piece of advice is: don’t trust your brain to do the right thing. In one experiment students were given a test that was, in fact, a distraction. They had to move from one room to another, some having to remember a long number and some a short number. On the way they were offered snacks — chocolate cake or fruit. Those remembering the long number tended to take cake; those with the short, fruit. The cake eaters would under normal circumstances have gone for the healthy option, but, preoccupied, they took decisions against their own interests.
So be very careful about distractions. But, again, matters are not as simple as that. Sometimes it’s best to be distracted. A Dutch experiment involving getting people to choose the most suitable car found that they made the right decision more often if they stopped thinking, distracted themselves and then chose the car that popped into their head when they started thinking about it again.
The point here is that the balance between reason (that is, assessing each aspect of the car) and emotion (choosing the first one you think of) is not what it seems. As I said, dopamine is rational; it’s just that you don’t have any access to its rationality. Basically dopamine — and many other aspects of the brain — are ticking over all the time, assembling information. When the moment of decision arrives, this hidden database is accessed and its findings are transmitted to your conscious mind as emotions. So what we call emotion is, in fact, rationality of another, deeper type.
Sportsmen know this. Lehrer uses examples from American football and golf. Players train and train until the most complicated manoeuvres can be executed without conscious thought — they are embedded in the unconscious. And if they do start thinking, their game falls apart. It happened to the Frenchman Jean Van de Velde at the last hole of the 1999 Open. He started thinking about his swing, blew a three-stroke lead and lost.
Women, at this point, may be crowing that they can no longer be dismissed as hopelessly emotional decision makers. They shouldn’t be. Few sexual differences have emerged in this research. One, however, has. It is very familiar. Men make a decision and then stop thinking about it. Women keep thinking about it. Lehrer says when he gets home from a party he just wants to go to bed, whereas his wife wants to conduct a post-mortem examination.
The big message is: metacognition. Think about your thinking. Lehrer is a little hard on the Greeks — pointing out the flaws in Plato’s model of rationality — but here he is closer to them than he thinks. Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Lehrer’s idea is not so different: the unexamined life may make you buy, like him at 18, a $3,000 motorbike that you crash a week later — “my worst decision”.
Two great modern thinkers summed up the quandary, identified by neuroscience, of our brains’ desperate attempts to make sense of the world, to make decent choices. The first was the American psychologist William James, who said: “Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal.” Impulses, note, not thoughts. The second is the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “You will never be able to control randomness.” Put the two together and you will never again be able to choose a box of cereal. But you will be wise.
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