I’m the type of person that typically overthinks the smallest of decisions and wavers back and forth until the last minute. So I’ve always been curious about what exactly is going on in my brain when I’m having such a hard time deciding.
So when I read the inside cover of this book, which claims it to be “The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions,” I thought to myself “Maybe I should try it.”
Then, five minutes later: “Ehh…maybe not.”
The inside jacket also promises to answer two questions: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better? The book can get a little deep into the brain stuff, but overall it accomplishes its goal with lots of short, interesting stories.
Emotions Aren’t Our Enemies
Being a quarterback isn’t easy. Making decisions about whether to pass or not, who to throw it to, what the defense is doing, if you’re about to get tackled by a 300-pound angry defender—all that stuff is not easy to process and still perform.
But Tom Brady (and quarterbacks in general) seems to do it just fine. How is that? What’s going on in his brain that allows him to perform at such a high caliber when no one expected him to amount to much (he was the 199th pick of the 2000 draft)?
Is it because he has some obvious physical talent? Probably not, since he was drafted so low. Is it because he’s a much smarter player than other quarterbacks? If so, the Wonderlic tests that college players are given before the draft would show some kind of correlation between high scores and good careers.
But they don’t. Solving complicated equations and throwing a football under pressure seem to involve two completely different parts of the brain. If a quarterback were to rationally think about the pros and cons of every possible decision he’s faced with while he’s on the field, he’d be a walking, talking tackling dummy. There’s just no time for all that thinking.
So what’s the answer?
Lehrer tells us that Brady is using the most powerful, well developed part of all our brains: our emotions. He even uses a great analogy that I wish he would’ve visualized on the cover instead of the ice-cream cones because I feel it truly shows the essence of his book.
According to Lehrer, the emotional center of our brain is like a computer—capable of thousands of processes at light speeds. The “other” part of our brain, which is what the Wonderlic measures, is our reason. That is the newest part of the human brain. It isn’t very well developed and can only handle a limited amount of simple tasks. If our emotions are a computer, reason is a calculator.
The first two chapters of the book are devoted to debunking this myth about our emotions: that they turn us into irrational animals that make terrible decisions because our emotions have clouded proper judgment.
Here’s Tom Brady on how he decides where to throw when he’s playing QB:
I don’t know how I know where to pass. There are no firm rules. You just feel like you’re going to the right place…And that’s where I throw it.
Think about it for a second: if Brady were to treat this like a math problem, it would go something like this:
Hike!
OK, let’s see, there goes the safety. I’m going to stay away from the center of the field.
Oh there goes Troy Brown on his route—looks pretty well covered though.
Whoa, is the pocket starting to collapse? That guy over there looks like he’s getting too close.
Did the running back pick up the blitz? Looks like it.
Hey, Troy just made an excellent cut, maybe I can throw it to him if I lead him just enough to avoid the other defender in that area.
Gosh there are a lot of flashes coming from the stands…well, it is the Super Bowl.
Suffice to say, Tom Brady’s rational side would get sacked into submission and wouldn’t have a very promising career. Or a long life span. Tom Brady is great at what he does because he’s listening to how he feels and how he feels is being regulated by something called dopamine.
Here’s the gist on dopamine: it’s a neurotransmitter that floods our system when certain things happen. For example: Leher tells the story of a guy in the military in 1991 whose job was to protect the allied fleet by making sure nothing fishy was happening on radar. He suddenly sees something that makes him very nervous. It’s a blip that looks just like all the others that regularly come on his screen—nothing out of the ordinary—but for some reason he can’t quite pinpoint, it bothers him.
Something about it is off.
It’s his decision to either send a command to shoot the blip down or let it go. Here’s the problem: allied airplanes are always running the very same route that this blip is. Yet this radar guy is convinced something is off. After some deliberation, he orders the plane be shot down. And it is. Some tense moments later, it’s confirmed that it was an Iraqi missile but his superiors are mortified because he can’t explain why he ordered it be shot down. He’s relieved, obviously, but he still doesn’t know what it was that made him nervous about that blip.
The explanation lies in dopamine. The way our body is wired is to flood us with dopamine when our expectations are met (this feels good), and to trigger negative emotions when something that doesn’t match our expectations happens. This guy had been trained for a long time and had spent countless hours staring at blips on his radar. So the pathways and movements were burned into his brain, whether he knew it or not. But something that he rationally could not describe happened. The blip did something that his emotions picked up on. So they triggered the sweaty palms and uncertainty.
His emotions told him this was a missile before he knew what was going on.
The same goes for Tom Brady. Countless hours of practice have wired his brain to feel and react to certain things before he even knows what’s going on (for more on the importance of practice, check out my review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers). That’s why practice is so important and that’s what allows Tom Brady to rely on these decisions when he’s out on the field. They’re way more powerful than if he tried thinking it all out in his head.
The whole point of this chapter is for us to stop thinking that our emotions are only there to get into trouble. They are the most primitive because they’ve been with us the longest. But that doesn’t mean we become neanderthals when we rely on them—it means they are the most sharpened tools at our disposal.
Reason is not everything.
But Emotions Can Fool Us
Before you go on your tirade about how your emotions have gotten you in trouble before (at your job, your love life, etc.) to debunk Lehrer’s first point, hold on—he does it himself. After he tells us how great our emotions are, he also goes through some examples of how our emotions can betray us.
Who doesn’t love surprises? I’ve always recommended a surprise as the best kind of gift you can give another person. And if you’ve ever been truly surprised, you know how great of a feeling it is.
It’s because our brains are wired that way. Dopamine is even more powerful when something unexpected happens. That’s all well and good unless you’re doing something like playing slots.
Slots are totally random machines with no patterns. So when you win at slots, it feels good. But the brain feels even better because it had no idea the reward was coming. Like a crack addict yearning for that first high, the slots are designed to get us chasing that surprise again so we can get that exhilarating feeling all over again.
This kind of stuff can get us into all kinds of trouble, especially our finances. Take the stock market, another completely random, unpredictable thing. Our brain can’t stand that this system is completely random, so it tries to impose a pattern on it. We think we’ve solved the pattern and our brain makes us feel really good by buying the recent hot stock or mutual fund.
It also affects how we spend our money, and credit-card companies are making a mint because of it. Our brain registers spending differently when we take cash out of our wallet and hand it over then when we take out a piece of plastic and run it through a machine (something all personal-finance writers know about). The brain doesn’t like handing over large amounts of cash—it’s like we’re losing something we hold very dear. Paying with plastic, however, doesn’t cause that same feeling. So we spend and spend and spend—happy to have what we want and happy to not feel as guilty about it. Until the bills get bloated and out of control. Then we feel even worse.
Our feelings, powerful as they are, can be manipulated in ways that can get us into big trouble. And that’s when we need the help of our familiar friend: reason.
Reason to the Rescue
So our emotions are a powerful computer. That’s great—but what about reason? According to Lehrer, the rational part of our brain is like a calculator—great for small, simple tasks, but a nightmare for more complicated decisions.
Lehrer tells us a few stories where reason saved lives. One of them is about Wag Dodge (I remember hearing his story before, a long time ago, but have no idea where), a firefighter that was trapped in a grassy plain with other fellow firefighters with a huge wall of fire (the Mann Gulch fire) coming their way. It was pretty clear they couldn’t outrun the fire, it was coming much too fast, but most of the firefighters did just that.
Their emotions were telling them that a fire was about to kill them and they had to get away as quickly as possible. There’s nothing complicated about that formula. Fire = death. So their emotions were telling them to run for the hills.
Wag was running too, until reason came to his rescue. He suddenly realized that if he continued running he would be burned alive. There was no use running. That calmed him down and almost like a switch reason took control. And reason suddenly came up with a great idea.
So he stopped running and lit a match, igniting the grass in front of him and watching it burn up just as fast as the fire behind him was chasing him down. Then he stepped into the burnt grass and laid down, hoping the fire would burn right around and over him. Thirteen firefighters died. Wag Dodge survived.
The reason Lehrer runs through this and other examples is to show that reason can do some great things when it isn’t obscured by emotion. It can come up with creative new ways to solve problems no one has ever had before. This creativity and thinking is crucial to certain kinds of situations. Situations where it’s very easy to let your emotions take over and make bad decisions.
Overthinking
If anything, Lehrer is a fair man. He talks good and bad about our emotions and he does the same for reason. Just as our emotions can lead us astray, so too can reason. In his chapter “Choking on Thought” he talks about people who try to make decisions and start to overthink.
Professional athletes do this all the time. Think about it: these are people who have trained long and hard to automate the things they do. Like Tom Brady. Like Chuck Knoblauch—remember him? He’s the baseball player who couldn’t throw the ball in the infield anymore because of something going on in his head. He was probably using too much reason to do something he should’ve put on autopilot.
I’ve seen this playing baseball. I do it all the time, but one time when I was pitching I saw an extreme. This young kid was catching me and he was real eager to do a good job. Which is great. So he comes into the game in the fifth inning or so and I’m pitching. He calls for a slider and I shake my head no. He calls for it again. I shake him off, a little confused. The calls for the slider again, this time with some oomph. As in, “Just throw it!”
I was shocked—a pitcher is like a woman. If he says no, then you move on. But this kid just didn’t get it. I didn’t want to make a big scene, so I through the pitch and moved on. Once we were in the dugout I asked him what the hell his problem was. His answer:
I could see you didn’t want to throw the slider but I noticed that in his last at bat he got a little jammed. Plus our infield was playing back so I figured he’s pull it right at them. Also, the grass is a little high today and with the shadows creeping up on the plate and the dirty baseball, he’s not going to be able to square up on the ball too good.
We were all speechless until one of our veterans spoke up. “Kid,” he told him. “This ain’t the big leagues. Just go out there and stop thinking so much. And if he doesn’t want to throw the slider, call something else.”
He was doing a little too much thinking on the baseball field and it was making him look and sound like a total moron (or a robot). Either way, it wasn’t a good thing. You don’t need a computer to catch a baseball.
The Poker Hand
So now we know that our emotions are powerful computers and reason is a calculator. And we know that too much of either can hurt us. So now what?
Here is where the book starts to answer the second question it promised to address in the inside jacket: how can we make better decisions? In order to help us answer that question, the last chapter deals with poker.
You see, poker is a game that requires the use of both sides of our brain. You need the rational part to figure out which cards you need and when you’ll see them (especially if you can count cards). But you also need to know when/how to bluff, which is the domain of your emotions. A great poker player has both of these qualities and knows when to break out each one.
This last chapter tells a longer, more drawn out story than the other ones in the book. It’s similar to Outliers and it’s very entertaining.
But he eventually starts to wrap it up:
If you’re going to take only one idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process it requires.
I love it when authors do this because it tells you how important this central idea is to him/her.
And that’s really what Lehrer is trying to say here. There is no perfect answer. We can make better decisions by paying attention to what we’re thinking and feeling. By analyzing our past mistakes and learning from them. By knowing how both sides of the brain work so we know why we feel the way we do—which is what the book actually does.
Some might be disappointed with Lehrer’s answer—most of us want a magic formula or some kind of inspiring quote. But that’s because we’re wired that way, and Lehrer understands that.
Overall, How We Decide comes through on its promise. It explains how our brains work when we’re making decisions and what we can do about it. Some of the details on the brain stuff can get a little high end for me, but you don’t have to know it to appreciate what he’s saying. To me, the examples are the best part of the book. And while I like longer ones like in Outliers, he manages to compile a good amount of interesting examples which will probably mean you’ll find at least one or two you really love.
I know I did.
Now I just need to decide which book I’ll read next…
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There are other countless stories in the book—some are very engrossing and some are just OK. Unlike Outliers, which tells fewer but longer stories, How We Decide tells a lot more stories and a shorter time span. I wish I could touch on all of them here, but if you like Deal or No Deal, chess-playing computers, educational testing, and behavioral experiments, then I really recommend you check this book out. It’s filled with great little anecdotes that help highlite his main points.
Tags: brain, how we decide, jonah lehrer, making decisions
