How We Decide [Kindle Edition] Review

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The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help you us increase the risk for 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 this gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box while using latest tools of neuroscience, they re finding that it's not how the mind works. Our best decisions certainly are a finely tuned mixture of both feeling and reason along with the precise mix depends about the situation. When buying a house, for example, it's best to let our unconscious mull in the many variables. However when we're picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to work with the different parts in the brain, and to perform this, we have to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us with all the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research too as the real-world experiences of the wide array of deciders from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. Lehrer shows how people consider advantage from the new science to create better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal would be to answer two questions which are of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does a persons mind make decisions? And how are we able to make those decisions better?
A Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, Author of The Way We Decide
Q: Why did you wish to write a magazine about decision-making?

A: All of it began with Cheerios. I'm a tremendously indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying to choose relating to the apple-cinnamon and honey-nut varieties. It was an embarrassing waste of energy and yet it happened in my opinion every certainly one of the time. Eventually, I chose that enough was enough: I want to to know what was happening inside my brain when i contemplated my breakfast options. I soon realized, of course, this new science of selection had implications far grander than Cheerios.

Q: What are a few of the implications?

A: Life is ultimately only a group of decisions, from your mundane (what do i need to eat for breakfast?) to the profound (what should I actually do with my life?). Until recently, though, we had no idea how our brain actually made these decisions. As a result, we used untested assumptions, like the assumption that folks were rational creatures. (This assumption goes all the best way up returning to Plato along with the ancient Greeks.) But now, for that very first time in human history, we are able to look in your mind and find out how we actually think. It turns out that individuals weren't designed being rational or logical or even particularly deliberate. Instead, our mind holds a messy network of different areas, many that may take place with the output of emotion. If we produce a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even though we attempt to be 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 make better decisions.

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

A: My answer is often a qualified yes. Despite the claims of countless self-help books, there's not a secret recipe for decision-making, no single strategy that can work in every single situation. The real-world is too complex. The thought process that excels within the supermarket won't pass muster within the Oval Office. Therefore natural selection endowed us using a brain that is enthusiastically pluralist. Sometimes we have to reason through our options and thoroughly analyze the possibilities. And we occassionally should pay attention to our emotions and gut instinct. The secret, of course, is understanding when to make use of different styles of thought--when to trust feelings then when to exercise reason. In my book, I devoted an instalment to looking at the world over the prism of the game of poker and found that, in poker as in life, two broad kinds of decisions exist: math problems and mysteries. The first step to making the right decision, then, is accurately diagnosing the issue and figuring out which brain system to rely on. Should we trust our intuition or calculate the probabilities? We always need to become thinking of how we think.

Q: Are you a great poker player?

A: when I is at Vegas, hanging by helping cover their a number of best poker players inside the world, I convinced myself that I'd absorbed the tricks in the trade, that we can use their advice to win some money. So I went to some low-stakes table with the Rio, put $300 on the line, and waited for that chips to accumulate. Instead, I lost all my cash in less than an hour. It was a pricey but valuable lesson: there's a big distinction between understanding how experts think and being in a situation to think just like an expert.

Q: Why write this book now?

A: Neuroscience can seem to be abstract, a science preoccupied with questions about the cellular specifics of perception and also the memory of fruit flies. In recent years, however, the area has been invaded by some practical thinkers. These scientists want to utilize the nifty experimental tools of recent neuroscience to explore some in the mysteries every day life. How should we select a cereal? What areas with the brain are triggered inside shopping mall? So why do smart people accumulate bank card debt and sign up for subprime mortgages? How can you use the brain to explain financial bubbles? For the first time, these incredibly relevant questions have rigorously scientific answers. It all goes returning to that classical Greek aphorism: Know thyself. I'd argue that the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience allow us to understand ourselves (and our decisions!) within an entirely new way.

Q: The Way You Decide draws from the latest research in neuroscience yet also analyzes some crucial moments within the lives of an variety of "deciders," from the football star Tom Brady to your soap opera director. Why did you are taking this approach?

A: Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, famously compared our mind with a set of scissors. One blade, he said, represented the brain. Another blade was the particular environment through which our brain was operating. If you need to view the function of scissors, Simon said, then you've got to appear at both blades simultaneously. Some Tips I desired to do in The Way We Decide was go out with the lab and in the real-world to ensure I really could see the scissors at work. I discuss some ingenious experiments on this book, but let's face it: the science lab is really a startlingly artificial place. And so, wherever possible, I experimented with explore these scientific theories in the context every day life. Rather than just writing about hyperbolic discounting along with the feebleness in the prefrontal cortex, I spent time having a debt counselor inside the Bronx. when I became interested within the anatomy of insight (where do our ideas come from?) I interviewed an airplane pilot whose epiphany within the cockpit saved countless lives. That's if you really commence to appreciate the ability on this new science--when you can use its tips to explain all kinds of important phenomena, like the risky behavior of teenagers, the amorality of psychopaths, and also the tendency of some athletes to choke under pressure.

Q: What do you have to do in the cereal aisle now?

A: I had been about halfway through writing it once i got some great advice from the scientist. I utilized to be 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 help me determine what sort of cereal I actually planned to eat for breakfast. So Used to do the only real logical thing: I got myself my three favorite Cheerios varieties and combined every among them during 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 like presentation (a sales page or packaging)...Lehrer is really a delight to read, and this can be a fascinating book (some that appeared recently, inside a slightly different form, in the New Yorker) that will help everyone better understand themselves along with their decision making.” —Publisher's Weekly, starred review