How Our Brains Makes Decisions using both Reason and Feeling

According to the book "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer, the brain makes decisions using a mix of both reason and feeling. Whether decisions are best arrived at via reason or via feeling or a combination of both will depend on the situation. And good decisions come when the right mix is used.

The following is an example from the book "How We Decide" of an real case when decision based on feeling leads to a positive outcome. It was February 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, when Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley was monitoring the radar responsible for protecting the fleet. He had been on duty all night and had seen dozens of radar blips which were friendly fighter jets. But then he saw one blip that for some unexplained reason filled him with fear. The blip looked and moved like the other friendly blips. He didn't have much time before he had to give the command to fire on the blip which could either be a friendly fighter jet or an enemy missile. He issued the order to fire. It turned out that the blip was an Iraqi missile. Riley's decision had saved an American battleship.

Riley was not able to explain by reason why he knew the blip was a missile. Instead his emotions knew. This idea that an expert with experience in a particular field is able to have "gut feelings" that often turn out to be correct is also described in the book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell. On hind-sight analysis, the blip was slightly different from the other blips during the initial appearance of the blip. However, this subtle difference was not picked up by the reasoning brain. Instead, it was picked up by the emotional sub-conscious brain. And it is thought that dopamine neurons plays a role.

Neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Antoine Bechara designed an experiment that showed that the sub-conscious can sometimes know things before the conscious brain. The participant was to turn over cards from any of the four decks of cards. Each card will indicate whether the participant won or lost money. The goal was for the participant to make as much money as possible. The researchers had rigged two of the decks such that these are "bad risk" decks. The participants would do better to pick from the other two "good risk" decks. It is interesting to see how many random cards the participants have to turn over before they realize which decks are bad. And it turns out that participants had to turn over about 80 cards before they realize consciously which are the decks to avoid. However, by measuring the electrical conductance of the participants' skin, it was found that by around the 10th card, nervousness was detected whenever the participant reached for the bad deck even before the participant was able to explain why. As Lehrer writes, "These wise yet inexplicable feelings are an essential part of the decision-making process. Even when we think we know nothing, our brains know something. That's what our feelings are trying to tell us." [page 48]

In order for "gut feeling" to be accurate, the person must have trained his/her dopamine neurons through extensive experience and practice in a particular field.  Nevertheless, there are situations where our feelings can lead us astray and it is best to use reason. Chapter four of the book describes a story of a group of firefighters being chased by a wall of fire. The fire-fighters ran for their lives driven by their life-or-death fear. Wag Dodge was an experienced veteran and knew that he could not out-run the fire. Instead he over-rode his intense fear emotions and stood where he was. He used his conscious brain to come up with the solution of lighting a match and burning a firewall of fire around himself. That enabled him to live the event, whereas many of the other firefighters had died.

We have now seen how sometimes our feelings are correct. And sometimes our feelings are wrong. We have also seen how reason is sometimes correct. And now we'll see how reasoning too much can also give us the wrong decision.

University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson had a group of students taste-test some jams. All they had to do was taste and then rank. The students was able to correctly rank the jams and matched well with what Consumer Report thought as best-tasting and worst tasting jams. Next Wilson, had a group of students taste-test the same jams. But this time, the students had to fill out questionnaires and analyze their choices. This time, the students had very poor correlation in ranking correctly what jams tasted best. The flaw was because "thinking too much" lead us to consider variables that were not important. And ultimately, it lead us to the wrong decision.

Wilson did a similar experiment with posters. "Non-thinking" decision makers choose the Monet or van Gogh as their preference. Whereas, "thinking" decision makers choose the humorous cat posters.

Jonah Lehrer writes that sometimes "we could make better consumer decisions by knowing less about the products we are buying. ... When we spend too much time thinking in the supermarket, we can trick ourselves into choosing the wrong things for the wrong reasons."[p149] This is also an idea that was talked about in another book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" by Barry Schwartz.

In another study, counselors were ask to predict a student's freshman grades in college. The counselors looked at personality tests, high school transcripts, personal interviews, etc. Next the student's freshman grades where predicted solely based on a mathematical formula of grade point average and a single standardize test. The mathematical formula using less data made more better predictions than the counselors with whole slew of information. This is because the counselors had so much information that they are sometimes lead astray by facts that turned out not to be important.

So we've seen how sometimes the use of feeling will give us better decisions. And sometimes the use of reason will give us better decisions. The question is when to use feeling and when to use reason. This question was asked in a talk that Jonah Lehrer gave at the CommonWealth Club. Lehrer says that this is still very preliminary science. But one important take-away from these research is the idea of trying to cultivate meta-cognition and trying to adjust one's thought process appropriately for the situation at hand. Meta-cognition is thinking about thinking. And meditation is a form of meta-cognition.

Knowing how the brain work and when reason works better in some situations and feeling works better in other situations can help you become a better decider. On page 237 of his book, Lehrer writes "It is the easy problems -- the mundane math problems of daily life -- that are best suited to the conscious brain. These simple decisions won't overwhelm the prefrontal cortex. In fact, they are so simple that they tend to trip up the emotions, which don't know how to compare prices or compute the odds of a poker hand. ... Complex problems, on the other hand require the processing powers of the emotional brain, the supercomputer of the mind."

In his talk, Lehrer mentions the "7 plus or minus 2" limitation of the pre-frontal cortex which is the seat of the conscious brain.

And finally near the end of the book, Lehrer talks about professional poker players who had to use both reason and feeling in order to win. Reason was need to calculate the statistical odds of a poker hand. And feeling was needed in order to read the other opponents and know when they have good hands or not and to know when to bluff or not.

How We Decide - book by Jonah Lehrer