Jonah Lehrer on Your Dopamine Decisions
Jonah Lehrer is all laconic, low-key business behind the podium, despite his emo-rocker look on his homepage. A little more bedhead and some ink, and he could make a third bandmate for We Are Scientists. (Tambourine?) He was Town Hall last night talking about his second book, How We Decide, which, it turns out, has a lot to do with dopamine-driven emotions, rather than Vulcan-style rationality.
Dopamine is probably best known from experiments with blissed-out rats who forego anything else to get just a little more. But it is released not just as a reward for good things happening, but when we've successfully predicted a good thing will happen. That makes dopamine a key part of how we learn.
It helps us retain patterns of behavior that for one reason or another result in a case of the happies, and even to chain together behaviors that help us perform ever more complex tasks for bigger payoffs. It does all this with emotional tagging, and it's this subconscious feedback that helps us select a box of Cheerios from the cereal aisle--or that leaves us bewildered by choices between plain, honeynut, or multigrain when we don't have a sufficiently strong emotional response to any in particular.
The flip side of reward is prediction error--Lehrer says researcher Wolfram Schultz describes the feeling of prediction error as the moment when, starving, you use your last 75 cents to buy a snack machine candy bar, hear the clink of the coins, see the spiral start to push the candy toward you--only to watch it snag at the very last second. (We think snack machines tend not to have fire axes near them for this reason.)
We're still learning a lot about dopamine and its effects--one accidental discovery occurred with Parkinson's patients being given a medication that stimulates dopamine receptors too powerfully. A percentage become slot machine addicts because their reward-seeking behavior is heightened, and because high levels of dopamine make us think we see patterns in more or less random stimulus. (This may be related to the schizophrenic tendency to see everyday events as part of a plotted pattern, we add as an aside.)
Think of your brain as a Swiss army knife, says Lehrer. It contains a number of highly specialized tools, and you have to help judge which is the best tool for the job. Start by "eavesdropping on your emotional brain," to discover what you're attracted to. Accept that much of advertising is speaking directly to that emotional brain (studies have shown that the emotional pull of brand attachment can overwhelm your sense of taste). And if you rely on one of those pro vs. con grids to help with big decisions, realize that an subconscious emotional bias can warp your ability to generate pros and cons.
For the investors in the audience, Lehrer had this to say about bubble behavior: Whenever the mainstream has lost any sense of risk, your bubble is reaching its peak. Expect that the longer a bull market continues the more your own sense of risk will erode. And finally, beware of the human tendency to outsource our confidence to experts with compelling statistical models.
