How to Improve Your Decision Making Process | Dr. Michael Platt & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | What are the core mechanics of value-based decision making as it relates to outcomes

00:00:09.020 | and time?

00:00:10.020 | Yeah.

00:00:11.020 | So we – I think we understand this system pretty well at this point.

00:00:16.180 | So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive.

00:00:20.180 | So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this and essentially what happens

00:00:23.660 | is you're confronting a situation and it doesn't really matter whether – it seems

00:00:27.680 | to be the same process, no matter whether you're trying to decide between eating a

00:00:31.120 | donut or an apple or buying this house versus renting an apartment or marrying this person,

00:00:37.960 | you know, proposing or not.

00:00:39.440 | It's sort of all the same system.

00:00:42.400 | And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the

00:00:49.680 | alternatives.

00:00:50.720 | What are the options that are available to me?

00:00:53.320 | What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from, you know, maybe prior

00:00:57.560 | encounters or just other information?

00:00:59.880 | And it takes that evidence and it weighs it against stored information about things you'd

00:01:05.320 | done in the past, other decisions you'd made, and then begins to assign value, computes

00:01:10.040 | the expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you.

00:01:16.680 | And then essentially that is the basis along which that decision gets made.

00:01:23.840 | So it's, you know, it's a soft max function as we say, so it's not like a hard deterministic

00:01:30.520 | one.

00:01:31.520 | So there's some statistical noise in there for some, you know, we could talk about what

00:01:35.040 | that reason might be.

00:01:36.440 | You make a choice and whenever you make a choice in any behavior that you're engaging

00:01:41.160 | in, your brain is making a forecast of what's going to happen next as a result of that.

00:01:46.160 | And your brain then determines, computes, that things go exactly as predicted, right?

00:01:52.520 | Is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted?

00:01:55.200 | And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs

00:02:00.640 | that job better in the future, right?

00:02:03.800 | So like, "Oh, actually that was—it went way better than expected.

00:02:08.040 | You should assign that a higher value and do that thing."

00:02:12.280 | And this process of weighing up the evidence takes time.

00:02:17.160 | And that's why we have this speed-accuracy trade-off in decision-making where we observe

00:02:21.800 | that the faster you go, the more mistakes you tend to make.

00:02:26.160 | Been there.

00:02:27.160 | Exactly.

00:02:28.160 | We've all made split-second decisions that we regretted later.

00:02:32.120 | Oh, yeah.

00:02:33.160 | Or slightly sleep-deprived.

00:02:34.160 | Sleep-deprived, exactly.

00:02:36.560 | The more time you take, the more evidence you can accumulate.

00:02:40.920 | And when you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment

00:02:45.920 | is noisy, right?

00:02:47.720 | It's not perfect.

00:02:48.720 | It's noisy because of the environment.

00:02:50.680 | It's noisy because the wetware of the brain is statistical and biological.

00:02:56.520 | So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal.

00:03:03.520 | And that happens when you go too quickly, right?

00:03:06.320 | And one of the things that's – so there's a good mantra from that, which is if you want

00:03:11.520 | to make really good decisions or if it's really important, you kind of have to decide

00:03:14.720 | ahead of time, like, "Do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast?"

00:03:19.160 | And if accuracy is important, you need to slow down.

00:03:23.240 | Take your time.

00:03:24.240 | Take as much time as needed to get the most information that you can.

00:03:29.300 | And even in the moment that doing, like, simple strategies like breathing or having, you know,

00:03:36.500 | a mantra that says, like, you know, it's not what matters – you know, every little

00:03:40.020 | decision is not what counts, but it's the long run.

00:03:43.160 | That helps to turn – we've talked about arousal a lot here.

00:03:46.400 | And that turns down arousal.

00:03:47.400 | One of the things you think of arousal as doing when you keep talking about volume knobs,

00:03:51.460 | it's like a volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal

00:03:57.980 | or noise.

00:03:59.380 | So it can turn up noise too.

00:04:01.620 | So you could count as evidence toward the value of an option something that is not actually,

00:04:09.540 | you know, evidence, and then you make the wrong decision.

00:04:12.420 | So by turning down arousal, slowing down, you're relying more on evidence than on noise.

00:04:20.900 | Does increasing arousal increase the likelihood of false positives, that is, thinking something

00:04:25.260 | is there that's not, generally speaking, as well as false negatives, you know, thinking

00:04:31.020 | that something's absent when actually it's present?

00:04:34.300 | I haven't thought about it that way before, but it seems to me like that's – yeah,

00:04:39.900 | that seems consistent with my understanding.

00:04:42.620 | Just by way of example, one of the things that's been really different for me in the

00:04:48.180 | last few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're

00:04:55.780 | doing social media, you just click, it's out in the world versus, you know, the way

00:05:01.260 | I was weaned was, you know, spend two, three, four years on a project.

00:05:05.180 | Maybe it doesn't go anywhere, maybe it does, goes to multiple papers, gets reviewed.

00:05:08.460 | So by the time it comes out, you know, it's been proofread and you've read the proof.

00:05:13.260 | So it's been vetted by a number of hopefully expert sources, usually really good sources

00:05:19.420 | of feedback, as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication.

00:05:25.780 | And I used to have this saying, which was in the lab, because sometimes, you know, you

00:05:32.300 | have two months to do a revision or something, it's never really two months, it always

00:05:35.140 | takes five times as long, I used to say, "I go as fast as I carefully can," and I used

00:05:41.100 | to tell my students in postdocs that, "We go as fast as we carefully can because the

00:05:44.380 | moment you start going fast, you start making mistakes, you start making mistakes, you definitely

00:05:48.100 | pay for it later."

00:05:49.100 | And the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast and/or fatigue

00:05:53.580 | and the two things kind of relate to one another.

00:05:57.940 | Or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence and then nowadays you can go back

00:06:02.020 | and repair things with AI, you can, you know, you put things in, but I feel like so much

00:06:08.220 | of life in terms of decision-making is trying to make decisions when most of the time we

00:06:14.100 | think we don't have more time, but most of the time we do have more time, unless somebody's

00:06:18.580 | hemorrhaging, we usually have more time.

00:06:21.740 | But then there are some real things where we don't always have more time, I mean, we

00:06:27.120 | are biological aging machines and there is such a thing as too late.

00:06:32.980 | So how do you think these systems change as a function of, you know, playing a game for

00:06:39.660 | some money in the lab or we can get caught up in it, but there's this like tremendous

00:06:45.620 | backdrop of context, you know, $100 might be fun for one person, might be the difference

00:06:50.100 | between making rent and not making rent for another person.

00:06:54.660 | You know, the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your

00:06:58.900 | teens or 20s is fundamentally different than when somebody's, for instance, near the transition

00:07:05.540 | zone of having versus losing their fertility.

00:07:08.660 | I mean, these are like, yeah, and those change all sorts of, these pressures are so real

00:07:14.820 | and yet if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward

00:07:19.340 | system, it seems like we ought to learn in school how to, like, work with and update

00:07:29.020 | our decision-making process based on immediate term, short term, like all the different timescales.

00:07:34.540 | To be able to do that seems really important.

00:07:37.500 | Are there any ways to train that up?

00:07:39.220 | Yeah, I think it's a, so there's a few things in here that I think are worth unpacking.

00:07:45.580 | I mean, one is what you brought up about fatigue, which I think is really critical.

00:07:52.540 | We did some work with the wrestling team at Penn.

00:07:56.620 | Coach came to us, and I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab, and he said,

00:08:00.540 | you know, we're having this problem, which is that, and I don't know if you've ever wrestled,

00:08:04.540 | I wrestled, my middle son...

00:08:06.580 | One match.

00:08:07.580 | It's the worst six minutes of your life.

00:08:09.020 | Well, I didn't quit because I lost that match, and I did lose that match, it was seventh

00:08:12.060 | grade.

00:08:13.060 | I didn't quit because my dad gave me a choice, I could either continue to wrestle or I could

00:08:18.940 | play this other sport that I really wanted to play.

00:08:21.820 | He said you can't do both because it was going to impact my grades negatively, and so I opted

00:08:26.500 | for the other sport.

00:08:28.120 | What was the other sport?

00:08:29.120 | Soccer.

00:08:30.120 | Okay.

00:08:31.120 | Yeah.

00:08:32.120 | Okay.

00:08:33.120 | Yeah.

00:08:34.120 | And it just, yeah.

00:08:35.120 | And I love soccer.

00:08:36.120 | Yeah.

00:08:37.120 | And, but, you know, losing that one wrestling match was informative.

00:08:38.120 | The guy just dead fished on me the whole time, and he deserved to win, like, it was a really

00:08:42.060 | good strategy.

00:08:43.060 | He just, like, dead fished on me.

00:08:44.060 | Plopped on top of you.

00:08:45.060 | Yeah.

00:08:46.060 | You know, and I, like, couldn't gum me out of there.

00:08:47.860 | But it is the worst six minutes of your life.

00:08:50.660 | You're exhausted within, like, 30 seconds.

00:08:53.300 | Yeah.

00:08:54.300 | It's incredibly grueling.

00:08:55.300 | And what the coach observed was that their guys, it was the men's wrestling team, was

00:09:02.060 | they were performing very well in the first two periods, and they got to the third period

00:09:05.420 | and they start making really dumb mistakes, bad decisions.

00:09:08.940 | And so we, so he said, "What's going on?"

00:09:11.180 | I said, "Well, it's about the speed accuracy trade-off, but we have to investigate how

00:09:14.180 | it's related to fatigue."

00:09:16.580 | So what we did, this was a really fun experiment.

00:09:18.900 | So we go to the wrestling room and we wire these guys up.

00:09:22.100 | They got wearable EEG, heart rate monitors, the whole nine yards.

00:09:25.580 | And what we do, we gave them, like, this simple little decision-making/impulse control task.

00:09:30.940 | It's just, like, a controlled response task.

00:09:32.900 | Here's a, you know, a trade-off.

00:09:34.860 | If you go too fast and you make mistakes, okay?

00:09:37.680 | So it's like, there's, it's like a go/no-go.

00:09:40.380 | And so they do it.

00:09:42.260 | Then we run them through two minutes of CrossFit exercises, really brutal.

00:09:46.140 | Then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again.

00:09:47.980 | And we do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other.

00:09:50.020 | - Oh, so it's cognitive and physical.

00:09:51.740 | - Yeah, cognitive and physical.

00:09:52.740 | - Not on, like, chess boxing, which is not a sport I recommend.

00:09:54.700 | Have you seen this?

00:09:55.700 | - I have.

00:09:56.700 | - Where they play around, they play some chess and then they literally fight and then they,

00:09:59.980 | it's crazy.

00:10:00.980 | It's like switching between these two very different states of mind.

00:10:02.820 | - Yeah, it's insane, but also somehow really appealing, you know?

00:10:05.820 | It's like- - Well, I think for the neuroscientist in

00:10:07.800 | you and me, and I think we're all neuroscientists to some extent, we want to understand the

00:10:11.700 | brain in ourselves.

00:10:13.260 | This notion of very disparate behaviors, boxing and playing chess, being associated with very

00:10:21.500 | disparate sort of types of arousal and how those map onto one another, I think is interesting.

00:10:28.740 | - I think the confluence of chess boxing is fencing, which is very much like chess.

00:10:37.760 | My youngest son fenced for a number of years.

00:10:40.340 | And so mentally it's like that, but it has the physicality.

00:10:43.940 | - Or jiu-jitsu.

00:10:44.940 | My friends who do Brazilian jiu-jitsu tell me that it's like, there's an infinite number

00:10:48.140 | of options that become constrained in certain dynamics and yeah, very similar.

00:10:54.540 | So this was really cool because what we found was that speed-accuracy trade-off, the more

00:10:59.860 | fatigue they got, the more calories they spent, the faster they would slide down to emphasizing

00:11:07.700 | speed over accuracy.

00:11:08.900 | They just started like, just got to get done.

00:11:13.020 | Just got to get...

00:11:14.020 | I don't know what they were feeling, but that they were just not deliberating, not really

00:11:19.140 | being focused.

00:11:20.140 | They just lost the capability of doing that.

00:11:23.780 | And aside from, like you say, well, we could help you guys, you could become more physically

00:11:28.660 | fit.

00:11:29.660 | Maybe you wouldn't fatigue as fast, but they're about as fit as they could be.

00:11:32.260 | We said, well, why don't we do this?

00:11:34.340 | Why don't we offload the decision in the third period to the coach?

00:11:39.380 | As soon as you, in the third period, you're going to just look at the coach at some cadence

00:11:45.780 | or whenever he's going to yell at you to look and you do what the coach tells you.

00:11:49.820 | So I think this is really interesting because you think about it in like other contexts,

00:11:53.900 | like in a business context or something.

00:11:55.740 | When if somebody is really fatigued or your unit's fatigued, maybe you have an external

00:12:00.380 | person then who takes over making the decision that you just execute in a sense, right?

00:12:09.420 | The other thing I wanted to say about this all too, which I think it's to your point

00:12:12.820 | about, well, in the lab, it's like, you know, it's one thing.

00:12:16.420 | You've got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks over an hour and how well does that

00:12:22.540 | map on to the real world where there are all these other things going on?

00:12:25.780 | And I think that that's the challenge.

00:12:29.620 | When I teach business school or in classes, MBA students or executives and through exec

00:12:34.380 | ed, they all want to know like, give me the five-step formula.

00:12:39.900 | It's like, that's supposed to apply.

00:12:41.940 | How do I take into all-- and it's like, well, we mostly know about one-- this dimension

00:12:46.220 | or that dimension or that dimension and not how in the real world, you know, in a real

00:12:50.740 | complex environment to put that all together.

00:12:54.740 | So that is a-- I think that's a gap.

00:12:56.860 | That's a-- and one that we're trying to fill, which is to study decision making, whether

00:13:02.700 | it's individual or collective decision making in real world environments, right, to where

00:13:07.260 | all of these factors, you know, context and the various priorities that are coming in

00:13:14.700 | are more, you know, more natural, they're not controlled.

00:13:18.060 | And how then-- I mean, we think we know how that works, but we haven't really proven it

00:13:23.420 | yet.

00:13:23.820 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

How to Improve Your Decision Making Process | Dr. Michael Platt & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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