What are the core mechanics of value-based decision making as it relates to outcomes and time? Yeah. So we – I think we understand this system pretty well at this point. So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive. So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this and essentially what happens is you're confronting a situation and it doesn't really matter whether – it seems to be the same process, no matter whether you're trying to decide between eating a donut or an apple or buying this house versus renting an apartment or marrying this person, you know, proposing or not.

It's sort of all the same system. And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the alternatives. What are the options that are available to me? What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from, you know, maybe prior encounters or just other information?

And it takes that evidence and it weighs it against stored information about things you'd done in the past, other decisions you'd made, and then begins to assign value, computes the expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you. And then essentially that is the basis along which that decision gets made.

So it's, you know, it's a soft max function as we say, so it's not like a hard deterministic one. So there's some statistical noise in there for some, you know, we could talk about what that reason might be. You make a choice and whenever you make a choice in any behavior that you're engaging in, your brain is making a forecast of what's going to happen next as a result of that.

And your brain then determines, computes, that things go exactly as predicted, right? Is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted? And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future, right? So like, "Oh, actually that was—it went way better than expected.

You should assign that a higher value and do that thing." And this process of weighing up the evidence takes time. And that's why we have this speed-accuracy trade-off in decision-making where we observe that the faster you go, the more mistakes you tend to make. Been there. Exactly. We've all made split-second decisions that we regretted later.

Oh, yeah. Or slightly sleep-deprived. Sleep-deprived, exactly. The more time you take, the more evidence you can accumulate. And when you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy, right? It's not perfect. It's noisy because of the environment. It's noisy because the wetware of the brain is statistical and biological.

So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal. And that happens when you go too quickly, right? And one of the things that's – so there's a good mantra from that, which is if you want to make really good decisions or if it's really important, you kind of have to decide ahead of time, like, "Do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast?" And if accuracy is important, you need to slow down.

Take your time. Take as much time as needed to get the most information that you can. And even in the moment that doing, like, simple strategies like breathing or having, you know, a mantra that says, like, you know, it's not what matters – you know, every little decision is not what counts, but it's the long run.

That helps to turn – we've talked about arousal a lot here. And that turns down arousal. One of the things you think of arousal as doing when you keep talking about volume knobs, it's like a volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal or noise.

So it can turn up noise too. So you could count as evidence toward the value of an option something that is not actually, you know, evidence, and then you make the wrong decision. So by turning down arousal, slowing down, you're relying more on evidence than on noise. Does increasing arousal increase the likelihood of false positives, that is, thinking something is there that's not, generally speaking, as well as false negatives, you know, thinking that something's absent when actually it's present?

I haven't thought about it that way before, but it seems to me like that's – yeah, that seems consistent with my understanding. Just by way of example, one of the things that's been really different for me in the last few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're doing social media, you just click, it's out in the world versus, you know, the way I was weaned was, you know, spend two, three, four years on a project.

Maybe it doesn't go anywhere, maybe it does, goes to multiple papers, gets reviewed. So by the time it comes out, you know, it's been proofread and you've read the proof. So it's been vetted by a number of hopefully expert sources, usually really good sources of feedback, as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication.

And I used to have this saying, which was in the lab, because sometimes, you know, you have two months to do a revision or something, it's never really two months, it always takes five times as long, I used to say, "I go as fast as I carefully can," and I used to tell my students in postdocs that, "We go as fast as we carefully can because the moment you start going fast, you start making mistakes, you start making mistakes, you definitely pay for it later." And the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast and/or fatigue and the two things kind of relate to one another.

Or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence and then nowadays you can go back and repair things with AI, you can, you know, you put things in, but I feel like so much of life in terms of decision-making is trying to make decisions when most of the time we think we don't have more time, but most of the time we do have more time, unless somebody's hemorrhaging, we usually have more time.

But then there are some real things where we don't always have more time, I mean, we are biological aging machines and there is such a thing as too late. So how do you think these systems change as a function of, you know, playing a game for some money in the lab or we can get caught up in it, but there's this like tremendous backdrop of context, you know, $100 might be fun for one person, might be the difference between making rent and not making rent for another person.

You know, the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your teens or 20s is fundamentally different than when somebody's, for instance, near the transition zone of having versus losing their fertility. I mean, these are like, yeah, and those change all sorts of, these pressures are so real and yet if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward system, it seems like we ought to learn in school how to, like, work with and update our decision-making process based on immediate term, short term, like all the different timescales.

To be able to do that seems really important. Are there any ways to train that up? Yeah, I think it's a, so there's a few things in here that I think are worth unpacking. I mean, one is what you brought up about fatigue, which I think is really critical.

We did some work with the wrestling team at Penn. Coach came to us, and I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab, and he said, you know, we're having this problem, which is that, and I don't know if you've ever wrestled, I wrestled, my middle son...

One match. It's the worst six minutes of your life. Well, I didn't quit because I lost that match, and I did lose that match, it was seventh grade. I didn't quit because my dad gave me a choice, I could either continue to wrestle or I could play this other sport that I really wanted to play.

He said you can't do both because it was going to impact my grades negatively, and so I opted for the other sport. What was the other sport? Soccer. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And it just, yeah. And I love soccer. Yeah. And, but, you know, losing that one wrestling match was informative.

The guy just dead fished on me the whole time, and he deserved to win, like, it was a really good strategy. He just, like, dead fished on me. Plopped on top of you. Yeah. You know, and I, like, couldn't gum me out of there. But it is the worst six minutes of your life.

You're exhausted within, like, 30 seconds. Yeah. It's incredibly grueling. And what the coach observed was that their guys, it was the men's wrestling team, was they were performing very well in the first two periods, and they got to the third period and they start making really dumb mistakes, bad decisions.

And so we, so he said, "What's going on?" I said, "Well, it's about the speed accuracy trade-off, but we have to investigate how it's related to fatigue." So what we did, this was a really fun experiment. So we go to the wrestling room and we wire these guys up.

They got wearable EEG, heart rate monitors, the whole nine yards. And what we do, we gave them, like, this simple little decision-making/impulse control task. It's just, like, a controlled response task. Here's a, you know, a trade-off. If you go too fast and you make mistakes, okay? So it's like, there's, it's like a go/no-go.

And so they do it. Then we run them through two minutes of CrossFit exercises, really brutal. Then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again. And we do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other. - Oh, so it's cognitive and physical.

- Yeah, cognitive and physical. - Not on, like, chess boxing, which is not a sport I recommend. Have you seen this? - I have. - Where they play around, they play some chess and then they literally fight and then they, it's crazy. It's like switching between these two very different states of mind.

- Yeah, it's insane, but also somehow really appealing, you know? It's like- - Well, I think for the neuroscientist in you and me, and I think we're all neuroscientists to some extent, we want to understand the brain in ourselves. This notion of very disparate behaviors, boxing and playing chess, being associated with very disparate sort of types of arousal and how those map onto one another, I think is interesting.

- I think the confluence of chess boxing is fencing, which is very much like chess. My youngest son fenced for a number of years. And so mentally it's like that, but it has the physicality. - Or jiu-jitsu. My friends who do Brazilian jiu-jitsu tell me that it's like, there's an infinite number of options that become constrained in certain dynamics and yeah, very similar.

So this was really cool because what we found was that speed-accuracy trade-off, the more fatigue they got, the more calories they spent, the faster they would slide down to emphasizing speed over accuracy. They just started like, just got to get done. Just got to get... I don't know what they were feeling, but that they were just not deliberating, not really being focused.

They just lost the capability of doing that. And aside from, like you say, well, we could help you guys, you could become more physically fit. Maybe you wouldn't fatigue as fast, but they're about as fit as they could be. We said, well, why don't we do this? Why don't we offload the decision in the third period to the coach?

As soon as you, in the third period, you're going to just look at the coach at some cadence or whenever he's going to yell at you to look and you do what the coach tells you. So I think this is really interesting because you think about it in like other contexts, like in a business context or something.

When if somebody is really fatigued or your unit's fatigued, maybe you have an external person then who takes over making the decision that you just execute in a sense, right? The other thing I wanted to say about this all too, which I think it's to your point about, well, in the lab, it's like, you know, it's one thing.

You've got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks over an hour and how well does that map on to the real world where there are all these other things going on? And I think that that's the challenge. When I teach business school or in classes, MBA students or executives and through exec ed, they all want to know like, give me the five-step formula.

It's like, that's supposed to apply. How do I take into all-- and it's like, well, we mostly know about one-- this dimension or that dimension or that dimension and not how in the real world, you know, in a real complex environment to put that all together. So that is a-- I think that's a gap.

That's a-- and one that we're trying to fill, which is to study decision making, whether it's individual or collective decision making in real world environments, right, to where all of these factors, you know, context and the various priorities that are coming in are more, you know, more natural, they're not controlled.

And how then-- I mean, we think we know how that works, but we haven't really proven it yet.