If all you get out of this Cory Doctorow book review is that our brains have a system inside of them named “Oh Sh–! Circuit” (don’t blame us – that’s just what they’re named)… then at least you got a good chuckle. But it’s so much better for anyone who is interested in moving brain Mysteries around. Sometimes I sit and experiment with myself by choosing to do or to refrain from something. I pick easy things like whether to do the Robot with my left elbow or my right. Or hard things – like refraining from scratching an itch (voluntarily – without an audience). What makes the chooser go? It’s a Mystery.
And, in many ways, it still is a Mystery, even if you know some of the answers. You’ll know a couple more after reading the piece, but you’ll still be scratching your head (voluntarily or not). Choice excerpts:
Dopamine is the neurochemical star of the book, and its many pathologies make for gripping reading. There’s a case study of Ann Klinestiver, a sedate school-teacher who was given strong doses of Requip a dopamine agonist (it imitates dopamine’s action in the brain), as treatment for worsening Parkinson’s Disease. Like 13 percent of Requip patients, Ann developed a gambling compulsion for slot machines that eventually ruined her life, costing her her husband, her family, and all her assets (she finally went off Requip and opted for severely constrained movement but no gambling).
The pathology here is all about missed predictions. Dopamine helps the brain to find patterns and thus make predictions about the future. But slots are random, and so in a normal brain, slot-play follows a common pattern: first the brain is delighted by the chance to chew on such a meaty problem. It formulates hypotheses about the slots’ action, and then new input (mistakes that light up the Oh shit circuit) cause it to start over. But after a short time, a normal brain gives up — there is no pattern to see, so there’s no point in playing on.
But in a brain where the dopamine levels are abnormal, surrender never happens. The brain is in a constant state of reward, because of all the “new input” (random noise) that arrives every time the lever is pulled.
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Indeed, investors follow this trend more generally, selling stocks that do well, and holding onto stocks that do poorly (because they can’t part with them while they’re still “behind”). Eventually, the investor’s portfolio is filled with nothing but declining bad bets.
However, this loss-aversion can be short circuited with simple gimmicks, especially credit-cards. The brain just doesn’t register the same loss when you swipe your card as it does when money leaves your pocket. Carnegie Mellon neuroeconomist George Loewenstein says, “credit-cards…anaesthetize your brain against the pain of payment.” MIT business professors demonstrate this by showing that students bidding for tickets to a Celtics game on average bid twice as much when the betting is done by credit-card than by cash.
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But don’t think too much. There are classes of problems — ones in which there are more variables than the conscious mind can juggle — where thinking overwhelms your brain’s ability to synthesize all these variables into a good conclusion. Timothy Wilson, a U Virginia psychologist, asked two groups of female college students to choose and keep their favorite art print from a selection containing a Monet, a van Gogh, and some inspirational kitten posters. A control group was asked to rate each poster from 1 to 9 and keep their top one. The experimental group was asked to fill in questionnaires about what they liked about each poster.
The controls overwhelmingly picked the fine art. Follow-up questions established that they were still happy with their decisions weeks later.
But the experimental group — the group that had to explain what they liked about each poster — chose the kittens. And when they were followed up, they were disappointed with their decision.
Wilson explains that the failure arises because the good things about fine art are difficult to describe: they are intangible aesthetic elements. We like them, but most of us can’t explain why. On the other hand, the virtues of a kitten-picture are easy to enumerate. When asked to explain, rationally, which one is best, kittens win every time. But it is this very superficiality that causes us to quickly tire of the kittens and wish for a Monet.
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All this introspection takes place in the prefrontal cortex, which has lots of other work that it has to keep on top of, so when it is distracted, our ability to make good decisions decline. In one experiment, control subjects are asked to remember two numbers and are then walked down a hall to another room where they will be asked to recall them. On the way, they pass a refreshment table with chocolate cake and fresh fruit. The experimenters measure their ability to pick the “right” snack — that is, the one that, in the light of cold reason they would opt for.
The experimental group goes through the same test — only they’re asked to remember seven numbers, which is somewhere near the upper range of what the average person can remember.
The experimental group eats cake. The control group eats fruit. When we’re distracted, we stop introspecting and listen to our emotional minds. This fact is not lost on retail psychologists who design stores to maximise this effect.
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