Neuroscience of Decision Making
From the everyday to the extraordinary, our decisions shape the course of our lives.
So how exactly do the choices we make every day, and the people we come in contact with, change that course?
And how can knowing more about our brains lead to better decisions -- ones that we can feel confident in and that match our strengths and values?
Tune in as we uncover the secrets to better decision-making by understanding the inner workings of our brains. ______________________________________________________
For more ways to get involved with the Brain Blown Community, head to www.patreon.com/brainblownpodcast to learn about our offers!
If you have any topic suggestions for future episodes, don't hesitate to reach out! Send us an email at info@brainblownpodcast.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
REFERENCES
The Behavioral Neuroscience of Motivation: An Overview of Concepts, Measures, and Translational Applications -- Eleanor H. Simpson and Peter D. Balsam
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Decision Making: A Review and Conceptual Framework -- Lesley K. Fellows Montreal Neurological Institute
The Role of Emotion in Decision Making: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective -- Nasir Naqvi, Baba Shiv and Antoine Bechara
Decision Neuroscience New Directions in Studies of Judgment and Decision Making Alan G. Sanfey
The Ecology of Human Fear: Survival Optimization and the Nervous System -- Dean Mobbs, Cindy C. Hagan, Tim Dalgleish , Brian Silston and Charlotte Prévost
Human Orbitofrontal Cortex Signals Decision Outcomes to Sensory Cortex During Behavioral Adaptations -- Bin A. Wang, Maike Veismann, Abhishek Banerjee & Burkhard Pleger
General Outline of Episode
Hello everyone and welcome to season 3 of the brainblown podcast!
Our brains impact us all the time, and one of the ways is by the decisions we make and how they alter the course that our life will take. How do the decisions we make every day and the people we come in contact with change that course? How does understanding our brain better help us make decisions that play to our strengths, hold true to our values and make our lives and the lives of others better?
Today we’re going to take a closer look at our own decision-making process. So in typical new year’s fashion, let’s look back on some of the decisions you made in 2023.
Starting with the big ones: (for some people these questions may be larger or smaller in impact than what I have listed, but generally speaking):
What’s a big, life-altering decision you made last year? Did you make a big financial investment like buy a house or a new car? Did you Decide to have children or add a new member to your family? Go on a dream trip or vacation? Change careers? Move somewhere new?
Now let’s zoom in on some of the smaller decisions you might have made:
Did you get out of town for a little? Did you see your family? Get a new pet? Treat yourself to a new tv, appliance, etc.? Renovate or redecorate?
And lastly, think about one specific day and the decisions you made:
Did you snooze your alarm? What did you put on in the morning? Did you wash your face/brush your teeth? What did you make for breakfast? Was it coffee or tea you had? Hot or cold? How did you get to work? Did you take the usual route? What was your first task to get done? When did you have lunch? Etc. etc.
Laine:
Socrates proposes that “human beings are complex things for human beings to understand”
Hidden Brain’s Podcast “We fall into patterns of behavior we don’t always agree with, we have biases we don’t always understand and we have many things that impact the choices we make”
The decisions we make in our lifetime have a lasting effect on us, no matter how small they may be. And in this episode, we’re starting off by trying to understand the bigger picture:
How do we make decisions? This is the neuroscience of decision making
What goes on in the brain when we are doing x? (x in this case being decision making)
“Human beings do not know themselves”
This goes back to season 1, episode 4: we act and then we make sense of it. However, we tell ourselves that the opposite is true. What is actually going on?
We learned in both seasons 1 and 2 that the brain is super adaptive and continues to be - its what makes human brains so unique.
Hagan, Dalgleish, Silsont and Prevost state “the human brain remains plastic in order to flexibly and optimally cope with a changing world”. But we learned in season 2 how we do this - which is that we code - all the time, with all of our senses. They will also state that we do adaptive coding - meaning we code meaning into memories pretty much all the time - this is how we adjust and change - that coding can be changed but isn’t always easy. This coding/this memory impacts what parts of our brain fire when we make decisions - but it's not all conscious
So what is actually going on in the brain?
Essentially different decisions and different things that impact decisions fire different parts of your brain. Is fear involved (is there enough of this, will this impact me in a bad way, can I get out of this, can I survive this) that impacts one part, is this financial, does this have a long-term benefit - different part, emotional - another part completely and so on.
Cost-benefit analysis a lot of the time (to quote Simpson and Balsam this is physical effort, mental effort, time, loss of other opportunities, discomfort, danger, etc vs fulfilling psychological or psychological needs, escaping harm/avoiding a cost)
And depending on needs, the cost-benefit analysis changes in the brain due to things like hormonal changes or neural changes - like when you are hungry
Mobbs, Hagan, Dalgleish, Silston and Prévost “Building off a set of well-known neural systems, recent insights from human and comparative neuroscience have demonstrated that midbrain regions are involved in phylogenetically older adaptations such as reflexive fight, flight or freeze systems and are strongly interconnected, innervated by and in competition with, forebrain structures, including the prefrontal cortex and amygdala” - In other words, we have learned that our brain does not make decisions all the time, and rarely just makes decisions using one part of the brain - things like safety, rewards, pleasure, emotions, fear, long term benefits, short term benefits and the occasional sprinkling of logic are how we make decisions.
However - we think, pretty much all the time, that we make decisions only based on logic
How can understanding the neuroscience give us better control, or help us understand the problem better?
We have emotion and we have logic, understanding how both work in your brain will help you make better decisions, or be present with your needs and accept what you decided rather than regretting it.
What is the brain’s role? (answer before or after #3) is this more in detail for 2
Motivation:
Simpson and Peter D. Balsam - It was originally theorized by Hull that motivation existed solely to energize us to action, however, we have learned that “motivation was conceptualized to consist of both a goal-directed, directional component and an arousal, activational component” So motivation helps us with the end destination as well as the gas to get there.
Areas of the Brain that can function - but this will vary
Amygdala (how much depends on how much fear)
Orbital Frontal Cortex Wang, Veismann, Banerjee, and Pleger state “The ability to respond flexibly to an ever-changing environment relies on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).” They were studying how the Oribial Frontal Cortext takes the sensory information and combines it with “predicted outcomes to enable flexible sensory learning in humans.” This is the coding we were mentioning. We adjust to constant changes in our environment through our Orbital Frontal Cortex taking in that coding that all of our senses can do, and how we code (positive, negative, neutral, other) helps us determine if the outcome is possibly good, or bad for us
They state that we have to adapt to survive and we do this based on prediction and evaluation. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is “known to have widespread connectivity to sensory areas, as well as to cortical and subcortical areas related to memory, learning and attention” The medial orbitofrontal cortex encodes the reward value, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex is helps assign credit. Thus our Oribial frontal cortex is impacted when we are trying to use recall to assess if this could go good or bad. Specifically, it is “encoding the prediction error (PE) in the face of environmental changes, thereby updating associative representations in other brain areas and, ultimately, guiding adaptive behavior”.
Mesolymbi and meso cortical domaigenic productions - this is an activation in the Ventral Tegmental Area and those nucleus accumbens - certain things impact this and change our decision making - see chemical dependency. Fellows states the mesolimbic dopamine system, is specifically thought to play a role in the “unconscious biasing of action” and as we learned last season very active in focusing our attention and helping make our decisions for us when it comes to reward processing and decision making. Lots of research has shown that certain things make this fire pretty hard, and as we learned can rewire our brain so that we are only focused on this if we are not careful. But we also learned that joy and pleasure are a requirement for humans so we need to find something to activate this because otherwise, it will override us into making bad decisions.
Baron, Hernnstein, and Prelack as well as Lipshiz state an oversimplification of decision making is that there are three interrelated processes. Essentially we identify options, we evaluate and we make a choice. One of the big things in this is how we evaluate, however. Naqvi, Shiv and Bechara state “It does seem clear that the ventral and medial prefrontal cortex mediate some or many aspects of reinforcement processing” So for example this has come up in a new field of neuroeconomics. Which believed that clearly, humans would make decisions based on a cost-benefit analysis using a “rational Bayesian maximization of expected utility” (ie mathematical probability.) However, this could only be true if humans “were equipped with unlimited knowledge, time, and information-processing power.”. This is not the case. Thus the assumption that we do things based on a logical equation of cost-benefit analysis is not actually possible.
Instead, Naqvi, Shiv, and Bechara found that most decision-making is impacted by emotions and biases. We don’t make logical choices because we don’t have infinite knowledge and time. And unlike what humans would like to think - which is clearly the more important the decision, the more logic we have, the reverse is actually found to be true. The higher the risk, the more the uncertainty, the more we lean on gut and emotion. This gets impacted and navigated by our ventromedial prefrontal cortex and if this area is not working as well as we would like it to, we often make choices that are detrimental to our well-being. And too much damage, and we do not learn from our mistakes. However, what have we learned in this podcast? An important thing about this study is that participants who had clear damage to this area made very poor choices, specifically when emotion was involved, and could not learn from their mistakes but “their intellect and problem-solving abilities were largely normal” specifically this showed that decision making was not impacted in knowledge, comprehension. attention, or memory. However, their emotions were impacted, appearing to be flat, and struggled to read emotional cues. This shows us that the vmPFC helps us “use emotions to aid in decision making, particularly decision making in the personal, financial, and moral realms”. This also helps us show that no matter what, “emotions play a role in guiding decisions, especially in situations in which the outcome of one's choices, in terms of reward and punishment, are uncertain”
Naqvi, Shiv, and Bechar also found that damage to the amygdala impacted decision-making in that it becomes more difficult to understand rewards and punishments, specifically to predict the future
So what happens? Essentially we learn and code all the time. When we are coding we connect emotion and reward to that memory. When we make decisions we have a need to review our past information to guide our future actions, and we try to weigh the pros and cons. As we review our options those body memories that are coded are activated and reviewed by our vmPFC and we have a sensory memory of them. Naqvi, Shiv, and Bechar state “This can occur in two ways. The mapping of bodily/emotional states at the cortical level, such as within the insular cortex, gives rise to conscious "gut feelings" of desire or aversion that are attributed to specific behavioral options. The mapping of bodily states at the subcortical level, such as within the mesolimbic dopamine system, occurs in a nonconscious fashion, such that subjects choose the advantageous option without feeling specific feelings of desire for that option or aversion to the disadvantageous option” So does it disgust us, do we feel uncomfortable by it - then, of course, our insula is getting involved, are we afraid, our amygdala is getting involved, do we sense immediate rewards and desire, that's our Mesolimbic/Ventrotagmental/Neculeuse Accubents. The higher the risk the more the amygdala but also the higher the insula activation, specifically insual is trying to help us select a safe response.
An “MRI study by Sanfey and colleagues (Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003) found that the insular cortex is activated when subjects evaluate the fairness”, which is emotional but is also judgment -specifically if it feels unfair. If it impacts moral as well, then our VMPFC is back on board, and if it's monetary then our striatal is also active in the midbrain area around dopamine.
What can we do about the information we just learned?
Type of decision-making plays into what is going on in your body with the type of decision. But we don’t make all decisions the same. We don’t even potentially make the same decision the same if we make it once when we are hungry and once when we are not. Knowing what might be impacting your decisions allows you to understand your own human behavior at a greater level, and impact the surrounding situation to do so. For example, as we learned in previous seasons the part of your brain activated for long-term reward requires way more energy than the rest of our brain. We can’t actually use this to help us make decisions if we are under-resourced. Want to eat better - I hope you slept well last night. Knowing this helps us prepare, especially when it comes to important decisions, we need to be more resourced to do it! It also helps us not beat up on ourselves so much when we struggle to make the decision we were hoping we would. Why do I keep backsliding on my goals - while the wrong part of my brain is firing? I’m not a bad person, but I might need to eat.
Taking a step away - inner reflection - “why we think what we think, why we are doing what we are doing”
