Ep76 "How do you decide?" (Part 2)

Do brains time travel? What is a prediction error? What does any of this have to do with the 2008 crash of the economy, how we keep internal price tags, or a rational approach to drug addiction in society? Join Eagleman to learn how your 3-pound universe spends its whole existence nailing down choices.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
How do brain's time travel. We all know what a
prediction is, but why is the important thing to the brain?
What's called a prediction error? And what does any of
this have to do with the two thousand and eight
crash of the economy, or how we keep internal price
tags on everything, or what we should do with the
war on drugs. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagelman.

(00:30):
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe
to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.
Today's episode is part two about decision making, so let's

(00:52):
quickly summarize last week's episode to get ourselves back up
to speed. In that episode, we saw how the brain
is a sophisticated decision making machine. It's constantly engaged in
choosing among options. Now, this can be something trivial like
deciding between a taco and a burrito, all the way
to life altering decisions like whether to take that job

(01:14):
or whether to propose marriage. Now, while early economists assumed
that humans make decisions rationally by weighing pros and cons
to arrive at the optimal choice. Modern day psychology and
neuroscience reveals a pretty different story and what we saw
last week, and something I've talked about before here a
lot is that the brain is composed of multiple networks,

(01:38):
each with its own goals and desires, and these often
compete with one another to influence the decisions that we make,
and this internal conflict is at the heart of how
we navigate the world. And by the way, the massive
battles under the hood largely occur below our conscious awarenes

(02:00):
So for example, when you look at a picture that
can either be perceived as a duck or a rabbit,
your brain chooses one interpretation over the other, and we
can measure what's happening in the activity of neurons to
see how one network wins over the other one. And
in the case of a picture like that, your interpretation

(02:21):
goes back and forth and back and forth. Now that
might not feel like a decision to you, but it's
the same neural process of having competing networks that are
fighting for dominance, and the same neural battle is mirrored
in everyday choices, like when you choose between different flavors
of a sports drink or whether to take the right

(02:43):
trail or the left trail. All your options are represented
by different coalitions of neurons in the brain, and these
coalitions compete for dominance and the winner determines the action
we take. And we saw simple tasks like this stroop
task where you have conflicting information like the word reed

(03:03):
printed in blue ink and you're supposed to name the
color of the ink. This highlights the tension between different
networks in the brain. And similarly, we are always facing
moral dilemmas like I mentioned the trolley problem last week,
and this demonstrates how emotional and rational networks can come
into conflict and it can lead to different outcomes depending

(03:24):
on which network prevails. And one of the things we
saw from that was that emotions play a really crucial
role in decision making. The importance of emotional input into
your decision making is seen really clearly when people get
brain injury like damage to the orbit or frontal cortex,
because then they can't integrate the emotional signals from the

(03:48):
body into a decision, and that leaves a person paralyzed
within decision even in very simple situations. So without the
ability to read these bodily signals which we're providing summaries
of different options. People struggle to make choices. So the
brain's decision making process is not a straightforward calculation of

(04:11):
pros and cons but a dynamic interplay of competing networks
and emotional signals. Every decision we make from what to
where in the morning, or which coffee shop to choose,
or how we respond in a crisis, the choices are
all the results of this ongoing conflict within our brains.

(04:31):
Now where we left off last week with seeing how
each decision involves our past experiences stored in the states
of our body and the present situation like do I
have enough money to buy this instead of that? Or
is this other option available? But there's one more part
to the story of decisions, and that is predictions about

(04:52):
the future. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Now,
across the animal kingdom, every creature is wired to see reward. Now,
surely this is something you know, but have you ever
thought about the question what is a reward? At its essence,
a reward is something that will move the body closer

(05:14):
to its ideal set points. So water is a reward
when your body is getting dehydrated. Food is a reward
when your energy stores are running down. Now, water and
food are called primary rewards because they directly address biological need.
But what's super interesting is that human behavior is steered

(05:36):
by secondary rewards, which are things that predict primary rewards.
For example, the sight of a metal cylinder wouldn't by
itself do much for your brain, but because you've learned
to recognize it as a can of sparkling water, then
the sight of it comes to be rewarding when you
are thirsty, and in the case of humans, much more

(05:59):
than anywhere else in the animal kingdom. We can find
even very abstract concepts rewarding, such as a political ideology
or the feeling that we are valued by our local community,
and unlike other animals, we can often put these rewards
ahead of biological needs. As my colleague Read Montacu points out,

(06:21):
sharks don't go on hunger strikes. In other words, the
rest of the animal kingdom only chases its basic needs,
while only humans regularly override our basic needs. In deference
to abstract ideals, concepts that we have decided are rewarding
to us. So whenever we're faced with different possibilities, we

(06:44):
integrate internal and external data to try to maximize reward. However,
reward is defined to you as an individual. Now here's
the point I want to make. The challenge with any reward,
whether basic or abstract, is that choices to typically don't
yield their fruits right away. We almost always have to

(07:05):
make decisions in which a chosen course of action will
yield reward at a later time. People go to school
for years because they value the future concept of having
a degree, or they slave through decades of work that
they don't like with the future hope of a promotion.
Or you push yourself through painful exercise with the goal

(07:27):
of being fit in the future. Now to understand this,
let's think about the concept of anticipated reward. To compare
different options means assigning a value to each one in
some common currency that of anticipated reward, and then choosing
the one with the highest value. So let's make this concrete.

(07:49):
Let's say you have a small window of free time
and you are trying to decide what to do. You
know that you need groceries, but you also know that
you really need to sit down and get that big
email I'll sent off, and you're also way behind on
arranging to meet with your friend at the coffee shop. Well,
these are all very different things groceries, email, friend. So

(08:10):
how does your brain arbitrate this menu of options. It
would be easy if you could directly compare these experiences
by living out each one and then rewinding time and
finally choosing your path based on which outcome was best.
But the mummer is that you can't travel in time,
or can't you? In fact, human's time travel daily time

(08:36):
travel is what the human brain does relentlessly. When faced
with the decision. Your brain simulates different outcomes to generate
a mockup of what your future might be. We call
this time traveling. Mentally, you can disconnect from the present
moment and voyage to a world that doesn't yet exist.

(09:00):
Now simulating a scenario in your mind. That's just the
first step. To decide between the imagined scenarios. You try
to estimate what the reward will be in each of
those potential futures. So when you simulate filling your pantry
with the groceries, you feel a sense of relief at

(09:21):
being organized and avoiding uncertainty. Finishing that email carries different
sorts of rewards, not only the primary reward of maybe
securing some money as a result, but more generally, the
kudos from your boss and a rewarding sense of accomplishment
in your career. Now you can also imagine yourself at

(09:41):
the coffee shop with your friend, and that inspires joy
and a sense of reward in terms of relationships and
closeness with other people. So your final decision between these
three options will be navigated by how each future stacks
up against the other others in the common currency of

(10:02):
your reward system. Now, this choice isn't easy, because all
these valuations are nuanced. The simulation of the grocery shopping
is accompanied by feelings of tedium, and your simulation of
writing the long email is attended by a sense of frustration,
and your simulation of your friend at the coffee shop

(10:23):
is accompanied with guilt about not getting work done. But
in all these cases, under the radar of awareness, your
brain simulates all these options one at a time and
does a gut check on each and that's how you decide.
But here's a question, how do you simulate these futures accurately?

(10:43):
How can you possibly predict what it will really be
like to go down these paths. The answer is that
you can't. There's no way to know that your predictions
will be perfectly accurate. Your simulations are only based on
your past experiences and your current model of how the
world works. The key business of brains is to predict,

(11:05):
and to do this well, we need to continually learn
about the world from our every experience so that we
can make the best guesses that we can. So in
this case, you place a value on each of these
options groceries or email or coffee shop, based on your
past experiences and using the Hollywood studios in your mind,

(11:27):
you travel in time to your imagined futures to see
how much value they'll have, and that's how you make
your choices. You compare possible futures against one another. That's
how you convert competing options into a common currency of
future reward. So think about your predicted reward value for

(11:49):
each of these options like an internal price tag that
stores how good something will be. Because grocery shopping is
going to supply you with food, say it's worth ten
reward units, and writing that stupid email is difficult but
necessary to your career, so it weighs in at twenty
five reward units, and you love spending time with your friend.

(12:13):
So going to the coffee shop is worth fifty reward units.
But there's an interesting twist here. The world is complicated,
and so your internal price tags are never written in
permanent ink. Your valuation of everything around you is changeable
because quite often our predictions don't match what actually happens.

(12:37):
The key to effective learning lies in tracking this prediction error.
The prediction error means the difference between what you thought
was going to happen and what actually happened. In the
case of this decision about groceries or email or coffee shop,
your brain has a prediction about how rewarding the coffee

(12:59):
shop is going to be. Now, let's say it turns
out that they have some new snack there, and also
you run into other friends there and the whole experience
is even better than you thought. That raises the price
tag the next time you're thinking about the coffee shop.
On the other hand, if the coffee is cold and
your friend is late and distracted, that might lower your

(13:22):
price tag for the next time around. Now, how does
this work in the brain? How do you have these

(13:43):
dynamic internal price tags. There's a tiny, ancient system in
the brain whose mission is to keep updating your assessments
of the world. The system is made of tiny groups
of cells in your midbrain that speak in the language
of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. When there's a mismatch between

(14:04):
your expectation and your reality, this midbrain dopamine system broadcasts
a signal that reevaluates the price point. The signal tells
the rest of the system whether things turn out to
be better than expected, in which case you get an
increased burst of dopamine, or worse than expected, in which

(14:25):
case you get a decrease in dopamine. And that prediction
error signal, meaning there was an error in the prediction
that I had made, allows the rest of the brain
to adjust its expectations to try to be closer to
reality next time. So the dopamine acts as an error corrector.
It's a chemical appraiser that always works to make your

(14:49):
price tags as updated as they can be. That way,
you can rank your decisions based on your optimized guesses
about the future. Fundamentally, what the brain pays attention to
are the unexpected outcomes, something being better than expected or
worse than expected, and this sensitivity is at the heart

(15:10):
of animal's abilities to adapt and learn. It's no surprise then,
that the brain architecture involved in learning from experience is
consistent across species. You see this from honeybees to humans.
In other words, brains discovered the basic principles of getting
feedback from reward a long time ago. So we've seen

(15:33):
how values get attached to different options. But there's a
twist that often gets in the way of good decision making,
which is that options that are right in front of
you tend to be valued higher than those that you
merely simulate. The thing that trips up good decision making
about the future is the present. I'll give you a

(15:56):
really interesting example of this. In two thousand and eight,
the US economy took a sharp downturn. Many of you
may remember that at the heart of all the trouble
was a simple fact, which is that many homeowners had overborrowed.
They had taken out these mortgage loans that had really
low interest rates for a period of a few years,

(16:16):
and the problem occurred at the end of that period
when the interest rate suddenly shot up to something quite high,
and a lot of homeowners suddenly found themselves facing down
the barrel of these higher interest rates. And they realized
they weren't going to be able to make the payments.
So close to a million American homes went into foreclosure,

(16:38):
and that sent shockwaves through the economy of the planet. Now,
what in the world does this have to do with
competing networks in the brain. Here's what these loans called
subprime loans. They allowed people to obtain a nice house
right now, with the high interest rates defferred until later.

(16:59):
As such, the offer perfectly appealed to the neural networks
that care about instant gratification. In other words, those networks
that want things right now. The idea was here, take
these keys, this house is yours. The mortgage payments are
pretty easy to make. Oh yeah, the rates will go up,
but that's a long way away. That's obscured in the

(17:21):
midst of the future. You don't have to worry about
that right now. That's a long way off. And because
of the seduction of the immediate satisfaction, as in, wow,
I can move into this house right now, I can
impress my parents and my friends and whatever. Because the
now pulls so strongly on our decision making, the two

(17:43):
thousand and eight housing bubble can be understood not simply
as an economic phenomenon, but as a neural one. And
by the way, the pull of the now wasn't just
about the people borrowing, of course, but it's also about
the lenders who are getting rich right now by offering
loans that they suspec might not ever get paid. They
rebundled these loans and sold them off. Practices like this

(18:05):
are unethical and illegal, but it proved too enticing to
many decision makers when they were faced with that temptation. Now,
this now versus the future battle. This doesn't just apply
to housing bubbles. It cuts across every aspect of our lives.
It's why car dealers want you to get in and
test drive the cars, because the seduction of the now

(18:28):
is probably going to override your thinking about the distant
future when you have to pay that monthly loan. It's
why clothing stores want you to try on the clothes,
because once you see yourself in front of the mirror there,
you'll think, wow, I can't pass that up. It's why
merchants want you to touch the merchandise. It's because your
mental simulations of the future can't compete well against the

(18:50):
experience of something right here, right now. In your hands.
In other words, to the brain, the future can only
ever be a pale shadow of the now. The power
of now explains why people make decisions that feel good
in the moment but have lousy consequences for their future.

(19:11):
So people who take a drink or a drug hit
even though they know they shouldn't, or married partners who
give in to an available affair, or athletes who take
anabolic steroids even though they know it's going to shave
years off their life. So can we do anything about
the seduction of the now? Well, with a little bit

(19:33):
of knowledge about the brain, we can. So consider this.
We all know that it's really difficult to do certain thing.
It's like go regularly to the gym. Most people want
to be in good shape, but when it comes down
to it, there are usually things right in front of
us that seem more enjoyable. The pull of what we're
doing is stronger than the abstract notion of future fitness.

(19:55):
So here's the solution to make sure you get there.
You can take in spiration from a man who lived
three thousand years ago. Now, I talked about this in
a recent episode, so I'll give the short version here.
But it's massively important. The man we're going to talk
about was in a more extreme version of the Jim scenario.
He had something he wanted to do, but knew that

(20:16):
he wouldn't be able to resist temptation when the time
came for him. It wasn't about getting a better physique.
It was about saving his life from a group of
mesmerizing maidens. So this was the legendary hero Ulysses, on
his way back from triumph in the Trojan War. At
some point on his long journey home, he realized that

(20:38):
his ship was going to be passing an island where
the beautiful sirens lived, and the sirens were famous for
singing songs so melodious that sailors were enchanted. And the
problem was that the sailors found this irresistible and they
would crash their ships into the rocks trying to get

(20:58):
to the sirens, and they would now Ulysses desperately wanted
to hear these legendary songs, but he didn't want to
kill himself and his crew, so he hatched a plan.
He knew that when he heard the music, he would
be unable to resist steering towards the island's rocks and
so he recognized that the problem wasn't his present rational self,
but instead the future illogical Ulysses, the person that he

(21:24):
would become. When the sirens came with an earshot, so
Ulysses ordered his men to lash him securely to the
mast of his ship, and they filled their ears with
beeswax so it's not to hear the sirens, and they
rode under strict orders to ignore any of his pleas
or cries or writhing around. So what was going on here?

(21:44):
Ulysses knew that his future self would be in no
position to make good decisions, so the Ulysses of sound
mind arranged things so that the future Ulysses could do
no wrong. This sort of deal between your self and
your future self is known as the Ulysses contract. In

(22:04):
the case of getting to the gym, my simple Ulysses
contract is to arrange in advance for a friend to
meet me at the gym. So then I feel it's
pressure to uphold the social contract, and that lashes me
to the mast, even though when the morning rolls around,
all I really want to do is just sleep in
or do something else. I've pre arranged a contract and

(22:26):
now I have to show up when you start looking
around for these ulysses contracts, you'll see that they're actually
all around you. Just as an example, I was recently
giving a talk on a college campus and learned that
during the week of final exams, some students will swap
their TikTok passwords with each other, and then each student

(22:46):
changes the other's passwords so that they can't log on,
and then when finals are over, they switch the passwords back.
So this way, during the week that they're supposed to
be studying, even though they know that they're going to
be tempted by the sirens song, they can't do anything
about it. Similarly, the first step for alcoholics in rehabilitation
programs is to clear all the alcohol out of their

(23:08):
house so that the temptation is not in front of
them when they're feeling weak. People with weight problems sometimes
get surgery to reduce their stomach volume so they physically
can't overeat. These are all things that you do right
now so that your future self won't do something that
you don't want to. It's a way to structure things

(23:30):
in the presence so that your future self cannot misbehave.
And that's the trick for getting around the seduction of
the now you strap yourself to the mast, and that
allows you to behave in better alignment with the kind
of person you would like to be. The key to
a Ulysses contract is just recognizing that we are different

(23:50):
people in different contexts. The ancient Greeks had a saying
they liked, which was know thyself. But I've always felt
from a neuroscience point of view that the the updated
version is know thyselves now. What's strange is that knowing
yourselves is not easy because how you act at different
times is not always something you can predict. Even though

(24:13):
you can make good guesses, things can drift around. So
sometimes you're really jazzed about going to the gym, and
sometimes not so much. Sometimes you'll stick with the diet
and sometimes you won't. Sometimes you're more capable of good
decision making, and other times your neural parliament won't come
out with the vote that you expected. Why it's because

(24:35):
the outcome depends on a lot of changing factors about
the state of your body. For example, states, which can
change hour to hour. So here's a good way for
us to appreciate this. There was a study done some
years ago looking at prisoners who are going in front
of a parole judge to see if the prisoner could
get his sentence shortened to go home early. So imagine

(25:00):
two prisoners both scheduled to appear in front of this
parole judge. One prisoner goes before the judge at eleven
twenty seven am. His crime is fraud and he's serving
thirty months. Another prisoner appears at one fifteen pm. He
has committed the same crime for which he's been given
the same sentence. Now, the first prisoner is denied parole,

(25:21):
the second is granted parole. Why what influenced the decision?
Was it? Race? Was at looks was at age? So
a study by Jonathan levav In colleagues analyzed one thousand
rulings from judges and found it wasn't about that. Whether
the prisoner is granted parole or not isn't just about

(25:42):
the prisoner. It's about the judge's biology. Specifically, it's about
the judge's hunger. So just after the judge had enjoyed
a food break, a prisoner's chance of parole rose to
its highest point of sixty five percent. But a prisoner
seen towards the end of the session had the lowest

(26:03):
chances just a twenty percent likelihood of a favorable outcome.
In other words, decisions get reprioritized as other needs rise
in importance. Your choices change as circumstances change. A prisoner's
fate is irrevocably intertwined with the judge's neural networks, which
operate according to biological needs. Some psychologists describe this effect

(26:29):
as ego depletion, meaning that higher level cognitive areas involved
in executive function and planning they get fatigued. So in
this view, willpower is a limited resources. We can run
low on it, just like a tank of fuel. In
the case of the judges, the more cases they had

(26:50):
to make decisions about, which was up to thirty five
in one sitting, the more energy depleted their brains became.
But after they ate something like a sandwich and a
piece of free their energy stores were refueled and different
drives had more power now in steering their decisions. Traditionally,
we assume that humans are rational decision makers. We absorb information,

(27:15):
we process it, we come up with an optimal answer
or solution. But real humans don't work this way. Even
judges striving for freedom from bias are imprisoned by their biology.
Our decisions are equally influenced when it comes to how
we act with our romantic partners. So consider the choice

(27:36):
of monogamy, bonding and staying with a single partner. So
this would seem like a decision that involves your culture
and your values and your morals and all. That's true,
But there's a deeper force acting on your decision making
as well, which is your hormones, and one in particular
called oxytocin, which is a key ingredient in the magic
of bonding. So in one recent study, men who are

(28:00):
in love with their female partners were given a small
dose of extra oxytocin. Then they were asked to rate
the attractiveness of different women. So with the extra oxytocin,
the men found their partners more attractive, but not the
other women. In fact, the men kept a bit more
physical distance from an attractive female research associate in the study,

(28:23):
So oxytocin only increased bonding to their partner. Why do
we have chemicals like oxytocin steering our decision making towards bonding?
After all, from an evolutionary perspective, we might expect that
a male shouldn't want monogamy if his biological mandate is
to spread genes as widely as possible. But for the

(28:44):
survival of the children, having two parents around is better
than one. And this simple fact is so important that
the brain has hidden ways to influence you or decision
making on it. Our decisions are often steered by invisibly
small molecules that we don't even necessarily know about. Now

(29:19):
we've been talking all about decision making and how it
arises from battling networks in the brain. Why does it
matter to understand this stuff? While a better understanding of
decision making allows us to better steer our own lives,
and also it opens the door to craft better social policy.
For example, all of us, in our own ways, we

(29:40):
always have to battle impulse control. At the extreme, we
can end up as slaves to the immediate cravings of
our impulses. And I think from this perspective we can
gain a more nuanced understanding of the efficacy of social
programs like the War on drugs. So take drug addiction.
It's a big problem for societies. It's about seven out

(30:03):
of ten prisoners meet the criteria for substance abuse or
dependence and one study found that over a third of
convicted inmates were under the influence of drugs at the
time of their crime. So drug abuse translates into tens
of billions of dollars, mostly in terms of drug related crime,
and what this has led to is a burgeoning prison population. Now,

(30:26):
what most countries do is they deal with the problem
of drug addiction by criminalizing it. The problem is that
the number of Americans in prison for drug crimes has
gone up eightfold since the War on Drugs was declared
in nineteen seventy one, and every year the US spends
twenty billion dollars on the War on drugs. But the

(30:47):
investment hasn't actually worked because since the War on drugs began,
drug use has actually expanded. So why hasn't it worked well?
As any economist will tell you, the difficulty with the
drug supply is that it's like a water balloon, So
if you push it down in one place, it comes
up somewhere else. So instead of attacking supply, the better

(31:10):
strategy is to address demand, and drug demand is in
the brain of the addict. And by the way, if
you look at who's incarcerated, the people behind the bars
aren't the cartel bosses or the big time dealers. Instead,
they are people locked up for possession of a small
amount of drugs, usually less than two grams. They're the users,

(31:32):
the addicts. Now, unfortunately, going to prison doesn't solve their problems.
It generally worsens it. The problem is that when you
lock someone up and break their social circles and their
employment opportunities, where you're doing is you're giving them new
social circles and new employment opportunities, and those usually don't
help them break their addiction. Some people argue that drug

(31:54):
addiction is about poverty and peer pressure, and those do
play a role, But at the core of the issue
is the biology of the brain. So just look at
laboratory experiments where you see rats self administering drugs. What
they'll do is they'll continually hit this lever over and
over to get drugs, and they'll do that at the
expense of food and drink. The rats aren't doing that

(32:17):
because of finances or social coercion. They're doing it because
the drugs tapp into fundamental reward circuitry in the brain.
The drugs effectively tell the brain that this decision is
better than all the other things it could be doing.
Other brain networks might be involved in the battle, and
they're representing all the reasons to resist the drug, but

(32:38):
in an addict, the craving network wins. In fact, if
you spend a lot of time talking to people who
are addicted to drugs, you'll find that the majority of them
want to quit, and they're perfectly able to list all
the reasons why they should quit, but they just can't
do it. Why. It's because they've become slaves to these
short term gratifies caation circuits. Now, because the problem with

(33:03):
drug addiction lies in the brain, it's plausible that the
solutions lie there. Also, one approach is to tip the
balance of impulse control. So, as an example, one successful
tactic is to ramp up the certainty and swiftness of punishment,
for example, by requiring drug offenders to undergo twice weekly

(33:25):
drug testing with automatic immediate jail time for failure, and
that way they don't have to rely on a distant
abstraction alone. Or here's something related. Some economists propose that
the drop in American crime since the early nineteen nineties
has been due in part to the increased presence of
police on the streets. So in the language of the brain,

(33:49):
the police visibility stimulates the networks of the brain that
way long term consequences. Now those are social approaches, but
because this is a neuroscience podcast, I'm going to tell
you about a brain based approach which is currently being
studied and this could end up being quite effective. This
involves giving real time feedback during brain imaging. So you're

(34:13):
allowing a person who's addicted to drugs to view their
brain activity and learn how to regulate it. So let
me tell you how this works. Imagine there's someone call
her Susan, who is addicted to heroin. So you put
Susan into the brain scanner. This is using functional magnetic
resonance imaging, also known as fMRI, and you show Susan

(34:37):
pictures of heroin and you say to her, I want
you to go ahead and crave this. Well, that's easy
for her to do, and it activates particular regions of
her brain that we can summarize as the craving network.
Then we ask her to suppress her craving. We asked
her to think about the cost that heroin has had
her in terms of finances, in terms of relation ships

(35:00):
in terms of employment. So that activates a different set
of brain areas, which we can summarize as the suppression network.
Now here's the key. The craving and the suppression networks
are always battling it out for supremacy, and whichever wins
at any moment determines what Susan does when she's offered heroin.

(35:22):
So in the scanner we can measure which network is winning.
The short term thinking of the craving network where the
long term thinking of the impulse control or suppression network.
So we give Susan real time visual feedback in the
form of a speedometer, so she can see how the
battle is going. When her craving is winning, the needle

(35:46):
is up in the red zone, and as she successfully
suppresses the craving, the needle moves to the blue zone.
So she can then use different mental approaches to discover
what works to take the balance of these networks. In
other words, we're giving her visual feedback about how the

(36:06):
battle is going on the inside, and by practicing over
and over, Susan gets better at understanding what she needs
to do to move that needle. She may or may
not be consciously aware of how she's doing it, but
by repeated practice, she can strengthen the neural circuitry that

(36:26):
allows her to suppress. So this technique is still in
its infancy, but the hope is that when she's next
offered heroin, she'll have the cognitive tools to overcome her
immediate cravings if she wants to. Now, the interesting part
about an approach like this, I think, is that this
training doesn't force Susan to behave in any particular way.

(36:49):
It simply gives her the cognitive skills to have more
control over her choice rather than to be a slave
of her impulses. And the heart of new approaches like
this is the understanding that drug addiction is a problem
for millions of people, but prisons aren't necessarily the place

(37:10):
to solve that problem. As we develop in understanding of
how human brains actually make decisions, we can develop new
approaches beyond just straight up punishment. As we come to
better understand the operations inside our brains, we can better
align our behavior with our best intentions, and even more generally,

(37:32):
as we get better at understanding decision making, we can
improve other aspects of our criminal justice system beyond addiction.
Putting into place policies which are more humane and more
cost effective. So what would that look like. It would
begin with an emphasis on rehabilitation over mass incarceration. So,
just as one example, young people don't have a fully

(37:54):
developed prefrontal cortex, and so they often make decisions impulsively
without a meaningful consideration of future consequences. And so facilities
with good rehab programs work to train people to improve
their self control. You can do this with mentoring and
counseling and rewards, but all of this is to simply

(38:16):
train young people to pause and consider the future outcome
of any choice they might make. You encourage them to
run stimulations of what might happen, and this is how
you strengthen the neural connections that can override the immediate
gratification of impulses. I'm going to come back to this
in a future episode. I'm going to talk about a

(38:38):
group called the Interrupters in Chicago that work to lower
crime on the streets with essentially a version of the
same technique. When some young person gets all hot headed
and wants to take revenge on someone else, the interrupter
poses questions that forces them to think about the future,
like hey, who's going to be with your girl when

(38:58):
you're sitting in jail. Ah? Okay, fine, I won't shoot
the guy now. Okay? Why because he was just confronted
with a future simulation that tipped the battle of the
decision making. The fact is that poor impulse control is
a hallmark characteristic of the majority of criminals in the
prison system. Most of the people on the wrong side

(39:22):
of the law generally know the difference between right and
wrong actions, and they understand the threat of punishment, but
they're hamstrung by poor impulse control. They see an opportunity
for something and they take it. They don't pause to
consider other options. The temptation of the now overrides any

(39:42):
consideration of the future consequences. Our current style of punishment
rests on a bedrock of personal volition and blame, because
the fact is we're all deeply wired with impulses to punish.
But as we get better at understanding decision making, we
can start to imagine a different kind of criminal justice system,

(40:04):
one with a closer relationship to the neuroscience of decisions.
It wouldn't let anybody off the hook. People who break
the law still need to get taken off the streets,
but the system we could evolve toward would be more
concerned with how to deal with law breakers with an
eye toward their future, rather than writing them off because

(40:26):
of their past. Again, people who break the social contracts
need to be off the streets for the safety of society.
But what happens in prison does not have to be
based only on bloodlust, but also on meaningful rehabilitation, and,
in the context of today's episode, rehabilitation based on an
increasingly better understanding of how the brain makes decisions. So

(40:51):
let's wrap up what we saw in these last two
episodes is that decision making lies at the heart of
everything about who we are and what we do. Without
the ability to weigh alternatives, we would be hostages to
our most basic drives. We wouldn't be able to wisely
navigate the now or plan our future lives. As we

(41:11):
keep gaining more and more insight into how choices battle
it out in the brain, we can learn to make
better choices for ourselves and for our society. Go to
Eagleman dot com slash podcast more information and to find
further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman

(41:32):
dot com with questions or discussion and check out and
subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
and you have made the nice decision to join me
here in the Inner Cosmos.