How We Decide

by Jonah Lehrer

most important lessons

• use emotional brain for complicated decisions, logical brain for simple decisions
• emotional brain has limited capacities...too much info confuses it
• to improve emotional brain decisions, limit the info being absorbed to only the most important...it cannot distinguish important from not important
• emotional brain picks up on patterns from practice...
• countless hours of practice is what makes a genius
• choking is the result of thinking too much...this confuses the emotional brain and logical brain kicks in..you lose the automatic performance that is needed at high levels of competition
• high emotions cause brain to panic and kicks the logical brain into action and silences the emotional brain...we need to control emotions to use emotional brain even during very stressful, emotional situations
• Think less about those
  items that you care a lot about. Don't be afraid to let your emotions
  choose.
• If the emotional
  brain is a fancy laptop, stuffed full of microprocessors
  operating in parallel, the rational brain is an old-fashioned calculator.
• Embrace uncertainty - Pretending that the mystery has been erased results in the dangerous trap of certainty. You are so confident you're right that you neglect
  all the evidence that contradicts your conclusion.
• One of the enduring
  paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn't know itself
  very well. This is why people have emotions: they are
  windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the
  information we process but don't perceive
• The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've
  managed to turn mistakes into educational events. You are constantly
  benefiting from experience, even if you're not consciously
  aware of the benefits.
• There are no shortcuts to this painstaking process; becoming
  an expert just takes time and practice. But once you've developed
  expertise in a particular area—once you've made the requisite
  mistakes—it's important to trust your emotions when
  making decisions in that domain. It is feelings, after all, and not
  the prefrontal cortex, that capture the wisdom of experience.
• And yet, this doesn't mean the emotional brain should always
  be trusted. Sometimes it can be impulsive and short-sighted. Sometimes
  it can be a little too sensitive to patterns. However, the
  one thing you should always be doing is considering your emotions,
  thinking about why you're feeling what you're feeling.
• THINK ABOUT THINKING. If you're going to take only one
  idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making andthe kind of thought process it requires.

Introduction

• Sometimes we need to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities. And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions. The secret is knowing when to use these different styles of thought. We always need to be thinking about how we think.

Chapter 1 - Quarterback in the Pocket

• To Damasio, Elliot's pathology suggested that emotions
  are a crucial part of the decision-making process. When we
  are cut off from our feelings, the most banal decisions became
  impossible. A brain that can't feel can't make up its mind.
• According to LeDoux, much of what we "think" is really driven by
  our emotions. In this sense, every feeling is really a summary of
  data, a visceral response to all of the information that can't be
  accessed directly.
• The process of thinking requires
  feeling, for feelings are what let us understand all the information
  that we can't directly comprehend. Reason without
  emotion is impotent.
  

Chapter 2 - The Predictions of Dopamine

• When dopamine neurons are working properly, they are a crucial source of wisdom. The emotional brain effortlessly figures out what's going on and how to exploit the situation for maximum gain. Everytime you experience a feeling of joy or disappointment, fear or happiness, your neurons are busy rewiring themselves, constructing a theory of what sensory cues preceded the emotions. The lesson is then committed to memory, so the next time you make a decision, your brain cells are ready. They have learned how to predict what will happen next.
• Dopamine neurons automatically
  detect the subtle patterns that we would otherwise fail to
  notice; they assimilate all the data that we can't consciously comprehend.
  And then, once they come up with a set of refined predictions
  about how the world works, they translate these predictions
  into emotions. Let's say, for example, that you're given
  lots of information about how twenty different stocks have performed
  over a period of time. (The various share prices are displayed
  on a ticker tape at the bottom of a television screen, just
  as they appear on CNBC.) You'll soon discover that you have
  difficulty remembering all the financial data. If somebody asks
  you which stocks performed the best, you'll probably be unable
  to give a good answer. You can't process all the information.
  However, if you're asked which stocks trigger the best feelings—
  your emotional brain is now being quizzed—you'll suddenly
  be able to identify the best stocks. According to Tilmann
  Betsch, the psychologist who performed this clever little experiment,
  your emotions will "reveal a remarkable degree of sensitivity"
  to the actual performance of all of the different securities.
  The investments that rose in value will be associated with the
  most positive emotions, while the shares that went down in value
  will trigger a vague sense of unease. These wise yet inexplicable
  feelings are an essential part of the decision-making process.
  Even when we think we know nothing, our brains know something.
  That's what our feelings are trying to tell us.
  
• This doesn't mean that people can coast on these cellular emotions.
  Dopamine neurons need to be continually trained and retrained,
  or else their predictive accuracy declines. Trusting one's
  emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the
  result of deliberate practice.
• Even when Robertie wins—and he almost always wins—he insists
  on searching for his errors, dissecting those decisions that
  could have been a little bit better. He knows that self-criticism
  is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best
  kind.
• The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person
  who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow
  field." From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely
  right. Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from
  cellular error. Mistakes aren't things to be discouraged. On the
  contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
  
• Instead of praising kids for trying hard, teachers typically
  praise them for their innate intelligence (being smart). Dweck
  has shown that this type of encouragement actually backfires,
  since it leads students to see mistakes as signs of stupidity and
  not as the building blocks of knowledge. The regrettable outcome
  is that kids never learn how to learn.
• The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence
  —the "smart" compliment—is that it misrepresents the neural
  reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful
  kind of learning activities, which is learning from mistakes.
  
• Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong,
  your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can
  succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this
  painstaking process.
• Although we tend to think of
  experts as being weighed down by information, their intelligence
  dependent on a vast amount of explicit knowledge, experts are
  actually profoundly intuitive. When an expert evaluates a situation,
  he doesn't systematically compare all the available options
  or consciously analyze the relevant information. He doesn't rely
  on elaborate spreadsheets or long lists of pros and cons. Instead,
  the expert naturally depends on the emotions generated by his
  dopamine neurons. His prediction errors have been translated
  into useful knowledge, which allows him to tap into a set of accurate
  feelings he can't begin to explain.
• The best experts embrace this intuitive style of thinking. Bill
  Robertie makes difficult backgammon decisions by just "looking"
  at the board. Thanks to his rigorous practice techniques,
  he's confident that his mind has already internalized the ideal
  moves. Garry Kasparov, the chess grand master, obsessively studied
  his past matches, looking for the slightest imperfection, but
  when it came time to play a chess game, he said he played by instinct,
  "by smell, by feel."

Chapter 3 - fooled by a feeling

• But here's the catch: while dopamine neurons get excited by
  predictable rewards—they increase their firing when the juice
  arrives after the loud tone that heralded it—they get even more
  excited by surprising ones. According to Wolfram Schultz, such
  unpredictable rewards are typically three to four times more exciting,
  at least for dopamine neurons, than rewards that can be
  predicted in advance. (In other words, the best-tasting juice is
  the juice that was most unexpected.) The purpose of this dopamine
  surge is to make the brain pay attention to new, and potentially
  important, stimuli.
• Instead of getting bored by the haphazard payouts, the
  dopamine neurons become obsessed. When you pull the lever
  and get a reward, you experience a rush of pleasurable dopamine,
  precisely because the reward was so unexpected, because
  your brain cells had no idea what was about to happen. The
  clanging coins and flashing lights are like a surprise squirt of
  juice. Because the dopamine neurons can't figure out the pattern,
  they can't adapt to the pattern. The result is that you are transfixed
  by the slot machine, riveted by the fickle nature of its
  payouts.
• The danger of random processes—things like slot machines
  and basketball shots—is that they take advantage of a defect
  built into the emotional brain. Dopamine neurons get such a visceral
  thrill from watching a hot player sink another jumper or
  from winning a little change from a one-armed bandit or from
  correctly guessing the placement of a food morsel that our brains
  completely misinterpret what's actually going on. We trust our
  feelings and perceive patterns, but the patterns don't actually
  exist.
• The danger of the stock market, however, is that sometimes
  its erratic fluctuations can actually look predictable, at least in
  the short term. Dopamine neurons are determined to solve the
  flux, but most of the time there is nothing to solve. And so brain
  cells flail against the stochasticity, searching for lucrative patterns.
  Instead of seeing the randomness, we come up with imagined
  systems and see meaningful trends where there are only
  meaningless streaks. "People enjoy investing in the market and
  gambling in a casino for the same reason that they see Snoopy
  in the clouds," says the neuroscientist Read Montague. "When
  the brain is exposed to anything random, like a slot machine
  or the shape of a cloud, it automatically imposes a pattern onto
  the noise. But that isn't Snoopy, and you haven't found the secret
  pattern in the stock market."
• Even professional money managers are vulnerable to this bias and tend to
  hold losing stocks twice as long as winning stocks. Why does
  an investor do this? Because he is afraid to take a loss—it feels bad—and selling shares that have decreased in value makes the
  loss tangible. We try to postpone the pain for as long as possible;
  the result is more losses.
• Loss aversion is an innate flaw. Everyone who experiences
  emotion is vulnerable to its effects. It's part of a larger psychological
  phenomenon known as negativity bias, which means that,
  for the human mind, bad is stronger than good. This is why in
  marital interactions, it generally takes at least five kind comments
  to compensate for one critical comment.
• There's no rational reason for
  us to treat gains and losses or compliments and criticisms so differently.
  But we do. The only way to avoid loss aversion is to
  know about the concept.
• Because the emotional parts of the brain reliably undervalue
  the future—life is short and we want pleasure now—we
  all end up spending too much money today and delaying saving
  until tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow).
• The message of the chorus is simple: you can't always
  get what you want, but sometimes not getting what you want is
  just what you need.

chapter 4 - the uses of reason

• The problem with
  panic is that it narrows one's thoughts. It reduces awareness to
  the most essential facts, the most basic instincts. This means that
  when a person is being chased by a fire, all he or she can think
  about is running from the fire.
• Once he realized that his fear had exhausted
  its usefulness—it told him to run, but there was nowhere to
  go—Dodge was able to resist its primal urges. Instead, he turned
  to his conscious mind, which is uniquely capable of deliberate
  and creative thought. While automatic emotions focus on the
  most immediate variables, the rational brain is able to expand
  the list of possibilities. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux says,
  "The advantage [of the emotional brain] is that by allowing evolution
  to do the thinking for you at first, you basically buy the
  time that you need to think about the situation and do the most
  reasonable thing." And so Dodge stopped running. If he was going
  to survive the fire, he needed to think.
• "People who are more rational don't
  perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better."
  How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly
  simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows
  each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent
  psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry;
  every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so
  that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's
  feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala
  is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can
  be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to
  ignore the emotional brain.
• Instead, Aristotle argued that one of the critical functions
  of the rational soul was to make sure that emotions were
  intelligently applied to the real world. "Anyone can become angry—
  that is easy," Aristotle wrote. "But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the
  right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy." That requires
  some thought.
• If the emotional brain is the audience, constantly sending
  out visceral signals about its likes and dislikes, then the prefrontal
  cortex is the smart executive, patiently monitoring emotional
  reactions and deciding which to take seriously. It is the
  only brain area able to realize that the initial dislike of Seinfeld
  was a reaction to its originality, not to its inherent funniness. The
  rational brain can't silence emotions, but it can help figure out
  which ones should be followed.
• But when you encounter a problem you've never experienced before,
  when your dopamine neurons have no idea what to do, it's essential
  that you try to tune out your feelings. Pilots call such a
  state "deliberate calm," because staying calm in high-pressure
  situations requires conscious effort. "Maintaining our composure
  was one of the hardest things we had to do," Haynes says.
  "We knew we had to focus and think straight, but that's not always
  so easy."
• The pilots dealt with this potential information overload by
  quickly focusing on the most necessary bits of data. They were
  always thinking about what they should think about, which let
  them minimize potential distractions.
• Once the plane was within twenty miles of the Sioux City airport,
  about twelve minutes from touchdown, the captain started
  to concentrate on executing the landing. He deliberately ignored
  everything else. According to Predmore, the ability of the flight
  crew to successfully prioritize their tasks was a crucial ingredient
  of their success.

Chpater 5 - choking on thought

• What causes choking? Although it might seem like an amorphous
  category of failure, or even a case of excess emotion, choking
  is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking
  too much. The sequence of events typically goes like this: When
  a person gets nervous about performing, he naturally becomes
  extra self-conscious. He starts to focus on himself, trying to make
  sure that he doesn't make any mistakes. He begins scrutinizing
  actions that are best performed on autopilot.
• The pitcher concentrates too much on his motion
  and loses control of his fastball. The actor gets anxious
  about his lines and seizes up onstage. In each of these instances,
  the natural fluidity of performance is lost. The grace of talent
  disappears.
• The more time the beginner spends thinking
  about the putt, the more likely he is to sink the ball in the
  hole. By concentrating on the golf game, by paying attention to
  the mechanics of the stroke, the novice can avoid beginners' mistakes.
  
• A little experience, however, changes everything. After a
  golfer has learned how to putt—once he or she has memorized
  the necessary movements—analyzing the stroke is a waste of
  time. The brain already knows what to do. It automatically computes
  the slope of the green, settles on the best putting angle, and
  decides how hard to hit the ball. In fact, Beilock found that when
  experienced golfers are forced to think about their putts, they hit
  significantly worse shots. "We bring expert golfers into our lab,
  and we tell them to pay attention to a particular part of their
  swing, and they just screw up," Beilock says. "When you are at a
  high level, your skills become somewhat automated. You don't
  need to pay attention to every step in what you're doing."
• The part of the brain that monitors behavior—a network
  centered in the prefrontal cortex—starts to interfere with
  decisions that are normally made without thinking. It begins second-
  guessing the skills that have been honed through years of
  diligent practice. The worst part about choking is that it tends
  to be a downward spiral. The failures build on one another, and a stressful situation is made even more stressful.
• A follow-up study found that instead of thinking about the mechanical details of
  the swing, experienced golfers should focus on general aspects of their intended
  movement, what psychologists call a holistic cue word. For instance, instead of contemplating
  something like the precise position of the wrist or elbow, the player
  should focus on a descriptive adjective, such as smooth or balanced. An experimental
  trial demonstrated that professional golfers who used these holistic cues did far
  better than golfers who consciously tried to control their strokes.
• While reason is a powerful cognitive tool, it's dangerous to rely exclusively
  on the deliberations of the prefrontal cortex. When the rational
  brain hijacks the mind, people tend to make all sorts of
  decision-making mistakes. They hit bad golf shots and choose
  wrong answers on standardized tests. They ignore the wisdom
  of their emotions—the knowledge embedded in their dopamine
  neurons—and start reaching for things that they can explain.
  (One of the problems with feelings is that even when they are accurate,
  they can still be hard to articulate.) Instead of going with
  the option that feels the best, a person starts going with the option
  that sounds the best, even if it's a very bad idea.
• There is such a thing as too much analysis. When you overthink at the wrong moment, you cut yourself off
  from the wisdom of your emotions, which are much better at assessing
  actual preferences. You lose the ability to know what you
  really want.
• A recent study found that when a person travels
  more than one hour in each direction, he or she has to make 40
  percent more money in order to be as "satisfied with life" as a
  person with a short commute.
• "We have these general beliefs about the
  world—for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality—
  and they translate into specific expectations about specific
  products," said Shiv. "Then, once these expectations are activated,
  they start to really impact our behavior." The rational
  brain distorts the sense of reality, so the ability to properly assess
  the alternatives is lost. Instead of listening to the trustworthy
  opinions generated by our emotional brains, we follow our own
  false assumptions.
• These experiments suggest that, in many circumstances, we
  could make better consumer decisions by knowing less about the
  products we are buying. When you walk into a store, you are
  besieged by information. Even purchases that seem simple can
  quickly turn into a cognitive quagmire.
• a person should choose a jam with his or her prefrontal cortex. But this method
  can backfire. When we spend too much time thinking in the supermarket,
  we can trick ourselves into choosing the wrong things
  for the wrong reasons. That's why the best critics, from Consumer
  Reports to Robert Parker, always insist on blind comparisons.
  They want to avoid the deceptive thoughts that corrupt
  decisions. The prefrontal cortex isn't good at picking out jams or
  energy drinks or bottles of wine. Such decisions are like a golf
  swing: they are best done with the emotional brain, which generates
  its verdict automatically.
• Because working memory and rationality share a common
  cortical source—the prefrontal cortex—a mind trying to remember
  lots of information is less able to exert control over its
  impulses. The substrate of reason is so limited that a few extra
  digits can become an extreme handicap.
• Other studies have shown that a slight drop in blood-sugar levels can also inhibit
  self-control, since the frontal lobes require lots of energy in
  order to function.
• This research can also help explain why we get cranky when we're hungry and
  tired: the brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions
  sparked by small annoyances. A bad mood is really just a rundown
  prefrontal cortex.
• The same thing happens when people sit down to dinner:
  they tend to eat whatever is on their plates. If the plate is twice as
  large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the
  last twenty-five years), they'll still polish it off.
• The brain relies on mental accounting because it has such
  limited processing abilities. As Thaler notes, "These thinking
  problems come from the fact that we have a slow, erratic CPU
  [central processing unit] and the fact that we're busy." Since the
  prefrontal cortex can handle only about seven things at the same
  time, it's constantly trying to "chunk" stuff together, to make the
  complexity of life a little more manageable. Instead of thinking
  about each M&M, we think about the scoops. Instead of counting
  every dollar we spend, we parcel our dollars into particular
  purchases, like cars. We rely on misleading shortcuts because we
  lack the computational power to think any other way.
• The problem is that the rational brain isn't good at disregarding
  facts, even when it knows those facts are useless.
• Being exposed to extra news was distracting, and the high-information students quickly
  became focused on the latest rumors and insider gossip. (Herbert
  Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of
  attention.") As a result of all the extra input, these students engaged
  in far more buying and selling than the low-information
  group. They were convinced that all their knowledge allowed
  them to anticipate the market. But they were wrong.
• The prefrontal cortex can handle only so much information at any one time, so when a person gives it too many facts and then asks it to make a
  decision based on the facts that seem important, that person is
  asking for trouble. He is going to buy the wrong items at Wal-
  Mart and pick the wrong stocks. We all need to know about the
  innate frailties of the prefrontal cortex so that we don't undermine
  our decisions
• This is the danger of too much information: it can actually
  interfere with understanding. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed,
  a person can no longer make sense of the situation.
  Correlation is confused with causation, and people make theories
  out of coincidences.

Chapter 6 - The moral mind

• On most psychological
  tests, psychopaths appear perfectly normal. The working memory
  isn't impaired, they use language normally, and they don't
  have reduced attention spans. In fact, several studies have found
  that psychopaths have above-average IQs and reasoning abilities.
  Their logic is impeccable. But this intact intelligence conceals
  a devastating disorder: psychopaths are dangerous because
  they have damaged emotional brains.
• "You know when you see a scared face in a movie and
  that makes you automatically feel scared, too? Well, psychopaths
  don't feel that. It's like they don't understand what's going on.
  This lack of emotion is what causes their dangerous behavior.
  They are missing the primal emotional cues that the rest of us
  use as guides when making moral decisions."
• When you are confronted with an ethical dilemma,
  the unconscious automatically generates an emotional
  reaction. (This is what psychopaths can't do.) Within a few milliseconds,
  the brain has made up its mind; you know what is
  right and what is wrong. These moral instincts aren't rational but they are an essential part of
  what keep us all from committing unspeakable crimes.
• It's only at this point—after the emotions have already made
  the moral decision—that those rational circuits in the prefrontal
  cortex are activated. People come up with persuasive reasons to
  justify their moral intuition. When it comes to making ethical
  decisions, human rationality isn't a scientist, it's a lawyer. This
  inner attorney gathers bits of evidence, post hoc justifications,
  and pithy rhetoric in order to make the automatic reaction seem
  reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a façade, an elaborate
  self-delusion. Benjamin Franklin said it best in his autobiography:
  "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature,
  since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one
  has a mind to do."
• This is why psychopaths are so dangerous: they are missing
  the emotions that guide moral decisions in the first place. There's
  a dangerous void where their feelings are supposed to be. For
  people like Gacy, sin is always intellectual, never visceral. As a
  result, a psychopath is left with nothing but a rational lawyer
  inside his head, willing to justify any action. Psychopaths commit
  violent crimes because their emotions never tell them not to.
• The evolution of morality required a whole new set of decision-
  making machinery. The mind needed to evolve some structures
  that would keep it from hurting other people. Instead of
  just seeking more pleasure, the brain had to become sensitive to
  the pain and plight of strangers.
• Moral emotions existed long before Moses.
  They are writ into the primate brain. Religion simply allows us
  to codify these intuitions, to translate the ethics of evolution into
  a straightforward legal system. Just look at the Ten Commandments.
• At its core, moral decision-making is about sympathy. We abhor
  violence because we know violence hurts. We treat others fairly
  because we know what it feels like to be treated unfairly. We reject
  suffering because we can imagine what it's like to suffer.
  
• Feeling sympathetic is not as simple as it might seem. For
  starters, before you can sympathize with the feelings of other
  people, you have to figure out what they are feeling. This means
  you need to develop a theory about what's happening inside their
  minds so that your emotional brain can imitate the activity of
  their emotional brains. Sometimes, this act of mind reading is
  done by interpreting facial expressions. Of course, you don't always have access to a
  communicative set of facial expressions. When you talk on the
  phone or write an e-mail or think about someone far away, you
  are forced to mind read by simulation, by imagining what you
  would feel in the same situation.
• "As we have no immediate experience of
  what other men feel," Smith wrote, "we can form no idea of the
  manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we
  ourselves should feel in the like situation." This mirroring process
  leads to an instinctive sympathy for one's fellow man
• But here's the lovely secret of altruism: it feels good. The brain is designed so that acts of charity are pleasurable; being nice to
  others makes us feel nice.
• When they chose to give away the money, the reward
  centers of their brains became active and they experienced the
  delightful glow of unselfishness. In fact, several subjects showed
  more reward-related brain activity during acts of altruism than
  they did when they actually received cash rewards. From the
  perspective of the brain, it literally was better to give than to
  receive.
• Unlike people with autism,
  psychopaths can readily recognize when others are upset or in pain. Their
  problem is that they can't generate corresponding emotions, since their amygdalas
  are never turned on. The end result is that psychopaths remain preternaturally calm,
  even in situations that should make them upset. People with autism, however, don't
  have a problem generating emotion. The problem for them is of recognition; they
  struggle to decipher or simulate the mental states of others.
• According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they
  don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave
  us cold: our minds can't comprehend suffering on such a massive
  scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a
  well but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every
  year for lack of clean water. And why we donate thousands of
  dollars to help a single African war orphan featured on the cover
  of a magazine but ignore widespread genocides in Rwanda and
  Darfur. As Mother Teresa put it, "If I look at the mass, I will
  never act. If I look at the one, I will."
• We are
  designed to feel one another's pain so that we're extremely distressed
  when we hurt others and commit moral transgressions.
  Sympathy is one of humanity's most basic instincts, which is why
  evolution lavished so much attention on mirror neurons, the
  fusiform face area, and those other brain regions that help theorize
  about other minds. As long as a person is loved as a child and doesn't suffer from any developmental disorders, the human
  brain will naturally reject violence and make fair offers and try
  to comfort the crying child. This behavior is just a basic part of
  who we are. Evolution has programmed us to care about one
  another.

Chapter 6 - The Brain is an Argument

• They discovered that when a subject was first exposed
  to an object, his nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was turned on. The
  NAcc is a crucial part of the dopamine reward pathway, and the
  intensity of its activation was a reflection of desire for the item. If
  the person already owned the complete Harry Potter collection,
  then the NAcc didn't get too excited about the prospect of buying
  another copy. However, if he had been craving a George
  Foreman grill, the NAcc flooded the brain with dopamine when
  that item appeared.
• But then came the price tag. When the experimental subject
  was exposed to the cost of the product, the insula and prefrontal
  cortex were activated. The insula produces aversive feelings and
  is triggered by things like nicotine withdrawal and pictures of
  people in pain. In general, we try to avoid anything that makes
  our insulas excited. This includes spending money. The prefrontal
  cortex was activated, scientists speculated, because this rational
  area was computing the numbers, trying to figure out if the
  product was actually a good deal. The prefrontal cortex got most excited during the experiment when the cost of the item on display
  was significantly lower than normal.
  
• You don't look at
  the electric grill or box of chocolates and perform an explicit
  cost-benefit analysis. Instead, you outsource much of this calculation
  to your emotional brain and then rely on relative amounts
  of pleasure versus pain to tell you what to purchase. Whichever emotion you feel most intensely tends to dictate your shopping decisions. It's like an emotional
  tug of war.
• According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics
  doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to assimilate
  only those facts that confirm what they already believe.
• The
  pundits in Tetlock's study, however, distorted the verdicts of their
  emotional brains, cherry-picking the feelings they wanted to follow.
  Instead of trusting their gut feelings, they found ways to
  disregard the insights that contradicted their ideologies. When
  pundits were convinced that they were right, they ignored any
  brain areas that implied they might be wrong.
• This suggests that
  one of the best ways to distinguish genuine from phony expertise
  is to look at how a person responds to dissonant data. Does he
  or she reject the data out of hand? Perform elaborate mental
  gymnastics to avoid admitting error?
  
• Tetlock notes that the best pundits are willing to state their
  opinions in "testable form" so that they can "continually monitor
  their forecasting performance." He argues that this approach
  makes pundits not only more responsible—they are forced to
  account for being wrong—but also less prone to bombastic convictions,
  a crucial sign that a pundit isn't worth listening to.
• The only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage
  some inner dissonance. We must force ourselves to think
  about the information we don't want to think about, to pay attention
  to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs. When
  we start censoring our minds, turning off those brain areas that
  contradict our assumptions, we end up ignoring relevant evidence.
• The same lesson can be applied to the brain: when making
  decisions, actively resist the urge to suppress the argument. Instead,
  take the time to listen to what all the different brain areas
  have to say. Good decisions rarely emerge from a false consensus.

Chapter 8 - The Poker Hand

• "Use your conscious mind to
  acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But
  don't try to analyze the information with your conscious mind.
  Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it.
  Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going
  to be the best choice."
• Anyone who is
  constantly making difficult decisions, from corporate executives
  to poker players, can benefit from a more emotional thought
  process. As long as someone has sufficient experience in that domain—
  he's taken the time to train his dopamine neurons—then
  he shouldn't spend too much time consciously contemplating the
  alternatives. The hardest calls are the ones that require the most
  feeling.
• It is the easy problems—the mundane math
  problems of daily life—that are best suited to the conscious
  brain. These simple decisions won't overwhelm the prefrontal
  cortex. In fact, they are so simple that they tend to trip up the
  emotions, which don't know how to compare prices or compute
  the odds of a poker hand. (When people rely on their feelings in such situations, they make avoidable mistakes, like those due to
  loss aversion and arithmetical errors.*) Complex problems, on
  the other hand, require the processing powers of the emotional
  brain, the supercomputer of the mind. This doesn't mean you
  can just blink and know what to do—even the unconscious
  takes a little time to process information—but it does suggest
  that there's a better way to make difficult decisions. When choosing
  a couch, or holding a mysterious set of cards, always listen to
  your feelings. They know more than you do.
• Just because traders
  had nervous hands, or frightened amygdalas, didn't mean they
  were acting "irrationally." Rather, Lo discovered that the traders
  made the worst decisions when their emotions were either silent
  or overwhelming. In order to make the right investment decisions, the mind needs emotional input, but those emotions need
  to exist in a dialogue with rational analysis. Investors who got
  too worked up or who tried to rely on logic alone tended to make
  dramatic mistakes. "One of the implications of our experiments,"
  Lo says, "is that strong emotional reactions to financial
  gains or losses can actually be counterproductive. On the other
  hand, too little emotional reaction can also be dangerous. There's
  an ideal range of emotional responses that professional securities
  traders seem to exhibit, and that's an insight that we think individual
  investors can benefit from." The best investors, like the
  best poker players, are able to find that crucial mental balance.
  They constantly use one brain system to improve the performance
  of the other.
• The rational parts of the brain are uniquely able
  to monitor feelings, using the reins of cognition to keep the
  horses from running wild. Ironically, it's those moments when
  emotions seem most persuasive—when the brain is completely
  convinced that it's time to go all in—that you should take a little
  extra time to reflect on the emotional decision. Make yourself
  consider alternative possibilities and scenarios. This is why the
  Israeli intelligence services added yet another analytical branch
  after the Yom Kippur War. "If the game seems simple or obvious,
  then you've made a mistake," Binger says. "The game is
  never simple. You've always got to wonder: what am I missing?"
• SIMPLE PROBLEMS REQUIRE REASON. There isn't a clear
  line separating easy questions from hard ones, or math problems
  from mysteries. Some scientists, such as Ap Dijksterhuis, believe
  that any problem with more than four distinct variables overwhelms
  the rational brain. Others believe that a person can consciously
  process somewhere between five and nine pieces of information
  at any given moment. With practice and experience,
  this range can be slightly expanded. But in general, the prefrontal
  cortex is a sharply constrained piece of machinery. If the emotional
  brain is a fancy laptop, stuffed full of microprocessors
  operating in parallel, the rational brain is an old-fashioned calculator.
• So how can anyone reliably identify the simple problems that are best suited for the prefrontal cortex?
  The best way is to ask yourself if the decision can be accurately
  summarized in numerical terms. For example, since most vegetable
  peelers are virtually identical, not much is lost when the various
  peelers are sorted by price. In this case, the best choice is
  probably the cheapest: let the rational brain take over.
• If the decision doesn't
  matter all that much, the prefrontal cortex should take the time
  to carefully assess and analyze the options.
• And should anyone really
  choose an apartment or a car based on a single variable, such as
  the monthly rent or the amount of horsepower? As Dijksterhuis
  demonstrated, when you ask the prefrontal cortex to make these
  sorts of decisions, it makes consistent mistakes. You'll end up
  with an ugly couch in the wrong apartment. It might sound ridiculous,
  but it makes scientific sense: Think less about those
  items that you care a lot about. Don't be afraid to let your emotions
  choose.
• NOVEL PROBLEMS ALSO REQUIRE REASON. Before you
  entrust a mystery to the emotional brain, before deciding to let
  your instincts make a big bet in poker or fire a missile at a suspicious
  radar blip, ask yourself a question: How does your past
  experience help solve this particular problem? Have you played
  poker hands like this before? Seen blips like this before? Are
  these feelings rooted in experience, or are they just haphazard
  impulses?
  If the problem really is unprecedented—if it's like a complete
  hydraulic failure in a Boeing 737—then emotions can't save you.
• Stop and think and let your working memory tackle the dilemma.
  The only way out of a unique mess is to come up with a creative
  solution, like Al Haynes did when he realized that he couldn't
  steer the plane in the ordinary way but that it was possible to
  steer the plane with the thrust levers. Such insights require the
  flexible neurons of the prefrontal cortex.
• Mark Jung-Beeman, the scientist who studies the neuroscience
  of insight, has shown that people in good moods are significantly
  better at solving hard problems that require insight
  than people who are cranky and depressed. (Happy people solve
  nearly 20 percent more word puzzles than unhappy people.) He
  speculates that this is because the brain areas associated with executive
  control, such as the prefrontal cortex and the ACC, aren't
  as preoccupied with managing emotional life. In other words,
  they aren't worrying about why you're not happy, which means
  they are free to solve the problem at hand. The end result is that the rational brain can focus on what it needs to focus on, which
  is coming up with a solution for the unprecedented situation that
  you've found yourself in.
• EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. Hard problems rarely have easy
  solutions. There is no single way to win a poker hand, and there
  is no guaranteed path to making money in the stock market. Pretending
  that the mystery has been erased results in the dangerous
  trap of certainty. You are so confident you're right that you neglect
  all the evidence that contradicts your conclusion.
• There are two simple tricks to help ensure that you never let
  certainty interfere with your judgment. First, always entertain
  competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to interpret the
  facts through a different, perhaps uncomfortable lens, you often
  discover that your beliefs rest on a rather shaky foundation.
• Second, continually remind yourself of what you don't know.
  Even the best models and theories can be undone by utterly unpredictable
  events. Poker players call these "bad beats," and
  every player has stories about the hands he lost because he got
  the one card he wasn't expecting.
• YOU KNOW MORE THAN YOU KNOW. One of the enduring
  paradoxes of the human mind is that it doesn't know itself
  very well. The conscious brain is ignorant of its own underpinnings,
  blind to all that neural activity taking place outside the
  prefrontal cortex. This is why people have emotions: they are
  windows into the unconscious, visceral representations of all the
  information we process but don't perceive
• The reason these emotions are so intelligent is that they've
  managed to turn mistakes into educational events. You are constantly
  benefiting from experience, even if you're not consciously
  aware of the benefits.
• There are no shortcuts to this painstaking process; becoming
  an expert just takes time and practice. But once you've developed
  expertise in a particular area—once you've made the requisite
  mistakes—it's important to trust your emotions when
  making decisions in that domain. It is feelings, after all, and not
  the prefrontal cortex, that capture the wisdom of experience.
• And yet, this doesn't mean the emotional brain should always
  be trusted. Sometimes it can be impulsive and short-sighted. Sometimes
  it can be a little too sensitive to patterns, which is why
  people lose so much money playing slot machines. However, the
  one thing you should always be doing is considering your emotions,
  thinking about why you're feeling what you're feeling. In
  other words, act like the television executive carefully analyzing
  the reactions of the focus group. Even when you choose to ignore
  your emotions, they are still a valuable source of input.
• THINK ABOUT THINKING. If you're going to take only one
  idea away from this book, take this one: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making andthe kind of thought process it requires.
  
• The best way to make sure that you are using your
  brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument
  inside your head.

Final Chapter - CODA

• The best decisions emerge when a
  multiplicity of viewpoints are brought to bear on the situation.
  The wisdom of crowds also applies in the cockpit.
• The rational brain (the pilot)
  and the emotional brain (the cockpit computers) exist in perfect
  equilibrium, each system focusing on those areas in which
  it has a comparative advantage. The reason planes are so safe,
  even though both the pilot and the autopilot are fallible, is that
  both systems are constantly working to correct each other. Mistakes
  are fixed before they spiral out of control.
  

Play Poker Like the Pros

by phil helmuth

- reading on sections to help with my trading psychology...very situational and very helpful to put things in perspective


Limit Holdem tournament Strategy

• p170 top - sometimes i just wait for a big hand in a limit hold'em tourney and let the cards decide how long i'll be around for that day. if i catch good cards and win, then i might win the whole enchilada. if i catch good cards and lose, then at least i'm happy that i went out with some top ten hands. if i don't catch anything decent and ante myself out of the tourney, thats OK too. But if i start playing hands that i'm not supposed to play, that's the worst of all, because i shoot myself in the foot! (trading - win or lose with the best setups...any result is ok...worst is to buy suboptimal setups as thats self-sabotage...if cant' find anything, can walk with head held high knowing you did not take on unnecessary risks with bad setups)
  
• p 172 mid - I smooth call in order to trick my opponent into thinking i'm weak, so that he'll give me a lot of action the rest of the hand. Just remember that smooth calling in limit hold'em with big hands can work out very badly or perfectly, depending on the way the cards fall. When you smooth-call with a hand, you really are gambling (trading - never taking profit and always leaving 100% position in play)
  

Creativity

by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(i only read the last chapter as i felt i didn't need this knowledge in depth, especially after just reading "flow" by the same author...i don't mind reading the whole book someday or picking out the chapters of interest, but not now as i got more interestingly related books on my read list)

chapter 14 - Enhancing Personal Creativity

• But the fact is that there are real limits to how many things a person can attend to at the same time, and when survival needs require all of one's attention, none is left over for being creative
• in a person concerned with protecting his or her self, practically all the attention is invested in monitoring threats to the ego

Curiousity and Interest

• with age most of us lose the sense of wonder, the feeling of awe in confronting the majesty and variety of the world. Yet without awe, life becomes routine. Creative individuals are childlike in that their curiosity remains fresh even at ninety years of age; they delight in the strange and the unknown.
• Try to be surprised by something every day. Experience this one thing for what it is, not what you think it is. Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences - the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be
• Try to surprise at least one person every day. Comfortable routines are great when they save energy for doing what u really care about; but if you are still searching, they restrict and limit the future. Instead of being your predictable self, say something unexpected, express an opinion that you have not dared to reveal, ask a question you wouldn't ordinarily ask.
• Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. Most creative people keep a diary, or notes, or lab records to make their experiences more concrete and enduring. One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experiences less fleeting, so that the most memorable, interesting, and important events are not lost forever a few hours after they occured. Writing them down so that you can relive them in recollection is one way to keep them from dissapearing
• When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it. The world is our business, and we can't know which part of it is best suited to our selves, to our potentialities, unlesss we make a serious effort to learn about as many aspects of it as possible

Cultivating Flow in Everyday Life

• Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to. Creative people believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can't wait to get started on it. It is easier if each night before falling asleep, you review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesing and exciting. then next morning, open your eyes and visualize the chosen event - play it out briefly in your mind until you can hardly wait to get dressed and get going
• If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. The more activities that we do with excellence and style, the more of life becomes intrinsically rewarding
• To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity. You cannot enjoy an activity over and over, unless you discover new challenges, new opportunities in it. Otherwise it becomes boring. It is always possible to find a better way to do anything

Habits of Strength

• You should conserve creative energy by routinizing as much of everyday life as possible so that you can focus entirely on what really matters.
  
• Before you have discovered an overriding interest in a particular domain, it makes sense to be open to as much of the world as possible. After you have developed an abiding interest, however, it may make more sense to save as much energy as you can to invest in that one domain
• People who meditate expand their being by letting go of focused thought. this way, they aim to achieve a spiritual union with the energy behind the world of appearances, the force that drives the universe
• take charge of your schedule. There are probably best times to shop, to visit, to work, to relax for each one of us; the more we do things at the most suitable times, the more creative energy we can free up
• Make time for reflection and relaxation. Keeping constantly busy is commendable and certainly much better than just lounging around feeling sorry for yourself. But constant busyness is not a good prescription for creativity. It is important to schedule times in the day, the week, and the year just to take stock of your life and review what you have accomplished and what remains to be done.
  
• These are times when you should not expect any task to be one, any decision to be reached. You should just indulge in the luxury of reflection for its own sake. Whether you intend it or not, new ideas and conclusions will emerge in your consciousness anyway - and the less you try to direct the process the more creative they are likely to be. It may be best to combine these periods of reflection with some other task that requires a certain amount of attention.. Typical activities that facilitate subconscious creative processes are walking, showering, swimming, driving, gardening, weaving, and carpentry
• Creative individuals usually sleep longer and claim that if they cut down on sleeptime the originality of their ideas suffer. And don't feel guilty if you sleep a few hours more than is considered normal. What you lose in waking time will probably be made up in terms of the quality f experience while you are awake
• Shape your space. It is not what the environment is like that matters, but the extent to which you are in harmony with it. At the macro level, the question may be whether you feel you would be happiest if living at the seashore, surrounded by mountains or plains, or in the bustle of a big city. At the midlevel, determine what sort of community you want to sink roots in. Every city and rural area have neighborhoods that are stratified in terms of price, centrality, type of activities available and so forth. At the micro level the choices are much more readily available to everyone. We can all decide what kind of environment to create at our home. We can organize space and collect things that are meaningful and conducive to the use of creative energies
• The work space of creative individuals is often messy and it tends to put off more ordered souls. The important thing is that they know where everything is, so they can work without too much distraction.
• The kind of objects you fill your space with also either help or hinder the allocations of creative energies. Cherished objects remind us of our goals, make us feel more confident, and focus our attention.
• Trophies diplomas, favorite books, and family pictures on the office desk are all reminders of who you are, and what you have accomplished, therefore what you are likely to achieve.
• Pictures and maps of places you would liek to visit and books about things you might liek to learn more about are signposts of what u might do in the future
• Find out what you like and what you hate about life. It is astonishing how little most ppl know about their feelings. There are people who can't even tell if they are hapy, and if they are, when or where. Creative individuals are in very close touch with their emotions. They always know the reason for what they are doing, and the are very sensitve to pain, to boredom, to joy, to interest, and to other emotions. They are very quick to pack up and leave if they are bored and to get involved if they are interested. And because they have practiced this skill for a long time, they need to invest no psychic energy in self-monitoring. The first step toward self-knowledge involves having a clear idea of what you spend your life doing and how you feel while doing it.
• Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate. After a few weeks of self monitoring, sit down with your diary or your notes and begin to analyze them. See what you need to add more of or take away. Maybe the emotions say that you should quit your job or find a way to add more flow to it

Internal Traits

• To change personality mean to learn new patterns of attention. To look at different things, and to look at them differently; to learn to think new thoughts, have new feelings about what we experience
• Develop what you lack. The point here is that everyone can strengthen the missing end of the polarity. When an extrovert learns to experience the world like an introvert, or vice versa, it is as if he or she has discovered a whole missing dimension to the world.
• To start, it makes sense to identify your most obvious characteristic, the one that your friends would use to describe you. when you have identified a central trait, you can begin to try its opposite. Keep exploring what it takes to be the opposite of who you are
• Shift often from openness to closure. Perhaps the most important duality that creative persons are able to integrate is often being open and receptive on the one hand, and focused and hard-driving on the other. Good scientists, like good artists, must let their minds roam playfully or they will not discover new facts, new patterns, new relationships. At the same time, they must be able to evaluate critically every novelty they encounter, forget immediately the spurious ones, and then concentrate their minds on developing and realizing the few that are promising.
• for a relationship t work, it is essential to listen to the other person, to try to imagine why she says what she says, what she feels, how she sees the world. It is essential to change perspectives when necessary, to compromise, to understand the world and to act differently, because this is what the other person's reality requires. Yet it is just as important to remain in touch with our own beliefs and perspectives. In a relationship, we should be able to shift moment by moment from our own viewpoint to that of the other.
• Aim for complexity. A creative person is highly individualized. She follows her own star and creates her own career. At the same time, she is deeply steeped in the traditions of the culture; she learns and respects the rules of the domain and is responsive to the opinions of the field - as long as those opinions do not conflict with personal experience. Complexity is the result of the fruitful interaction between these two opposing tendencies.

The Applications of Creative Energy

Problem Finding

• Creative people are constantly surprised. They don't assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don't assume that anybody else does either. They question the obvious - not out of contrariness but because they see the shortcomings of accepted explanations before the rest of us do. They sense problems before they are generally perceived and are able to define what they are
• if you learn to be creative in everyday life, you may not change how future generations will see the world, but you will change the way you experience it. Problem finding is important in the daily domain because it helps us focus on issues that will affect our experiences but otherwise may go unnoticed.
• Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. When you know you have a problem, consider it from many different perspectives. How you define a problem usually carries with it an explanation of what caused it. our first impulse is to label problems by relying on tried and true prejudices (if has a fight with spouse, tend to favor self as right and spouse as wrong...though it prob is not the case all the time)
• creative individuals do not rush to define the nature of problems; they look at the situation from various angles first and leave the formulation undetermined for a long time. they consider different causes and reasons. They test their hunches about what really is going on, first in their own mind and then in reality. They try tentative solutions and check their success - and they are open to reformulating the problem if the evidence suggests they started out on the wrong path
• because they pause to consider a greater range of possible explanations for what happens to them, they have a wider and less predictable range of options to choose from
• Figure out the implications of the problem. once you have created a formulation, you can behing to entertain possible solutions.
  
• Creative individuals experiment with a number of alternative solutions until they are certain that they have found the one that will work best. Again, as soon as you think of a good solution, it is useful to think of an opposite one. Even the most experienced person is often unable to tell in advance, just by thinking which solution will do the trick. So first trying one way of going about the problem, then trying another tack for a while, and then comparing results often yields the most creative result
• Implement the solution. solving problems creatively involves continuous experimentation and revision. the longer you can keep options open, the more likely it is that the solution will be original and appropriate. artists who do more original work change their technique as they are painting, and their paintings develop on the canvas in less predictable ways than those of less original artists. This is because the original artist is more ready to learn from the emerging work. he or she is alert to the unexpected and is willing to go with a better solution if one presents itself. similarly creative writers often start a story without knowing how it will end; the ending emerges as they follow the logic of the evolving story.
• the reason most ppl prefer routine, tried and true solutions to their problems is that this requires less psychic energy. in fact, we could not afford to be creative all the time because we would soon stretch the limits of attention and collapse. routine results in great savings. but it makes good sense to know how to come up with a creative solution when we need one and can spare the effort.

Divergent Thinking

• Produce as many ideas as possible. First, come up with as many options as you can think of, even if they are not all very sensible. A crazy suggestion may jolt you into thinking in new directions and led to more acceptable alternatives you would not have considered otherwise.
• Have as many different ideas as possible. Quantity is important, but try to avoid redundancy. Whenever someone says something, he asks himself, "what if the opposite were true?" Imagining alternatives to what others hold to be true is probably going to be useless 99% of the time. but that one time the practice of flipping to a divergent perspective might generate an insight that is not only original but also useful

Choosing a Special Domain:

• either because of ignorance, low self-esteem, or habits of thought established early, we discount the possibility that we could enjoy and be good at many of the things that make other happy.
  
• few of us know in advance what domains we may have an affinity for. Prodigies are children who from an early age show a definite gift in some directions, but most of us are not prodigies and it takes us decades of trial and error to find out what we are best cut out for. Even in out sample, some individuals did not realize what the realizations were until they were middle-aged. And often the realization was forced on them by outside factors, such as a war or the necessity to do something that they turned out to be just right.
• it is important to try as many domains as possible. start with things you already enjoy and then move to related domains. Learning to operate within a new domain is always difficult, and love at first sight is rare. A certain amount of persistence is necessary. On the other hand, it makes no sense to persevere in an activity that gives no joy, or the promise of it.
• eventually you sound be able to find one or more domains that fit your interests, things that you enjoy doing and that expand your life. Ideally we should be able to do so in as many domains as possible. but in practice the limits on psychic energy make it impossible to take on more than a few discrete activities seriously.
• there are 2 dangers as you become involved in a domain. The first is addiction; some domains are so seductive that you may invest so much attention into it that you have none left for your job and family. The other danger is the opposite: you can become so diffuse, so eclectic, that what you feel in different domains ends up being the same superficial experience. Like the traveler who goes everywhere and is still the same boring soul he was before he left, many poeple seem to gain nothing from sampling the best that the culture has to offer...in other words, u might dabble too much and not get deep enough in any 1 domain that u never grow from the experiences