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

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 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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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? 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, 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, 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 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. 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. 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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,

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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, 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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.