David Redish

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is David Reddish, professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.

David's laboratory studies learning, memory and how animals, including humans, make decisions. His latest book is called The Mind Within the Brain, How we make decisions and how those decisions go wrong. Here's the interview. Hi David, Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be here. Yeah, I'm excited

to get you on. Your book is called The Mind Within the Brain, How we make decisions and how those decisions go wrong, which is a very uh, this is a pretty It straddles the line between what I would call sort of a popular science treatment and a pretty deep exploration of a lot of these things. So I found it kind of Uh, it was. It was certainly deeper in a lot of categories than then I'm used to going into some of this stuff. But it was very,

very interesting, Thank you. The goal was to make a book that was both readable by you know, by everybody, but also wouldn't take my colleagues off. That's a tough line to walk in the academic world, isn't it It is. I I hope that it it succeeded. I think you did a good job of it. I think it is readable, and yet it's not you know, you're you're definitely going into a lot of depth. So, um, we'll start off with the parable and then we'll jump more into the book.

So there is a an old parable parable two Wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think this is a fascinating parable, beak is it speaks to the human social interaction. You notice that all of the the wolves, uh, I don't know, um, you know, their their accouchments, they're they're what they're about, are all the things about interacting with

other people. And one of the things that we now really know in neuroscience is that this is a part of us, these kind of social interactions, and they come not from the very cognitive kind of perspective, but rather from those deep emotional relationships and what we now call the Pavlovian system, which I'm sure we'll get into eventually, UM, but the system that is the um species specific things

that make us human. So I find this this probably is very interesting because of course one of the big issues is how do you connect up with that part of yourself? How do you how do you feed the parts of yourself that you want to be in these kind of less I don't want to say conscious, but less deliberative, less cognitive kind of components. Right in your

book you talk about that UM. You talk about that there are multiple decision making systems within each of us, UM, and that the actions that we end up taking are are are a consequence of the interaction of those systems. Can you explain what what some of those different decision

making systems are? Sure, So we can start with the idea that what a decision is is it's taking kind of things from your past, things that you're seeing around you, that the sensory signals that you're seeing now, and your goals and kind of driving to create an appropriate action. But there are lots of we would say, computations that you conduce, lots of ways to solve that question. And it turns out there at least four different systems in the human system, in fact, in all mammals that UH

solve that task. UM, do you want me to go through them. Now do you want to? Sure? Yeah, let's just let's dive into them. Let's dive into the interesting thing is that they are. You know. Obviously, there is the big what we would call the deliberative system. This is a system that allows you to imagine a future, put yourself into that future, and then make a decision between those two choices. This deliberative system is very slow. It takes a lot of effort. Think of it as

what job am I going to take? What college am I going to go to. It's good for big decisions like that, but if you're going to do something fast, for example, hitting a baseball, you really don't have time to plan through all the possibilities. You've got a few hundred milliseconds to decide whether or not to swing. And so there's a second system, we call it the procedural system that basically has learned over time to categorize the world very quickly and then decide what's the right action

to take. And this is expertise. So a sports star, a musician, a um firefighter for example, deciding, you know, is that building safe or not. So those are kind of two of the four. The third one is kind of interesting because we call it the Pavlovian system because this is what Pavlov's famous dogs were doing. And what it is is it's a species specific behavior, behavior that you have evolved for your species, that you learn the

right situation to release. So, for example, Pavlov's dogs learned that when the bell rang, they would get food, so they salivated. But it turns out that this is used for lots not only of survival circuits running away from a lion, but also social interact actions, particularly among social

creatures like humans. So all of those behaviors that those dogs, those wolves were talking about, anger, jealousy, kindness, um, shame, all of these internal you know, these social interactions turn out to be part of that third system, and very interesting we can talk about it. The trends out that actually a lot of human morality comes from that third system, which is absolutely fascinating to me. The fourth system we have to include for completeness is reflexes. What reflexes have

done is learned over a very long evolutionary time. They've learned at this moment, you've got to react quickly, You've got to do this. It's the stimulus and the response are all already essentially built in, and we include them because then we can talk about conflicts like preventing a reflex. Isn't a deliberative system in conflict with your reflex system? Yeah, you say there are irrationality tends to come when these different systems are in inflict with each other. I think

we have to be careful with the word rationality. UM. I think that the word irrationality suggests that we know what the right answer is in lots of these um cases. Um. A lot of what we see is what I would say is that each of these systems is kind of really good for certain situations. Right, if you're hitting a baseball, you want your procedural system, but if you're deciding between colleges,

you want your deliberative system. And that means that in situations, these different systems can come up with different answers, and so you can find them into conflict in very interesting ways. And so let's go back to the Pavlovian system a little bit. Can you give me an example of how that that does affect social interaction? Yeah, my favorite example is the ultimatum game, and I probably should explain it for the listeners. So the ultimatum game is think of

it as an experiment, a morality game. You have two players. The first player has given some amount of money, say twenty dollars, and this first player decides how to split the money between the two players. So player A keeps, you know, ten dollars and player B gets ten dollars. Nice fair split. Or player A gets nineteen dollars and player B only gets one dollar. And then in the game, player B gets to decide whether they take the deal or not. And if they take the deal, they walk

away with that money. If player A said I get nineteen and player visa and if player A says I get nineteen and player B gets one, then they walk away with nineteen dollars and one dollar. But if player B says no, I don't like that deal, nobody gets anything. And what's interesting about this is that you know, from a simple how do you make more money situation, player B should take anything right. Player A says I get nineteen, you get one. Player B as a dollar richer than

player B was before. But most people don't react that way. Most people react with anger, They react with um what we call to forget you response, and they basically throw the money back and player's based if player A hasn't give them a decent deal. And in practice people end up being about And that's the Pavlovian system. That's that emotional system coming back and saying, this is not a situation that I'm going to accept. So that decision to accept or not accept. That is the way that the

Pavlovian system works. Is that intrinsically built into me? Or is that something that I learn over time how I react in that situation? So for example, could I, um, could I be trained to think about it very differently? And then yet it come from that level of the decision making system. It depends on the one you feed. Absolutely, it depends on you can be trained and in act you can learn to be you know, to take any deal.

You can learn what the social culture is right that you're within, and you very much learn when is it appropriate to to make a pass at somebody? For example, right, so uh, an emotional statement of that's an attractive person, Um, you know, I'm going to make a pass at that person? There are um that's very much part of that have

lo v and social structure. In fact, how a person makes that pass is very um, I won't say completely built in, but if you were to watch, you know, people making passes at other people, they're pretty similar across many cultures. But when that's appropriate or not is something that we definitely learn, absolutely, and these are cultural definitions that we learn and in exactly the same way that

we learned the right situations for those responses. One of the things that you talked about in the book, and there's you know, more and more studies seem you know, I just keep kind of stumbling upon them, which is that a lot of the conscious decisions, or what we think our conscious decisions, are actually rationalizations after the fact. Yes, that's that's very true, But I want to be careful with that because a lot of people take that to mean that they are somehow not making the decision, and

I think that's a mistake. I think that the fact that we recognize consciously when that decision occurs does not mean that it wasn't us who made that decision. You talk about an analogy in the book that is an analogy I've always really liked, which is Jonathan hates analogy

of the writer and the elephant. And you said that you don't completely agree with that analogy because it makes it sound like they're these different, um, different selves, where in reality, all these different decision making uh systems compromise who we are, and so we might be exercising one or the other of them, but that's still us exactly. I mean, I wouldn't want to say that some you know, sports star and musician who's practiced ten thousand hours in

order to get to that skill level. You know, that's part of who they are, being able to make those decisions. Um. And you know, when when I fall in love, you know, that's me falling in love. And likewise, when you fall in love, that's you falling in love. It's not some some horse that you're riding. And actually the Jonathan Hype book actually ends by saying, actually you are both the writer and the horse. And my problem is that it

ends there instead of beginning there. Yeah. Well, I think what gets tricky there is we think of ourselves as

or we are conscious. Right, there's the there's the you know, the deliberative system that you talked about, or the consciousness that's aware that we're conscious, and yet all these other things are happening at a level that feels unconscious and so even though those are part of us, it feels very difficult to have any acts us to those parts or to change or to affect how those parts work, at least with the conscious brain. I'm not sure that

they're unconscious. It's harder to describe that consciousness, but I think it's there. So, you know, a a I keep coming back to the sports star, a sports star or a musician who's you know, in the zone. You know, a jazz musician will often talk about kind of coming into themselves at the moment when they're playing a you know, an improv and it's working and everything is kind of working. That's not them. They don't feel out of body. They feel in their body. And so I think that that

is a form of consciousness. Um, you know, the it's not. It's just that it's hard to linguistically describe it. But it's still very much, you know, part of who we are and how we we can learn to control those things. You know, we do control those things and we practice for example, right, Well, I think they are. They're hard to linguistically name. Their also hard to summon on demand, seems to me, I'm not so sure they're They're hard

for the deliberative system just on demand, Yes, exactly. And I guess I think so what I'm sort of saying is that maybe, or maybe the other way of saying is that I am viewing all that from the lens of the deliberative system. Yes, And I think that's a common perspective, but it's one I actually am trying to argue against the book. Do you have any means or methods that you think is helpful to access those other

systems or to switch between those systems? So, for example, you could say, well, you know, if this person is always stuck in their head, they're always in the deliberative everything is liberative. Um. And you might say with another person, what it seems like they're you know, they're they're very Pavlovian, they're driven by all these other things. Is there ways to switch between these different systems to make our decision

making better? Because you kind of argue that that is one way to make better decisions is to um, make sure you're applying the right system to the right situation. That's a great question, and unfortunately the answer seems to be we don't know yet. Um. One of my favorite news science books is a book called Ignorance by Stuart Fierstein, and he argues in it that the goal of science is to open questions. You didn't know we're questions until

you did the science. And we're kind of at that right now now that we know that there are these multiple decision systems, that these multiple decision systems are kind of individualized, right that that your Pavlovian system is a little different from mine in part because of your experiences, and that means that we have that is us, but how do we switch between them? And we don't actually

know that right now? This is I mean, this is one of the things I love about this this field right now is that we can, in the course of you know, twenty minute conversation, come to the limits of our current knowledge. And this is where the science is right now. We know that there's a number of possibilities about how this could work, and people are doing experiments and looking at these questions right now, but we don't actually know what mediates these decisions, how these these different

systems mediate each other right now. That's actually just not known right because on the show lately we've had a bunch of conversations a little bit between and it's sort of a simplification. But with that idea of the thinking fast and slow brain, right, you've got your you've got your conscious brain that is a lot slower, but it's you know, it's very deliberative. It can think logically and rationally.

And then you've got again that that faster, more instinctive, and you sort of break that apart into different categories. And I think it's very important to break that apart to the different categories because that the categories that there's an old theory. I mean, it goes all the way back to Augustine and Plato that um, you know that you have this this this rational brain that is is this deliberative which isn't really rational. We have to be careful with that word. But and then you have this

kind of animal brain instead that underneath it. I think that that's a misnomer. I think that I'd like to try to to undercut that, um that theory with this more specific one that looks at these multiple systems because the fast component, there's a big difference between a fast component that you've practiced for ten thou hours and now you are an expert in commanding a you know, a tank or commanding a group of um, you know, fireman,

deciding what to do with the building. Right, that you have to make these fast decisions that you've practiced on, and that's very very different from the emotional statement of Oh, that person is cute, I want to go, I'm attracted to that person. Right, those are very different systems that work very differently, and we've got to be careful not to mix them up. And see what you're saying is we tend to lump both those things into this animal

brain or faster brain. That's concept and and really there's a bunch of different things going on under the covers there, that's right. And I think that it's it's dangerous and and oversimple to lump them into that that one, that one fast brain, because they are very very different, and in fact, I think part of the issue is controlling them requires very different processes. So I like the example, actually, I love that parable that you bring up at the

beginning about you feeding the wolf, right. A lot of the way one interacts with this Pavlovian system is by feeding it. Right, do you allow yourself to become angry sometimes that's important. Do you allow yourself to encompass joy.

That's important, right, But that's a very different control of how do you get yourself into the mindset for the big football game where you don't want to be thinking, you know, with your deliberative system, but you also really don't want to be thinking with that Pavlovian system because people are yelling at you and taunting you, and you

have to be under very tight control. So one of the things that you talk about is you say that the decision making in our brain arises from physical processes that occur in the brain, because our brain is a physical thing, and so it has vulnerabilities what we might call a failure mode in the engineering world, and that's where when we have you know, for lack of a better word, breakdowns in the system. It's it's understanding that these are physical processes that that have the ability to

fail or breakdown. Can you expound on that, um, sure? Or so? I think the first thing that we have to start with is this this point about the physical brain, and that the fact that we are a physical brain doesn't mean we're not with the mind. It's not denying the mind. The mind exists, it's just instantiated in a physical brain. That's kind of that's the medium in which it exists, but that means that it has It is

a system. And like any engineering system, whether it be a bridge or a car or you know, a computer, it has or a brain um which is different from all three of those things. Uh, it has ways, It has weak links in the chain. And I always I really kind of go back and forth between these various modes, you know words, you know, vulnerabilities or failure modes. The the engineers called them failure modes, but I don't want to say this means you're a failure if you have

one of these things. It's kind of really a statement of how does the system break down? And that's really the the the kind of the the issue here. And it turns out that a lot of the it's a new perspective on kind of issues like psychiatry and a lot of psychology and what is this breakdown? What is

break going down? How is this breakdown happening? And what's interesting is that a lot of these breakdowns can separate very very different um psychiatric phenomenon and it's likely that in fact, if we could get the right treatment to the right breakdown, then we can actually fix things better. Well, you talk about addiction as so I'll just I'll jump to that addiction as being a symptom of a breakdown

in the system. And it could be those different systems could be failing in different ways that it's not this, you know, to call it addiction is is a bit of a too broad of a term. And you're saying that if you can find out where the failure in the system is or which system is failing, you can try and address that more directly. Can you maybe give

a couple of examples of that in relation to addiction? Sure, I mean, um, so for example, we know that, UM, what would be a good kind of example, Well, you could imagine a case where you have practiced the habit too much, right, so you have you've you've smoked that cigarette just too many times, and what happens is your your habit system is now kind of hooked on that. It's built in that habit into its procedural components. So

we um. On the other hand, you could have a system which has recognized that if you were to take this drug, you feel extreme pleasure, and so now you want to get to that pleasure again by thinking about it. So you could actually have a deliberative mode that says I want to go and find that thing, or you can say, oh, I'm just kind of picking up my habit. And in fact, if you say does this make you take you know, I don't say make it? Does this? Does this explain why you take drugs? Let's phrase it

that way. Does this explain why you take drugs? That both both of those explain why, and they have that they have very different reasons and they would require very different treatments. What I find interesting about that is I think that actually that's absolutely true, that it is a there are different breakdowns. But I think often, at least in my experience, and I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict and I know a lot of people, is that you

have those breakdowns across multiple systems. It's kind of all those things you describe, you know, it can be all of those things kind of layered on top of each other, you know. The other one that you talk about that I think is really interesting as you talk about the concept of value um, which you do you define is how much one is willing to pay trade or work, um,

you know, for a reward or to avoid punishment. And the thing that you say is that value is not intrinsic to any object, but we have to recalculate it every time. And one of the things about addiction, clearly is at least for me and my experience at different points, is that valuing these different parts of our lives, the different things that our lives, gets way out of whack um in how you assign value to say a drink versus a family. You know, your your family, those kind

of things that happen. But I thought that was really interesting in that that value we have to calculate every time with an object, and that that changes over time, and I just thought that was a really interesting idea. So one of the things that's very interesting about value is each of these decision making systems in a sense, has its own way of calculating value. Right, So the deliberative system is imagining if I were to go do this, how good would it be? Whereas the um procedural or

habit system has record learned I'm in this situation. In this situation, the best thing is to do this, and you can actually construct and and you can find that they can go into conflict because one value could in fact say oh, I'm in a situation where I'm going to do this, and another like you go to the bar, you're gonna drink, right. Whereas so what you find is you can actually find cases where you can say I'm not going to go to the bar because if I

went to the bar, I would drink. And so it's called pre commitment, and it's in some sense a conflict between you and yourself. Right, So you have the the you at sitting at home does not want to go drink because that you sitting at home knows that if you go drink, you'll have the drink, you'll embarrassed, or you'll hate yourself or whatever. Right, you don't want that.

And yet if you were to go to the bar because your friend convinces you or whatever, now the you at the bar has a different decision and changes takes a different choice. Yep. I well, I think, you know, speaking from personal experience, I think that is one of the most painful parts of addiction, is that that warring you know within your brain, those different you know, like you said, you call it being in conflict with yourself,

which is exactly what it feels like. I think one of the important points here is that we can you is this actually if we know ah, it's you know, this situation or this aspect that is UM the problem. We could use that by trying to push you into using one of the other systems. So, for example, can we force you to UM always you know, deliberate over your choices, right, so there's um or, or could we, for example, UM make it easy for you to sign

step that choice. I think that there's a lot of processes by a number of things where you know, this for example, is where a suicide hotline really works or UM.

You know, my high school friends actually had kind of very specific kind of setups for these kinds of things where you can call somebody anytime, any day, right, and it becomes it's very easy, and in fact, you can convince yourself I'll call them and then I'll go do whatever I'm want to do, right, knowing full well that that call is going to cut off the UM the action plan that you don't want to do but do

want to do, right. So I think if we if we know where these vulnerability, these breakdowns, these failure modes are happening in a given individual, we can guide the treatment to that individual to essentially use the other systems to to help it and to help kind of correct for it. Use the term contingency management in the book What Does That Mean? Continguency management is a fascinating treatment for a number of things, including addiction, where basically you're

paying people not to take drugs. And at this point it's not no known why contingency management works. It works surprisingly well. Um, we have been working in my lab right now and a theory and we're kind of working through what we would call the theoretical neuroscience of this. That what contingency management does is um shifts you into this deliberative mode because it forces you into a choice of not should I take drugs or not, but should

I take drugs or not? Or get this this prize or this money or this even this you know, good job from my you know, from the treatment person, from the person you know providing a treatment. And I want to emphasize this is still, you know, we don't know why continuency management works. We're still we're working on this. This is the current theory that we're working on. But that's a very if we're right about why it works. That's a very interesting example where providing these very small

rewards can allow somebody to actually reject very expensive things. Certainly, you say it could be that it switches you into

the deliberative mode. What I think is interesting is that I think for a lot of addicts or alcoholics, there's a lot of deliberation going on, but it's between good and bad, and what what you're positing there is between um every reason not to do it is always framed as a negative, and what you're sort of doing is changing it and framing the reason, uh, not to do it is for a positive reason, or you're you're substituting some other reward in there, And I just think that's

you're you're right. It's interesting to see why that would work the way it does. It's also much more concrete. So one of the things that we've seen in you know, one of the things about this is each of these systems has its own you know, mechanism, and the deliberative mechanism entails imagining the actual future, and that means that the more concrete that future is, the easier it is to imagine. And in fact, you can make people more likely to pick a future by making that future more

concrete to them saying, imagine this specific example. So one possibility is that part of what contingency management is doing is making the don't be an addict, that don't take drugs future into a more concrete future, because a lot of the take drugs are not situation is well, I know exactly what that drug is going to feel like, but not doing it. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna water around the house, I'm gonna you know, by finding this alternative concrete things, in some sense mentally grab

ahold of, it becomes easier to pick that choice. Yeah, exactly, because those consequences, because if you're if you're approaching it from a consequence perspective, I'm not going to do this because of potential future consequences. The further off those consequences are the far harder it gets, um at least in

my experience, to connect those two things together. Right, And and I think it's important to think about in terms of also it's very abstract that that not consequence, Right, When that not consequence becomes less abstract and more concrete, of you know, my wife's really going to leave me? Now, that's when people go for treatment. It's those kind of those moments when those things the alternative becomes so concrete that they have to they kind of it. It helps

force them to respond. Do you have any data on whether contingency management continues to work over time? Because the other classic addiction problem, right is, while you know, my feet are on the fire, I do, I go get treatment, I get better, and then as time goes on, the remembrance of what that pain was, like, the membrance of the trouble fades, and it's easy to drift back into that previous circumstance. We do not have that data. I believe that data exists, and I don't really I'm not

qualified at this point to state what it would be. Um. But of course it's certainly possible to continue doing things like continuity management, you know, and continue to provide rewards for such things, um, you know, and and actually the cost of those rewards is much much cheaper than the cost of the addiction to society. Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. I'm not um, as I should point out, I'm a I'm a PhD, not in empty and I don't actually

do clinical practice. Um. My main research is in the laboratory, and I don't know what the current status is on continuity management, specific success long term. Well, I think we are near the end of our time. But I guess I would just ask you, is there any one thing that you would you know, if we wanted to give to the listeners one thing that could help them make better decisions in their life. Is there anything you could boil it down to a point or two that would

be easy to take away? Wow? Um, not to put you on the spot with anything difficult. I guess I haven't really thought of it that way, but I think that you could, you know, if I were to try

to boil it down to kind of one point. It's too to realize that all of these systems are you, right, and that the fact that there are there is, you know, an angry wolf and a kind wolf inside of you, and that the things you have practiced long term that have made you who you are, those are all part of what makes a person a person, and it does not diminish them in any sense to say that those

are also part of the person you know. In some sense, I think that the recognition of all of these systems and trying not to just say, oh, I'm this thin shell of deliberation or this thin shell of linguistic explanations sitting on top of everything else. I think that that you have to kind of accept the whole and be the whole person that that would be if I could, I would say that would be closest to a single point that I could try to make. As you say

in the book The Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. Yes, are some of those systems more a default for some of us than others, that we rely on them more or less? Are they really situationally called upon? I'm sure that they are certainly more for some people than others. Some people are certainly going to be more deliberative or more you know, Pavlovian or better at you know, learning procedural systems. I mean, this is personality. We all have personalities,

but I think we also all have these systems. It's not that you know, there is you know, person A is deliberative and person B is procedural. It's that is an A tends to use the deliberative system a little more when they're in a conflict situation. Right. Well, David, thanks so much for taking the time. It was a it's a fascinating book. And as you said, the whole the whole field right now of decision making theory is just there's so many different aspects of it that are

really interesting. Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. Okay, take care, Thank you bye. All right. You can learn more about David Reddish and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Reddish. That's r. E. D I. S H.