April 8, 2025 • 36 mins
Amid the many competing priorities of our busy lives, it can feel difficult to make the right decisions―ones that feel aligned with the things we care about. Change can feel almost impossible. In the new audiobook, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change, award-winning researcher Emily Falk reveals how we can transform our relationship with the daily choices that define our lives by thinking like a neuroscientist about what matters most to us.
Falk shows how we can work more strategically with our brains to make more fulfilling choices. Whether deciding on lunch or a career, changing our routines or other people’s minds, we learn how changing what we think about can change what we think, connecting with our core values can make us less defensive, and broadening our curiosity about different perspectives can seed innovation.
Written for anyone who has ever exasperatedly asked themselves “Why am I doing this?!”, What We Value is a groundbreaking guide to finding new possibilities in our choices—and the lives we ultimately make with them.
Learn more about What We Value at pushkin.fm/audiobooks, Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey everybody, I'm Emily Falk and I'm in your feed
today to bring you an excerpt from my audiobook What
We Value. In this book, I'll teach you how the
brain makes decisions, and we'll explore the hidden calculations that
can lead to more purposeful, fulfilling choices. We're constantly pulled
in different directions, from making decisions about family, to work
(00:39):
and our health.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
But by better understanding.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Why we do what we do, we can make decisions
that actually align with what we care about most, whether
we want to embrace new activities or become more effective
leaders in our communities. I'm excited to share my findings
with you. If you enjoy this excerpt, find What We
Value at Pushkin, dot FM, Slash Audiobooks, or wherever you
(01:03):
get your audiobooks.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Part one, Choice, Chapter one, The Value Calculation. Jenny Radcliffe
is known online as the people Hacker. There are many
ways she describes her job a burglar for hire, a
professional con artist, a social engineer, but officially, she's a
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penetration tester, a security consultant whom companies hire to break
into their buildings and computer systems to help identify weaknesses
in their security infrastructure. Although Jenny sometimes uses physical force,
lock picks, or computer code, her main tools come from psychology.
She can read a person or a situation and predict
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how someone or a group of people will respond to
her depending on what she does. Then she can create
a situation that moves her toward particular goals and outcomes.
This is just what she did when she was hired
to break into a bank in Germany. Her mission was
to enter the bank during business hours, get past security,
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and locate a particular office where she was to plug
a USB drive the company had given her into a computer.
A program preloaded on the drive would then install itself
on the computer, letting the company know that Jenny had
successfully penetrated their security. The morning of the big job,
Jenny ready to costume in props. She wrapped her hand
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and wrist in a bandage, figuring that people might be
more likely to hold doors open for her if she
appeared to be injured. She brought a big file box
full of papers to occupy her hands, further increasing the
odds that people might hold doors for her. Thus prepared,
she went into the bank, walked into the grand lobby
furnished with leather sofas and approached huge doors blocking access
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to the employee's only portion of the bank. Those doors
presented Jenny's first of many obstacles. They were operated by
fingerprint scanners, and of course, Jenny's fingerprint wasn't in the
bank system. She wasn't an employee. She was pretending to
be one. But she walked over to the fingerprint scanner
and put her finger on the pad. Anyway, it beaped
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no luck. She hadn't expected the censors to let her in,
but as a penetration tester performing a security audit, it
was still part of her job to check. At this point,
Jenny had choices. She could ask the security guard on
duty in the lobby to let her in, but what
incentive would he have to do that. It was his
job to keep strangers out. So instead she did the
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obvious thing. She swore really, really loudly. Just as Jenny
had planned, the security guard came over to see what
was happening. You don't have to work on the lock,
Jenny leader explained, work on the person behind the security.
It doesn't matter what they put in place. If someone's
got access, then I can access them. And then were
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down to me versus the person. When the guard approached,
Jenny said, impatiently, this isn't working. It was working yesterday.
The secure part guards suggested she tried the fingerprint censor again.
She made a big show of being annoyed, cursing once
more and awkwardly balancing her big box of papers on
her bandaged hand. She tried again. The machine beeped again.
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Maybe she wasn't pressing hard enough, the guard ventured. She
grudgingly placed her finger on the sensor again, at which
point the guard took her hand and tried to help
her press her finger onto the machine. Jenny yelped in
apparent pain and swore loudly. Once again. She made a
point of dropping the filebox, which scattered papers everywhere, and
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made a big show of trying to pick them up,
all while swearing away. Now she had drawn attention to herself.
People in the lobby were looking, for God's sake. Go in,
the guard said, and beeped her through the doors. Thank you, Dunkashane,
Jenny replied, and she was on her way down the
hallway to the designated office, where she inserted the USB
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key she had been given. What happened here? Making a
big commotion like Jenny did might not work for every
person in every situation. For one thing, some people might
be more influenced by being buttered up or feeling like
they're doing someone a favor. For another, the same actions
can be interpreted as more or less threatening depending on
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the characteristics of the person doing them in the environment therein.
But in this case, Jenny felt confident that causing a
scene would help her break into the bank because she
knew that in Germany people generally feel highly embarrassed by
a scene, and based on her gender and the way
she looks, she wasn't likely to be perceived as a
physical threat or a computer hacker. Under these conditions, making
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the commotion the most prominent thing in the guard's mind
would tip the scales of his decision making. She figured
that the guard would perceive her as low risk and
would rather buzz her in than deal with the discomfort
and disturbance of a spectacle, and she was right. Maybe
you feel tempted to harshly judge the guard for letting
Jenny in. The bank's rules no doubt emphasized that he
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should not let strangers through the door. If Jenny had
been a malicious hacker. The USB drive she plugged in
could have uploaded a computer virus that stole customer's personal
information in life savings, or taken down important parts of
the bank's infrastructure. But the truth is that many of
us would do the same thing in that situation. We
want to see ourselves as helpful, kind people, and much
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of the time other people aren't trying to deceive us.
If Jenny had been an injured employee simply trying to
get into her office to do her job, the guard's
actions would have been helpful to the bank, not harmful,
for better or worse. Jenny's understanding of these decisions making mechanics,
the sometimes unconscious, near instant calculus we perform when choosing
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between options and how they can be influenced, enabled her
to break into the bank. Recent advances in neuroscience allow
us to understand more about the underlying systems in the
brain that allowed her to do this and that might
allow others to resist, including one that scientists call the
value system. As we begin to explore the value system,
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which brings together many different types of information to guide
our decisions, it may be helpful to imagine the thought
process of the security guard when he was confronted with Jenny.
His brain's value system would compute the value of different
possible choices, allow the swearing woman to continue making a
scene or buzz her in, select the one with the
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highest value, buzz Jenny in, and then track how rewarding
the choice is. Now the scene is quiet, and I
feel good that I helped an injured person. Much of
the time, this value calculation happens quickly and seamlessly. Importantly,
as Jenny understood so well, its outcome depends on what
our brains pay attention to in the moment. In that
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split second, The value calculation can be shaped by any
number of factors, our own goals, how we feel, our identities,
what we think others will think and feel, other people's actions,
cultural norms and expectations, are social status, and much more.
Jenny used her implicit understanding of the value calculation to
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gain access to the bank, as she had been hired
to do.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Alert to this vulnerability, the bank, in turn, might take
steps to ensure a different outcome to guard's value calculations
in similar situations in the future. Making the guards aware
of how Jenny broke in could empower them to exert
more agency over their decision making in such a moment
and resist future attempts to hijack it. In that way,
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where the bank might provide more opportunities for security guards
to get to know the other bank employees so that
it would be clear when a new employee joined, as
well as who was a stranger. Of course, to think
of all these options requires thinking along a number of
different dimensions, checking in with the bank's bigger picture goals,
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the security guard's goals, and where there might be room
for greater possibility in the overlap. So what options or
combinations of options would make it more likely that the
security guard chooses differently next time. How might we become
more aware of when our value calculations are being shaped
by people who don't have our best interests at heart.
(09:25):
To figure this out, it's helpful to know what's going
on in our brains when we're confronted with choices kool
aid or peppermint tea. One remarkable power of the value
system is that it allows our brains to take complicated, messy,
real world decisions and boil them down into comparable quantities.
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Thus simplified, our brains are able to choose between options,
often almost instantaneously, and with a fair amount of internal consistency.
I find it useful to think of the value calculation
as a hidden game of would you rather? You're probably
familiar with this common icebreaker, in which one player offers
two ideally silly choices and other players say which they
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would prefer. Would you rather have a cat's tongue or
roller skates for hands? Would you rather be able to
speak every language or have the most beautiful singing voice
on earth? Would you rather live alone on a desert
island with all the movies and books ever made, or
with one other person you choose but no media. When
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you think about it, it is borderline magical that you
can answer would you rather questions comparing alternatives that differ
in so many ways from low stake situations like playing
the game? Would you rather at a party? To the
decisions that determine our actual behaviors each day. Our value
systems help guide us to our choices. But how does
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the brain do this? For a long time, no one
knew the answer. Did the brain have different systems that
each monitored different dimensions of a choice? How much sugar
or salt is in each food we're choosing between how
hot or cold is each food, how green is each food?
Or were there different brain systems that would handle choices
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in different domains, a brain system that decides what kind
of foods we want to eat, a different brain system
that keeps track of how much fun each of our
potential dinner companions is, and a third that handles the
financial decision about whether we can afford to eat out
the foundations of how we currently think about the neural
underpinnings of this kind of decision making were laid in
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the nineteen fifties by researchers who mapped a set of
brain regions that tracked simpler types of rewards and that
guided animals behavior to maximize those rewards, even if choosing
the reward was objectively bad for the animal's well being
in the longer term. James Olds and Peter Milner, scientists
at McGill University in Canada, discovered that when given the chance,
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rats repeatedly pressed a lever that triggered electrodes that stimulated
particular parts of their tiny rat brains that made them
feel good. In other words, the rats found it rewards
to stimulate these parts of their brains, and scientists at
the time began to think of the regions being stimulated
as the reward system. It turned out that stimulating this
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reward system had powerful consequences for the rats behavior. For example,
when rats were given the chance to press a lever
that stimulated these reward regions, they would even forego food
they needed to stay alive. And it wasn't just rats.
Scientists soon found parallel reward systems in rhesus monkeys and
eventually came to learn that all mammals had similar infrastructure
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in their brains across species. When scientists stimulated neurons, the
cells that transmit messages through the nervous system, deep in
the brain in a region called the straatum and in
certain regions in the front of the brain frontal cortex,
the animals seemed to experience reward, as evinced by their
tendency to seek out the stimulus over and over. Like humans.
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Some animals also displayed facial expression or made sounds showing
their pleasure. But although it was clear early on that
stimulating specific reward regions caused animals to want things, it
took several decades for scientists to understand how this translated
into more complex decision making in humans. Why would a
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system that tracks how much food you want or how
much you want to press a lever have anything to
do with whom you want to be president or which
movie you want to see? Could a single brain system
really handle comparing choices that take place at various points
in time now versus later, concrete rewards like which snack
to eat, and abstract questions about society and morality. A
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series of important insights about how brain systems make more
complicated calculations about the relative values of a wider range
of goods and ideas came in the mid two thousands,
one of them through offering kool aid to monkeys. Camillo
Padua Sciopa and John Hasad were researchers at Harvard Meadow
School studying decision making and economic choices when they wondered
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whether the reward system discovered in rats and other animals
could also help monkeys make somewhat more complicated decisions, and
if so, how, On the one hand, they reasoned, it
was possible that regions of the reward system might respond
to objective properties of different potential rewards, like the amount
of sugar in a juice. This might be the case
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if a particular nutrient like sugar or fiber had been
important to the survival of the species in the evolutionary past,
and a physical feature of the food like color or firmness,
was a good indicator of how much this nutrient was
present in it. If so, there should be a tight
correspondence between certain biological or chemical properties of foods and
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the response of the reward system. On the other hand,
what if the reward system could take a wider range
of things into account to make more subjective calculations. Did
it explain why a monkey might have different food preferences
at different times, or even predict what a monkey was
in the mood for. In their experiments, Camillo and John
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would present a monkey, let's call him Gizmo, with a
series of choices while recording the activity from neurons in
his brain. Would Gizmo like one drop of lemon cool
aid or two drops of peppermint tea, five drops of
milk or one drop of grape juice. Gizmo would look
left or right to indicate his decision. After many of
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these choices, the researchers could calculate how much value Gizmo
assigned to each drink relative to the other drinks what
neuroscientists now call its subjective value. We say the value
is subjective because it turned out not to be fixed
to some objective quality like the density or overall amount
of sugar present in each liquid, the exact temperature, the
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quantity of liquid, and so on. The scientists found that
Gizmo and other monkeys generally preferred to have more to
drink if possible, but like humans, they liked some drinks,
specifically lemon, kool aid and grape juice, more than others.
Depending on the offer, the monkeys would sometimes choose a
smaller amount of their preferred drink over more of one
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they liked less. By offering the monkeys the drinks in
different ratios, Camillo and John could arrive at a mathematical
description of the monkey's preferences in each session. For example,
if Gizmo was really in the mood for grape juice
in one session and chose one drop of it over
up to three drops of water, then Camillo and John
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could say that one drop of grape juice was worth
three points, while one drop of water was worth one.
While hanging out with the monkeys. Camillo and John also
found that subjective value was influenced by the context within
which the decisions were made. The monkey's drink preferences, that is,
the relative value of one drink to another, varied from
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day to day, even for the same monkey. Imagine that
you yourself are at someone's house and they offer you
a cup of coffee or a cup of lemon ginger
herbal tea. Your decision depends partly on stable preferences you have.
You typically like coffee more than lemon ginger tea, but
also on the situation it's late and you worry that
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caffeine might make it harder to sleep. Similarly, on Tuesday,
Gizmo might prefer grape juice to water three to one,
but on Friday he might feel less strongly because he's
already had plenty of fruit and may prefer the grape
juice to the water only two to one. This is
what subjective value means. Different aspects of a situation change
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how much something is worth to someone at a given
time in a given situation. When Camillo and John looked
at the data from the monkey's brains, they discovered that
neurons in the front and center. Specifically, a region called
the orbit offrontal cortex fired in response to each monkey's
overall subjective preferences for the juices. The activity in these
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neurons correlated with the overall ratios Camillo and John had
calculated based on the monkey's decisions. When the monkey preferred
one option three times as much, these neurons fired correspondingly.
More interestingly, the firing didn't seem to depend on objective
aspects of the choice, such as the specific ingredients of
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the drink. If, as you might think, there were neurons
tracking the amount of sugar, which side of the screen
showed the offer if neurons here kept track of what
motion the monkey needed to perform to get the juice,
or how many drops of juice were offered in total,
if more is always better. Instead, the neurons tracked the
overall subjective value, and this subjective value was tied to
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the choices the monkeys made. Just by seeing what was
happening within Gizmo's orbitofrontal cortex when he was shown the
different options, Camillo and John could predict which choice Gizmo
might make with re markable accuracy. In other words, the
monkey's brains were computing subjective values for each option on
a common scale that allowed them to make decisions and
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compare apple juice and orange juice. But what about humans.
Around the same time that studies on monkeys revealed that
their brains responded to subjective rather than objective value, scientists
began to find similar responses in the human brain. In
the span of a decade or so in the early
two thousands, scientists ran hundreds of experiments mapping what happened
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in people's brains when they made choices based on these
subjective preferences. In one early study, the neuroscientist Hilca Plasmin
and her colleagues at Caltech found that when they measured
how much human volunteers were willing to pay to eat
different snacks, they showed similar activity in brain regions analogous
to those the monkeys used to choose between lemonade and
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grape juice. The team showed pictures of salty and sweet
junk foods like chips and candy bars to hungry humans
while scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI.
This type of brain scan let scientists see when different
parts of the brain are active, and then connect this
activation to different psychological processes and behaviors. The volunteers in
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Hilka study were told they had a specific budget and
were asked how much they would be willing to pay
for different food items shown as images on a screen
in the fMRI scanner. As in the case of Camillo
and John's monkeys, brain activity increased the most within a
similar region in humans, the venturemedial prefrontal cortex for the
items they rated as most valuable. In other words, there
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was more activity in response to snacks they were willing
to pay three dollars for than snacks they were willing
to pay one dollar for or didn't want to buy
at all. People's brains kept track of the subjective value
to them personally of different foods and chose accordingly. This
was a breakthrough, but in daily life we often have
to choose between options that are harder to compare than
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two kinds of snack foods. Could the same brain regions
that decide if you'd rather drink coffee or tea also
compare things that are rewarding in very different ways. For example,
would you rather drink grape juice or go see a movie?
Or did such choices go beyond their role in decision making.
To probe this question, a team of scientists at Caltech
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and Trinity College Dublin designed an experiment that was, in essence,
a variant of the would you rather dilemma. The research
team gave volunteers in an fMRI scanner a twelve dollars
budget that they could use to bid on different types
of goods, from sweet and salty snacks to DVDs, Caltech memorabilia,
and monetary gambles. They found that an overlapping area of
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the venturemedial prefrontal cortex tracked how much people were willing
to pay not only for different foods, but also for
products like college memorabilia and DVDs. Around the same time,
other groups of scientists were also finding that activity in
the human medial prefrontal cortex and other regions like the
ventral stratum tracked people's willingness to pay different prices for
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a range of consumer goods. These findings suggested that a
common system was keeping track of the value of a
wide range of different kinds of choices. As this body
of research grew, this group of brain regions, including the
ventral stratum and venturemedial prefrontal cortex came to be known
as the value system. By twenty ten, activity in the
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value system had been shown to track not only people's
decisions about how much money they would pay for different goods,
but other kinds of financial choices as well. For example,
would you prefer to take one hundred percent chance of
winning ten dollars or a fifty percent chance of winning
twenty dollars. Would you rather have ten dollars now or
twenty dollars in six months? All of these types of
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choices seemed to work through a similar mechanism in which
the value system identified and assessed the subjective valuevalue of
different choices, compared them, and then acted. By twenty eleven,
researchers could even predict, based on activity observed in volunteers
value systems while they were looking at different goods what
they would later choose, even when they weren't asked to
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make any choices during the initial scan. In other words,
the value system seems to track the subjective value of
different things regardless of whether the person is consciously trying
to make a decision about them. When we're in line
at the grocery store, our value systems are weighing the
value of the candy bars by the register and absorbing
information from the news headlines and magazine covers. When we're
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scrolling through social media passively consuming ads, our value systems
are still registering the inputs, even if we aren't actively
paying attention to them. A decade later, it is now
more widely accepted that our brains can make calculations using
a common value scale that allows us to compare things
that aren't inherently comparable. Could probably easily decide if you'd
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rather snuggle a puppy or have five dollars right now.
This is because your value system converts each option onto
a common scale and makes the comparison. Likewise, when Jenny
yelled for the security guard, he quickly made the decision
to try to help her use the fingerprint scanner rather
than demand ID, and eventually to let her through the doors,
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rather than calling for backup, asking her to leave, or
asking her on a date. Predicting and learning, it's tempting
to think there are good choices and bad choices, but
the truth is that these are moving targets, and the
value system is dynamic, constantly weighing competing interests, and the context.
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This means that the choices we make depend on what
options we imagine we are choosing between and what dimensions
of the choice we focus on. If your kid has
never met a male nurse, it might constrain the career
options he imagines choosing to suit his empathic personality. Moreover,
the subjective value we assigned to a given choice option
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can change depending on a variety of factors related to
our past experiences, our current situation, and our future goals.
If your kid believes you'd like him to get a
job that helps a lot of people, that dimension might
weigh heavily as he considers career options. Likewise, if his
crush gushes about Austin, Texas, that might cause your son
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to give weight to the geographical flexibility of different job options.
This is one neural foundation of what social psychologists call
the power of the situation. Our decisions depend on our
current context, which gives certain inputs to the calculation more weight.
Let's say you're deciding whether you'd rather eat a salad
or chocolate cake. If your brain only followed objective rules,
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you might only care about how much the food filled
your stomach, or how many calories it offered, which could
translate directly to keeping you alive in earlier moments of
human evolution. But that's not how it works, as you
have no doubt experienced. When you decide what to eat,
you might focus on any number of things. How does
the food taste, how will you feel after eating it?
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What is your date eating? Did you just get a
bad doctor's report? Do you have a great metabolism? Is
it someone's birthday? How much does each cost? Did you
just run a marathon? Are you in a bad mood.
Your brain does this quickly and may not even take
into consideration all of these dimensions, limiting what it weighs
in any given choice. Based on what factors it does weigh,
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your brain can compute subjective values for salad and cake
on a common scale, then choose the higher value alternative.
Once you've made the choice, your value system transmits it
to the parts of your brain that help you act
on the decision, like reaching out and grabbing your chosen
food and eating it. Importantly, your brain's value system then
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keeps track of how good the decision's outcome was relative
to what you thought would happen. In other words, how
accurately it guessed how rewarding the choice would be at tracks.
Not only your prediction that cake looks delicious, I remember
how much fun I had at birthday parties as a kid,
but the prediction error, or the discrepancy between your prediction
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and the actual outcome. If the choice ends up being
more rewarding than you expected, that cake was delicious, totally
worth it, your brain generates what neuroscientists call a positive
prediction error, seen as an increase in activation within the
value system after the choice. Conversely, if the choice ends
up being worse than you thought that cake made me
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feel gross, your brain generates a negative prediction error, seen
as a decrease in activation within the value system after
the choice. These prediction errors help you learn for the future,
updating how your brain makes the value calculation over time.
In some there are three basic stages to what neuroscientists
call value based decision making. First, our brains determine what
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options they are choosing between, assign a subjective value to
each one, and identify the option with the highest value.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
In that moment.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
This means that from the start, our choices are shaped
by what we consider the possible options in the first place. Next,
our brains move forward with what is perceived as the
highest value choice, which may or may not be the
best choice in the context of our larger goals or
longer term well being. This means that there isn't one
single right answer, and what our brains perceive to be
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the highest value option right now might change if considered
from other perspectives, for example, when thinking about career goals
versus wanting to be a good friend. Finally, when we've
made the choice, our brains track how rewarding it turns
out to be so they can update how they make
the calculation next time. This means that we often overweight
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the outcomes of our choices rather than improving our process.
This highlight it's at least three places where we can intervene.
We can imagine more or different possibilities, consider the existing
possibilities from different angles, or pay attention to different aspects
of the outcome. We can think again of our security guard.
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If as the guard, you buzz in a bumbling person
making a scene and it yields a better social reward
than you had expected, the person gives you a big,
grateful smile and tells you how much she appreciates you.
Your brain will generate a positive prediction error. That data
will be stored, and in the future you will be
more likely to let in the next bumbling stranger. But
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if something bad happens and the outcome is worse than
you anticipated, the bumbling person turns out to be a
security tester, and your colleagues are annoyed with you because
now you all have to sit through extra training sessions.
Your value system stores that too. Next time, you might
think twice before letting in a stranger. But of course,
no one scanned the brain of the security guard. Most
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of the studies we've explored so far have taken place
in highly controlled lab settings, So what actually happens outside
the lab in the real world. Can we link activity
in the value system to what people do in their
day to day lives outside the brain scanner? A great
day for science. I was a budding neuroscientist in the
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early two thousands when our understanding of the value system
first started to take shape, and I was interested in
whether brain imaging could give us insight into health decision making.
I wanted to help people make choices that would help
them live healthier, happier lives. But I also knew that
these choices could be very difficult to make. It's hard
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to change, and even when we are motivated to change,
we don't always take time to figure out why we
do what we do in the first place, or know why.
Some ways of thinking are helpful in achieving our goals
and some aren't. I was thinking about how to make
better health coaching and messaging campaigns. I was also thinking
about how we might talk with our family members and friends, roommates,
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and colleagues to help motivate them to make healthy changes,
and even how we might talk to ourselves to make
decisions that are more in line with our goals. I
wondered if brain imaging could give us a new window
into this decision making. Maybe looking at brain responses to
health campaigns and health coaching messages could help us understand
what made people change and what would make it easier
(31:33):
to work with rather than against our desires. If that
were true, maybe it could help us design and select
better messaging. I decided to apply to graduate school to
work with Matt Lieberman at UCLA. Matt's lab was full
of scientists studying how people understood themselves and others and
how they made important decisions. Along with a group of
(31:56):
other young faculty, Matt had recently ignited a new field
of study that combined social psychology with cognitive neuroscience. Whereas
neuroscientists before had focused on topics ranging from vision and
memory to reward and motor actions, many fewer had delved
into topics that were more at the core of being human,
(32:17):
like where our sense of self comes from, how we
understand what others think and feel, and how imagination works.
At the time, it felt like a long shot to
connect what happened in a neuroimaging lab to real world
behavior changes outside the lab, But it also felt fundamental.
What good was all this research if it couldn't help
(32:37):
us in real life. Luckily, during the years I was
in graduate school, we did start to see a connection,
a pattern indicating that activity in the brain's value system
could reveal who is more likely to change their behaviors
in response to messaging and what kinds of messages were
most likely to elicit this kind of activity. The first
(32:57):
work we did in this space focused on sunscreen use
in Los Angeles, where to sunny almost every day. I
had a daily reminder that despite how great the sun
feels warming your skin. Sunburns and other invisible damage from
UV rays can cause skin cancer. Matt and I designed
an fMRI experiment scanning the brains of volunteers while exposing
(33:19):
them to messages about the importance of wearing sunscreen every day.
The finding was simple. The more activation we saw in
a person's value system, specifically the venturemedial prefrontal cortex, in
response to the messages, the more likely they were to
increase their sunscreen use in the next week. It suggested
that the value system helps guide not only simple choices
(33:42):
that people make in the lab, but also real world,
consequential behavior change outside the lab. When I saw the data,
I started jumping up and down on the lab couch.
My friend and then officemate, Sylvia, claims that I screamed,
this is a great day for science. I deny it.
While I don't know if non scientists would be this
(34:04):
excited about a data plot, it felt like a big moment.
And although this initial study relied on what people told
us about their sunscreen use, later studies in the lab
I now run at the University of Pennsylvania and others
have shown similar results. In people being coached on other
health habits where behavior change has been measured more objectively.
(34:24):
When sedentary adults were exposed to messages encouraging them to
get more exercise, the activity in their value system corresponded
with how much exercise they got, later measured objectively using
wrist worn activity trackers. Similarly, smokers whose value systems responded
more strongly to messages encouraging them to quit smoking were
significantly more likely to reduce their smoking over the following month,
(34:48):
which we confirmed using a device that measures how much
carbon monoxide smokers have in their lungs. In fact, our
ability to predict how much people would reduce their smoking
was twice as good when we included information from both
brain responses and self report surveys as when we included
only information from the surveys. This suggests that there was
(35:12):
useful information that the value system captured that was not
fully captured by surveys alone. Figuring out why this is
the case and how far in the future we can
predict is a current frontier. Another current frontier involves understanding
when and how people make the kind of deliberate decisions
that will mostly focus on in this book, compared with
(35:32):
other kinds of decisions. For example, it is increasingly clear
that a lot of what humans do is guided by
habitual routines, which is not the kind of choice we'll
be discussing. But some of these habits start with deliberate choices,
which is our focus. To illustrate this distinction, let's consider
my walk to work. When I first moved to Philadelphia,
(35:54):
I wanted to walk to work rather than drive or
take the subway, so i'd get outside more. That was
an active choice. I used my phone's map to find
the shortest route, and following my phone's map was also
an active choice. Over time, as I repeated this walking
route over and over, it became a habit, something I
could do and did on autopilot, whereas other options like driving,
(36:18):
taking the trolley, or even walking a different route require
more conscious thought. In other words, when repeated over and over,
what start as goal directed, value based decisions become routine
and get handed over to another brain system that supports
the kind of automatic pilot I was on. This book
(36:38):
explores what happens in the first type of decisions, when
we are more deliberately choosing and setting in motion paths
that may or may not eventually become habits. Find what
we value at Pushkin, dot Fm, Slash Audiobooks, or wherever
you get your audiobooks,
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey everybody, I'm Emily Falk and I'm in your feed
today to bring you an excerpt from my audiobook What
We Value. In this book, I'll teach you how the
brain makes decisions, and we'll explore the hidden calculations that
can lead to more purposeful, fulfilling choices. We're constantly pulled
in different directions, from making decisions about family, to work
(00:39):
and our health.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
But by better understanding.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Why we do what we do, we can make decisions
that actually align with what we care about most, whether
we want to embrace new activities or become more effective
leaders in our communities. I'm excited to share my findings
with you. If you enjoy this excerpt, find What We
Value at Pushkin, dot FM, Slash Audiobooks, or wherever you
(01:03):
get your audiobooks.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Part one, Choice, Chapter one, The Value Calculation. Jenny Radcliffe
is known online as the people Hacker. There are many
ways she describes her job a burglar for hire, a
professional con artist, a social engineer, but officially, she's a
(01:27):
penetration tester, a security consultant whom companies hire to break
into their buildings and computer systems to help identify weaknesses
in their security infrastructure. Although Jenny sometimes uses physical force,
lock picks, or computer code, her main tools come from psychology.
She can read a person or a situation and predict
(01:49):
how someone or a group of people will respond to
her depending on what she does. Then she can create
a situation that moves her toward particular goals and outcomes.
This is just what she did when she was hired
to break into a bank in Germany. Her mission was
to enter the bank during business hours, get past security,
(02:09):
and locate a particular office where she was to plug
a USB drive the company had given her into a computer.
A program preloaded on the drive would then install itself
on the computer, letting the company know that Jenny had
successfully penetrated their security. The morning of the big job,
Jenny ready to costume in props. She wrapped her hand
(02:31):
and wrist in a bandage, figuring that people might be
more likely to hold doors open for her if she
appeared to be injured. She brought a big file box
full of papers to occupy her hands, further increasing the
odds that people might hold doors for her. Thus prepared,
she went into the bank, walked into the grand lobby
furnished with leather sofas and approached huge doors blocking access
(02:54):
to the employee's only portion of the bank. Those doors
presented Jenny's first of many obstacles. They were operated by
fingerprint scanners, and of course, Jenny's fingerprint wasn't in the
bank system. She wasn't an employee. She was pretending to
be one. But she walked over to the fingerprint scanner
and put her finger on the pad. Anyway, it beaped
(03:17):
no luck. She hadn't expected the censors to let her in,
but as a penetration tester performing a security audit, it
was still part of her job to check. At this point,
Jenny had choices. She could ask the security guard on
duty in the lobby to let her in, but what
incentive would he have to do that. It was his
job to keep strangers out. So instead she did the
(03:39):
obvious thing. She swore really, really loudly. Just as Jenny
had planned, the security guard came over to see what
was happening. You don't have to work on the lock,
Jenny leader explained, work on the person behind the security.
It doesn't matter what they put in place. If someone's
got access, then I can access them. And then were
(03:59):
down to me versus the person. When the guard approached,
Jenny said, impatiently, this isn't working. It was working yesterday.
The secure part guards suggested she tried the fingerprint censor again.
She made a big show of being annoyed, cursing once
more and awkwardly balancing her big box of papers on
her bandaged hand. She tried again. The machine beeped again.
(04:23):
Maybe she wasn't pressing hard enough, the guard ventured. She
grudgingly placed her finger on the sensor again, at which
point the guard took her hand and tried to help
her press her finger onto the machine. Jenny yelped in
apparent pain and swore loudly. Once again. She made a
point of dropping the filebox, which scattered papers everywhere, and
(04:44):
made a big show of trying to pick them up,
all while swearing away. Now she had drawn attention to herself.
People in the lobby were looking, for God's sake. Go in,
the guard said, and beeped her through the doors. Thank you, Dunkashane,
Jenny replied, and she was on her way down the
hallway to the designated office, where she inserted the USB
(05:05):
key she had been given. What happened here? Making a
big commotion like Jenny did might not work for every
person in every situation. For one thing, some people might
be more influenced by being buttered up or feeling like
they're doing someone a favor. For another, the same actions
can be interpreted as more or less threatening depending on
(05:25):
the characteristics of the person doing them in the environment therein.
But in this case, Jenny felt confident that causing a
scene would help her break into the bank because she
knew that in Germany people generally feel highly embarrassed by
a scene, and based on her gender and the way
she looks, she wasn't likely to be perceived as a
physical threat or a computer hacker. Under these conditions, making
(05:48):
the commotion the most prominent thing in the guard's mind
would tip the scales of his decision making. She figured
that the guard would perceive her as low risk and
would rather buzz her in than deal with the discomfort
and disturbance of a spectacle, and she was right. Maybe
you feel tempted to harshly judge the guard for letting
Jenny in. The bank's rules no doubt emphasized that he
(06:10):
should not let strangers through the door. If Jenny had
been a malicious hacker. The USB drive she plugged in
could have uploaded a computer virus that stole customer's personal
information in life savings, or taken down important parts of
the bank's infrastructure. But the truth is that many of
us would do the same thing in that situation. We
want to see ourselves as helpful, kind people, and much
(06:34):
of the time other people aren't trying to deceive us.
If Jenny had been an injured employee simply trying to
get into her office to do her job, the guard's
actions would have been helpful to the bank, not harmful,
for better or worse. Jenny's understanding of these decisions making mechanics,
the sometimes unconscious, near instant calculus we perform when choosing
(06:56):
between options and how they can be influenced, enabled her
to break into the bank. Recent advances in neuroscience allow
us to understand more about the underlying systems in the
brain that allowed her to do this and that might
allow others to resist, including one that scientists call the
value system. As we begin to explore the value system,
(07:17):
which brings together many different types of information to guide
our decisions, it may be helpful to imagine the thought
process of the security guard when he was confronted with Jenny.
His brain's value system would compute the value of different
possible choices, allow the swearing woman to continue making a
scene or buzz her in, select the one with the
(07:37):
highest value, buzz Jenny in, and then track how rewarding
the choice is. Now the scene is quiet, and I
feel good that I helped an injured person. Much of
the time, this value calculation happens quickly and seamlessly. Importantly,
as Jenny understood so well, its outcome depends on what
our brains pay attention to in the moment. In that
(07:59):
split second, The value calculation can be shaped by any
number of factors, our own goals, how we feel, our identities,
what we think others will think and feel, other people's actions,
cultural norms and expectations, are social status, and much more.
Jenny used her implicit understanding of the value calculation to
(08:20):
gain access to the bank, as she had been hired
to do.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Now.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Alert to this vulnerability, the bank, in turn, might take
steps to ensure a different outcome to guard's value calculations
in similar situations in the future. Making the guards aware
of how Jenny broke in could empower them to exert
more agency over their decision making in such a moment
and resist future attempts to hijack it. In that way,
(08:45):
where the bank might provide more opportunities for security guards
to get to know the other bank employees so that
it would be clear when a new employee joined, as
well as who was a stranger. Of course, to think
of all these options requires thinking along a number of
different dimensions, checking in with the bank's bigger picture goals,
(09:05):
the security guard's goals, and where there might be room
for greater possibility in the overlap. So what options or
combinations of options would make it more likely that the
security guard chooses differently next time. How might we become
more aware of when our value calculations are being shaped
by people who don't have our best interests at heart.
(09:25):
To figure this out, it's helpful to know what's going
on in our brains when we're confronted with choices kool
aid or peppermint tea. One remarkable power of the value
system is that it allows our brains to take complicated, messy,
real world decisions and boil them down into comparable quantities.
(09:46):
Thus simplified, our brains are able to choose between options,
often almost instantaneously, and with a fair amount of internal consistency.
I find it useful to think of the value calculation
as a hidden game of would you rather? You're probably
familiar with this common icebreaker, in which one player offers
two ideally silly choices and other players say which they
(10:09):
would prefer. Would you rather have a cat's tongue or
roller skates for hands? Would you rather be able to
speak every language or have the most beautiful singing voice
on earth? Would you rather live alone on a desert
island with all the movies and books ever made, or
with one other person you choose but no media. When
(10:31):
you think about it, it is borderline magical that you
can answer would you rather questions comparing alternatives that differ
in so many ways from low stake situations like playing
the game? Would you rather at a party? To the
decisions that determine our actual behaviors each day. Our value
systems help guide us to our choices. But how does
(10:51):
the brain do this? For a long time, no one
knew the answer. Did the brain have different systems that
each monitored different dimensions of a choice? How much sugar
or salt is in each food we're choosing between how
hot or cold is each food, how green is each food?
Or were there different brain systems that would handle choices
(11:12):
in different domains, a brain system that decides what kind
of foods we want to eat, a different brain system
that keeps track of how much fun each of our
potential dinner companions is, and a third that handles the
financial decision about whether we can afford to eat out
the foundations of how we currently think about the neural
underpinnings of this kind of decision making were laid in
(11:33):
the nineteen fifties by researchers who mapped a set of
brain regions that tracked simpler types of rewards and that
guided animals behavior to maximize those rewards, even if choosing
the reward was objectively bad for the animal's well being
in the longer term. James Olds and Peter Milner, scientists
at McGill University in Canada, discovered that when given the chance,
(11:57):
rats repeatedly pressed a lever that triggered electrodes that stimulated
particular parts of their tiny rat brains that made them
feel good. In other words, the rats found it rewards
to stimulate these parts of their brains, and scientists at
the time began to think of the regions being stimulated
as the reward system. It turned out that stimulating this
(12:20):
reward system had powerful consequences for the rats behavior. For example,
when rats were given the chance to press a lever
that stimulated these reward regions, they would even forego food
they needed to stay alive. And it wasn't just rats.
Scientists soon found parallel reward systems in rhesus monkeys and
eventually came to learn that all mammals had similar infrastructure
(12:43):
in their brains across species. When scientists stimulated neurons, the
cells that transmit messages through the nervous system, deep in
the brain in a region called the straatum and in
certain regions in the front of the brain frontal cortex,
the animals seemed to experience reward, as evinced by their
tendency to seek out the stimulus over and over. Like humans.
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Some animals also displayed facial expression or made sounds showing
their pleasure. But although it was clear early on that
stimulating specific reward regions caused animals to want things, it
took several decades for scientists to understand how this translated
into more complex decision making in humans. Why would a
(13:26):
system that tracks how much food you want or how
much you want to press a lever have anything to
do with whom you want to be president or which
movie you want to see? Could a single brain system
really handle comparing choices that take place at various points
in time now versus later, concrete rewards like which snack
to eat, and abstract questions about society and morality. A
(13:50):
series of important insights about how brain systems make more
complicated calculations about the relative values of a wider range
of goods and ideas came in the mid two thousands,
one of them through offering kool aid to monkeys. Camillo
Padua Sciopa and John Hasad were researchers at Harvard Meadow
School studying decision making and economic choices when they wondered
(14:14):
whether the reward system discovered in rats and other animals
could also help monkeys make somewhat more complicated decisions, and
if so, how, On the one hand, they reasoned, it
was possible that regions of the reward system might respond
to objective properties of different potential rewards, like the amount
of sugar in a juice. This might be the case
(14:36):
if a particular nutrient like sugar or fiber had been
important to the survival of the species in the evolutionary past,
and a physical feature of the food like color or firmness,
was a good indicator of how much this nutrient was
present in it. If so, there should be a tight
correspondence between certain biological or chemical properties of foods and
(14:57):
the response of the reward system. On the other hand,
what if the reward system could take a wider range
of things into account to make more subjective calculations. Did
it explain why a monkey might have different food preferences
at different times, or even predict what a monkey was
in the mood for. In their experiments, Camillo and John
(15:18):
would present a monkey, let's call him Gizmo, with a
series of choices while recording the activity from neurons in
his brain. Would Gizmo like one drop of lemon cool
aid or two drops of peppermint tea, five drops of
milk or one drop of grape juice. Gizmo would look
left or right to indicate his decision. After many of
(15:39):
these choices, the researchers could calculate how much value Gizmo
assigned to each drink relative to the other drinks what
neuroscientists now call its subjective value. We say the value
is subjective because it turned out not to be fixed
to some objective quality like the density or overall amount
of sugar present in each liquid, the exact temperature, the
(16:01):
quantity of liquid, and so on. The scientists found that
Gizmo and other monkeys generally preferred to have more to
drink if possible, but like humans, they liked some drinks,
specifically lemon, kool aid and grape juice, more than others.
Depending on the offer, the monkeys would sometimes choose a
smaller amount of their preferred drink over more of one
(16:24):
they liked less. By offering the monkeys the drinks in
different ratios, Camillo and John could arrive at a mathematical
description of the monkey's preferences in each session. For example,
if Gizmo was really in the mood for grape juice
in one session and chose one drop of it over
up to three drops of water, then Camillo and John
(16:47):
could say that one drop of grape juice was worth
three points, while one drop of water was worth one.
While hanging out with the monkeys. Camillo and John also
found that subjective value was influenced by the context within
which the decisions were made. The monkey's drink preferences, that is,
the relative value of one drink to another, varied from
(17:09):
day to day, even for the same monkey. Imagine that
you yourself are at someone's house and they offer you
a cup of coffee or a cup of lemon ginger
herbal tea. Your decision depends partly on stable preferences you have.
You typically like coffee more than lemon ginger tea, but
also on the situation it's late and you worry that
(17:30):
caffeine might make it harder to sleep. Similarly, on Tuesday,
Gizmo might prefer grape juice to water three to one,
but on Friday he might feel less strongly because he's
already had plenty of fruit and may prefer the grape
juice to the water only two to one. This is
what subjective value means. Different aspects of a situation change
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how much something is worth to someone at a given
time in a given situation. When Camillo and John looked
at the data from the monkey's brains, they discovered that
neurons in the front and center. Specifically, a region called
the orbit offrontal cortex fired in response to each monkey's
overall subjective preferences for the juices. The activity in these
(18:13):
neurons correlated with the overall ratios Camillo and John had
calculated based on the monkey's decisions. When the monkey preferred
one option three times as much, these neurons fired correspondingly.
More interestingly, the firing didn't seem to depend on objective
aspects of the choice, such as the specific ingredients of
(18:33):
the drink. If, as you might think, there were neurons
tracking the amount of sugar, which side of the screen
showed the offer if neurons here kept track of what
motion the monkey needed to perform to get the juice,
or how many drops of juice were offered in total,
if more is always better. Instead, the neurons tracked the
overall subjective value, and this subjective value was tied to
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the choices the monkeys made. Just by seeing what was
happening within Gizmo's orbitofrontal cortex when he was shown the
different options, Camillo and John could predict which choice Gizmo
might make with re markable accuracy. In other words, the
monkey's brains were computing subjective values for each option on
a common scale that allowed them to make decisions and
(19:18):
compare apple juice and orange juice. But what about humans.
Around the same time that studies on monkeys revealed that
their brains responded to subjective rather than objective value, scientists
began to find similar responses in the human brain. In
the span of a decade or so in the early
two thousands, scientists ran hundreds of experiments mapping what happened
(19:41):
in people's brains when they made choices based on these
subjective preferences. In one early study, the neuroscientist Hilca Plasmin
and her colleagues at Caltech found that when they measured
how much human volunteers were willing to pay to eat
different snacks, they showed similar activity in brain regions analogous
to those the monkeys used to choose between lemonade and
(20:02):
grape juice. The team showed pictures of salty and sweet
junk foods like chips and candy bars to hungry humans
while scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI.
This type of brain scan let scientists see when different
parts of the brain are active, and then connect this
activation to different psychological processes and behaviors. The volunteers in
(20:25):
Hilka study were told they had a specific budget and
were asked how much they would be willing to pay
for different food items shown as images on a screen
in the fMRI scanner. As in the case of Camillo
and John's monkeys, brain activity increased the most within a
similar region in humans, the venturemedial prefrontal cortex for the
items they rated as most valuable. In other words, there
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was more activity in response to snacks they were willing
to pay three dollars for than snacks they were willing
to pay one dollar for or didn't want to buy
at all. People's brains kept track of the subjective value
to them personally of different foods and chose accordingly. This
was a breakthrough, but in daily life we often have
to choose between options that are harder to compare than
(21:11):
two kinds of snack foods. Could the same brain regions
that decide if you'd rather drink coffee or tea also
compare things that are rewarding in very different ways. For example,
would you rather drink grape juice or go see a movie?
Or did such choices go beyond their role in decision making.
To probe this question, a team of scientists at Caltech
(21:32):
and Trinity College Dublin designed an experiment that was, in essence,
a variant of the would you rather dilemma. The research
team gave volunteers in an fMRI scanner a twelve dollars
budget that they could use to bid on different types
of goods, from sweet and salty snacks to DVDs, Caltech memorabilia,
and monetary gambles. They found that an overlapping area of
(21:55):
the venturemedial prefrontal cortex tracked how much people were willing
to pay not only for different foods, but also for
products like college memorabilia and DVDs. Around the same time,
other groups of scientists were also finding that activity in
the human medial prefrontal cortex and other regions like the
ventral stratum tracked people's willingness to pay different prices for
(22:18):
a range of consumer goods. These findings suggested that a
common system was keeping track of the value of a
wide range of different kinds of choices. As this body
of research grew, this group of brain regions, including the
ventral stratum and venturemedial prefrontal cortex came to be known
as the value system. By twenty ten, activity in the
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value system had been shown to track not only people's
decisions about how much money they would pay for different goods,
but other kinds of financial choices as well. For example,
would you prefer to take one hundred percent chance of
winning ten dollars or a fifty percent chance of winning
twenty dollars. Would you rather have ten dollars now or
twenty dollars in six months? All of these types of
(23:02):
choices seemed to work through a similar mechanism in which
the value system identified and assessed the subjective valuevalue of
different choices, compared them, and then acted. By twenty eleven,
researchers could even predict, based on activity observed in volunteers
value systems while they were looking at different goods what
they would later choose, even when they weren't asked to
(23:24):
make any choices during the initial scan. In other words,
the value system seems to track the subjective value of
different things regardless of whether the person is consciously trying
to make a decision about them. When we're in line
at the grocery store, our value systems are weighing the
value of the candy bars by the register and absorbing
information from the news headlines and magazine covers. When we're
(23:48):
scrolling through social media passively consuming ads, our value systems
are still registering the inputs, even if we aren't actively
paying attention to them. A decade later, it is now
more widely accepted that our brains can make calculations using
a common value scale that allows us to compare things
that aren't inherently comparable. Could probably easily decide if you'd
(24:11):
rather snuggle a puppy or have five dollars right now.
This is because your value system converts each option onto
a common scale and makes the comparison. Likewise, when Jenny
yelled for the security guard, he quickly made the decision
to try to help her use the fingerprint scanner rather
than demand ID, and eventually to let her through the doors,
(24:31):
rather than calling for backup, asking her to leave, or
asking her on a date. Predicting and learning, it's tempting
to think there are good choices and bad choices, but
the truth is that these are moving targets, and the
value system is dynamic, constantly weighing competing interests, and the context.
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This means that the choices we make depend on what
options we imagine we are choosing between and what dimensions
of the choice we focus on. If your kid has
never met a male nurse, it might constrain the career
options he imagines choosing to suit his empathic personality. Moreover,
the subjective value we assigned to a given choice option
(25:12):
can change depending on a variety of factors related to
our past experiences, our current situation, and our future goals.
If your kid believes you'd like him to get a
job that helps a lot of people, that dimension might
weigh heavily as he considers career options. Likewise, if his
crush gushes about Austin, Texas, that might cause your son
(25:34):
to give weight to the geographical flexibility of different job options.
This is one neural foundation of what social psychologists call
the power of the situation. Our decisions depend on our
current context, which gives certain inputs to the calculation more weight.
Let's say you're deciding whether you'd rather eat a salad
or chocolate cake. If your brain only followed objective rules,
(25:58):
you might only care about how much the food filled
your stomach, or how many calories it offered, which could
translate directly to keeping you alive in earlier moments of
human evolution. But that's not how it works, as you
have no doubt experienced. When you decide what to eat,
you might focus on any number of things. How does
the food taste, how will you feel after eating it?
(26:20):
What is your date eating? Did you just get a
bad doctor's report? Do you have a great metabolism? Is
it someone's birthday? How much does each cost? Did you
just run a marathon? Are you in a bad mood.
Your brain does this quickly and may not even take
into consideration all of these dimensions, limiting what it weighs
in any given choice. Based on what factors it does weigh,
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your brain can compute subjective values for salad and cake
on a common scale, then choose the higher value alternative.
Once you've made the choice, your value system transmits it
to the parts of your brain that help you act
on the decision, like reaching out and grabbing your chosen
food and eating it. Importantly, your brain's value system then
(27:05):
keeps track of how good the decision's outcome was relative
to what you thought would happen. In other words, how
accurately it guessed how rewarding the choice would be at tracks.
Not only your prediction that cake looks delicious, I remember
how much fun I had at birthday parties as a kid,
but the prediction error, or the discrepancy between your prediction
(27:26):
and the actual outcome. If the choice ends up being
more rewarding than you expected, that cake was delicious, totally
worth it, your brain generates what neuroscientists call a positive
prediction error, seen as an increase in activation within the
value system after the choice. Conversely, if the choice ends
up being worse than you thought that cake made me
(27:48):
feel gross, your brain generates a negative prediction error, seen
as a decrease in activation within the value system after
the choice. These prediction errors help you learn for the future,
updating how your brain makes the value calculation over time.
In some there are three basic stages to what neuroscientists
call value based decision making. First, our brains determine what
(28:11):
options they are choosing between, assign a subjective value to
each one, and identify the option with the highest value.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
In that moment.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
This means that from the start, our choices are shaped
by what we consider the possible options in the first place. Next,
our brains move forward with what is perceived as the
highest value choice, which may or may not be the
best choice in the context of our larger goals or
longer term well being. This means that there isn't one
single right answer, and what our brains perceive to be
(28:42):
the highest value option right now might change if considered
from other perspectives, for example, when thinking about career goals
versus wanting to be a good friend. Finally, when we've
made the choice, our brains track how rewarding it turns
out to be so they can update how they make
the calculation next time. This means that we often overweight
(29:04):
the outcomes of our choices rather than improving our process.
This highlight it's at least three places where we can intervene.
We can imagine more or different possibilities, consider the existing
possibilities from different angles, or pay attention to different aspects
of the outcome. We can think again of our security guard.
(29:24):
If as the guard, you buzz in a bumbling person
making a scene and it yields a better social reward
than you had expected, the person gives you a big,
grateful smile and tells you how much she appreciates you.
Your brain will generate a positive prediction error. That data
will be stored, and in the future you will be
more likely to let in the next bumbling stranger. But
(29:46):
if something bad happens and the outcome is worse than
you anticipated, the bumbling person turns out to be a
security tester, and your colleagues are annoyed with you because
now you all have to sit through extra training sessions.
Your value system stores that too. Next time, you might
think twice before letting in a stranger. But of course,
no one scanned the brain of the security guard. Most
(30:07):
of the studies we've explored so far have taken place
in highly controlled lab settings, So what actually happens outside
the lab in the real world. Can we link activity
in the value system to what people do in their
day to day lives outside the brain scanner? A great
day for science. I was a budding neuroscientist in the
(30:28):
early two thousands when our understanding of the value system
first started to take shape, and I was interested in
whether brain imaging could give us insight into health decision making.
I wanted to help people make choices that would help
them live healthier, happier lives. But I also knew that
these choices could be very difficult to make. It's hard
(30:49):
to change, and even when we are motivated to change,
we don't always take time to figure out why we
do what we do in the first place, or know why.
Some ways of thinking are helpful in achieving our goals
and some aren't. I was thinking about how to make
better health coaching and messaging campaigns. I was also thinking
about how we might talk with our family members and friends, roommates,
(31:11):
and colleagues to help motivate them to make healthy changes,
and even how we might talk to ourselves to make
decisions that are more in line with our goals. I
wondered if brain imaging could give us a new window
into this decision making. Maybe looking at brain responses to
health campaigns and health coaching messages could help us understand
what made people change and what would make it easier
(31:33):
to work with rather than against our desires. If that
were true, maybe it could help us design and select
better messaging. I decided to apply to graduate school to
work with Matt Lieberman at UCLA. Matt's lab was full
of scientists studying how people understood themselves and others and
how they made important decisions. Along with a group of
(31:56):
other young faculty, Matt had recently ignited a new field
of study that combined social psychology with cognitive neuroscience. Whereas
neuroscientists before had focused on topics ranging from vision and
memory to reward and motor actions, many fewer had delved
into topics that were more at the core of being human,
(32:17):
like where our sense of self comes from, how we
understand what others think and feel, and how imagination works.
At the time, it felt like a long shot to
connect what happened in a neuroimaging lab to real world
behavior changes outside the lab, But it also felt fundamental.
What good was all this research if it couldn't help
(32:37):
us in real life. Luckily, during the years I was
in graduate school, we did start to see a connection,
a pattern indicating that activity in the brain's value system
could reveal who is more likely to change their behaviors
in response to messaging and what kinds of messages were
most likely to elicit this kind of activity. The first
(32:57):
work we did in this space focused on sunscreen use
in Los Angeles, where to sunny almost every day. I
had a daily reminder that despite how great the sun
feels warming your skin. Sunburns and other invisible damage from
UV rays can cause skin cancer. Matt and I designed
an fMRI experiment scanning the brains of volunteers while exposing
(33:19):
them to messages about the importance of wearing sunscreen every day.
The finding was simple. The more activation we saw in
a person's value system, specifically the venturemedial prefrontal cortex, in
response to the messages, the more likely they were to
increase their sunscreen use in the next week. It suggested
that the value system helps guide not only simple choices
(33:42):
that people make in the lab, but also real world,
consequential behavior change outside the lab. When I saw the data,
I started jumping up and down on the lab couch.
My friend and then officemate, Sylvia, claims that I screamed,
this is a great day for science. I deny it.
While I don't know if non scientists would be this
(34:04):
excited about a data plot, it felt like a big moment.
And although this initial study relied on what people told
us about their sunscreen use, later studies in the lab
I now run at the University of Pennsylvania and others
have shown similar results. In people being coached on other
health habits where behavior change has been measured more objectively.
(34:24):
When sedentary adults were exposed to messages encouraging them to
get more exercise, the activity in their value system corresponded
with how much exercise they got, later measured objectively using
wrist worn activity trackers. Similarly, smokers whose value systems responded
more strongly to messages encouraging them to quit smoking were
significantly more likely to reduce their smoking over the following month,
(34:48):
which we confirmed using a device that measures how much
carbon monoxide smokers have in their lungs. In fact, our
ability to predict how much people would reduce their smoking
was twice as good when we included information from both
brain responses and self report surveys as when we included
only information from the surveys. This suggests that there was
(35:12):
useful information that the value system captured that was not
fully captured by surveys alone. Figuring out why this is
the case and how far in the future we can
predict is a current frontier. Another current frontier involves understanding
when and how people make the kind of deliberate decisions
that will mostly focus on in this book, compared with
(35:32):
other kinds of decisions. For example, it is increasingly clear
that a lot of what humans do is guided by
habitual routines, which is not the kind of choice we'll
be discussing. But some of these habits start with deliberate choices,
which is our focus. To illustrate this distinction, let's consider
my walk to work. When I first moved to Philadelphia,
(35:54):
I wanted to walk to work rather than drive or
take the subway, so i'd get outside more. That was
an active choice. I used my phone's map to find
the shortest route, and following my phone's map was also
an active choice. Over time, as I repeated this walking
route over and over, it became a habit, something I
could do and did on autopilot, whereas other options like driving,
(36:18):
taking the trolley, or even walking a different route require
more conscious thought. In other words, when repeated over and over,
what start as goal directed, value based decisions become routine
and get handed over to another brain system that supports
the kind of automatic pilot I was on. This book
(36:38):
explores what happens in the first type of decisions, when
we are more deliberately choosing and setting in motion paths
that may or may not eventually become habits. Find what
we value at Pushkin, dot Fm, Slash Audiobooks, or wherever
you get your audiobooks,
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