cc  >> So, our evening speaker.  It is really an understatement  to say that Jonah Lehrer is  impressive.  Yes, he is a Rhodes scholar.  He is the author of two  influential books.  A blogger, essayist and editor  at large of the really wonderful  Seed Magazine, all well before  turning 30.  But it is really more than this.  Jonah Lehrer moves effortlessly  between football and soap operas  and George Eliot and Gertrude  Stein and the Yom Kippur War and  dopamine neurons and the  amygdala.  What I found most impressive  about Jonah Lehrer is the way he  is able to make connections  across fields and also across  genres of taste.  He's making public and visible  connections that might leave us  uncomfortable, and the title of  this evening's lecture has both  marshmallows and metacognition  in it, but also William James  and General Hospital might  appear within the same sentence.  And he does so with patience,  with detail and knowledge rather  than just a caricature. 

 "How We Decide"  not only taught me something  about what it was to  tell me about, which is how we  make decisions, but it also  taught me to appreciate football  in a completely different way  and soap operas and taste tests.  Indeed, what I think is most  compelling and important about  Lehrer's work is precisely this  openness to learning from a  range of sources and the ability  to tell stories that lead all of  us who read or hear them to  think anew about what he's  talking about.  In addition to "How We Decide,"  Jonah Lehrer also wrote  "Proust Was a Neuroscientist."  He's a contributor to the New  Yorker, Nature, Washington Post  and many, many, other  newspapers, magazines, etc.  And he's a would-be contributor  to Gourmet Magazine if -- had  not closed it down this week.  So please join me in welcoming  Jonah Lehrer.  (applause)  >> Jonah Lehrer: Thank you,  so much  for that kind introduction.  And thank you to the Center to  the Humanities for having me,  and it's wonderful to be part of  this really incredible book  festival.  I only wish I could have seen  Lorrie Moore last night and I  could stay for Wendell Berry on  Sunday.  It really is a wonderful place,  and I'm just honored to be here.  I'd like to begin by telling you  how I came to write a book on  decision-making, and it's a  slightly embarrassing  confession. 

 Sometimes you get the idea for  books in a single moment and  that's what happened with  How We Decide.  I was in the supermarket with my  wife, and we had gotten all our  things, and we were in the  checkout line, and we're putting  them on the conveyor belt, and  all of a sudden we remembered  we'd forgotten to buy breakfast  cereal.  So she sends me back to the  cereal aisle with relatively  specific instructions to buy a  box of Cheerios, and I run back  to the cereal aisle and reach  for that yellow box of Cheerios  only to see right next to that a  box of Honey Nut Cheerios.  And I think to myself Honey Nut  Cheerios are much more delicious  than regular Cheerios.  (laughter)  So I pick up the box  of Honey Nut Cheerios only to  see right next to that a box of  Multi-Grain Cheerios.  And then I think I should  probably get some fiber in my  diet.  (laughter)  So I reach for the box  of Multi-Grain Cheerios only  to see right next to that a box  of generic Cheerios  for $1.99.  It's a dollar cheaper.  And I'll spare you my entire  interior monologue but a couple  of minutes go by and I spy my  wife out of the corner of my eye  looking like I've lost my mind  because I can't choose a box of  breakfast cereal.  And of course this wasn't just  Cheerios, this happens to me all  the time. 

 I was, and sometimes still am,  the type of person who can spend  a half an hour choosing floss.  (laughter)  So it was that everyday failure  that led me to first  become really interested  in the subject of  decision-making and how the mind  makes decisions and how the mind  can make better decisions.  And when I first started looking  into the topic you quickly  discover that the answer has  seemed for a long time to be  really obvious.  The secret to decision-making  was simply to be more rational.  To be as rational as possible.  This goes back all the way to  Plato who had this great  metaphor for the mind, said the  mind was like a charioteer.  That you had this rational  rider, the rational charioteer,  and his job was to keep a tight  rein on the emotional horses who  sometimes lead us astray.  And the best decision-makers,  Plato said, simply had the  tightest reins on their horses.  They had the most control over  these impulsive, impetuous  beasts.  That metaphor was very  influential for Freud, he just  called the emotional horses the  id, and the goal of therapy,  Freud argued, was to better  allow the charioteer, the  superego, to have a better  control over these emotions,  these animal emotions that so  often lead us astray. 

 Of course, this basic idea  became the foundation of modern  economics.  You have the rational agent  model.  Economists discovered that you  could come up with all sorts of  really elegant, pretty models if  you only made one simple  assumption which is that people  are rational, selfish agents.  And this is a very alluring  idea.  It does elevate us above all the  other animals.  It neatly defines what makes  humans so special, so  Promethean.  The fact that we're capable of  being full of rationality.  We can be deliberate and  thoughtful.  We can think in logical chains  and really dissect our  decisions.  But there's only one problem  with, I think, this theory of  rationality, this assumption of  rationality, and that's that  it's, when you look at the brain  you discover that it's not  particularly true. 

 I think some of the most  compelling evidence for this  comes from the work of  neurologist Antonio Damasio,  who's now at USC, who in the  early 1980s began studying a  patient named Elliott who  because of a brain tumor in his  frontal lobes lost the ability  to experience emotions; it's a  brain area called the orbital  frontal cortex.  And he lost the ability to  experience emotion so all these  everyday feelings of pleasure  and pain and desire and lust and  anxiety that we take for granted  he couldn't experience.  And you'd think if you were  Plato that this would make him  the best decision-maker  possible.  Because he's got no horses to  lead him astray.  But Elliott it turned out wasn't  a master decider.  He still made all sorts of  terrible decisions, but his  biggest problem was that he was  pathologically indecisive.  Damasio tells some great stories  of he'd give Elliott a patient  consent form to sign, give him a  blue pen and a black pen, he'd  spend half an hour trying to  choose which pen to sign his  name with.  He'd spend six hours trying to  figure out where to eat lunch.  Then he'd be at the restaurant  and he'd be trying to choose  between a tuna fish sandwich and  a chicken salad sandwich, and it  would take him another hour.  So even the most the mundane  everyday decisions he seemed  incapable of making. 

 So this was one of the first  pieces of evidence that our  emotions don't just lead us  astray, they don't just lead us  to take out sub-prime mortgages  and rack up too much credit card  debt, they're also an essential  component of everyday  decision-making.  And then when you deprive the  mind of emotions, it can't make  any decisions at all.  So in this sense pure reason  isn't something to aspire to,  pure reason is actually a  disease.  And I think that is, I think, to  me one of the first themes, one  of those ideas that first got me  excited in this topic.  Because you have the ability to  kind of look inside these  3-pounds of gelatinous meat and  learn something interesting  about how we make decisions, and  it turned out to not be what  we've been assuming for a long,  long time.  But I'd like to spend most of  this evening talking about more  specific stories, more specific  examples, and not just about  vague generalities like reason  versus emotion and Plato and  Freud.  I'd like to begin by telling you  a story that takes place on the  second day of the ground  invasion of the first Persian  Gulf war.  And it involves a lieutenant  commander in the British Navy  called Mike O'Reilly.  Mike O'Reilly was in the HMS  Gloucester, it's a British  battleship.  And he was in the radar room. 

 This is 5:01 in the morning,  pre-dawn hours, and his job that  morning is to watch out for  silkworm missiles.  These are massive Chinese-made  missiles that the Iraqis have a  stockpile of.  And he's in charge of protecting  this large allied convoy.  So it's a flotilla of American  battleships, destroyers, two  aircraft carriers.  His job is to sit in the radar  room, make sure no silkworm  missiles are launched, and if  they are launched, to fire his  sea darts, those are his air  missiles, at the silkworm  missiles.  So there he is in the radar room  5:01 in the morning and he sees  just off the Iraqi coast two  neon green blips.  And as soon as he sees these  neon green blips, he sees with  this very powerful emotional  fear, he's convinced that they  are silkworm missiles.  His hands go clammy, his pulse  starts to raise, adrenaline  pours through his bloodstream,  sweat starts to pool on his  upper lip.  As soon as he sees these blips  he gives the order to prepare  his sea darts to fire because  he's so convinced they're  silkworm missiles.  But here's his problem, Mike  O'Reilly rationally knows that  these two blips could also be  American A6 fighter jets. 

 He's been watching these blips  for a long time, for the last  month and a half, and he's  watched A6 fighter jets take off  from the aircraft carriers  behind him, drop their bombs  over Iraq and then go wet feet,  that's a technical term for when  they become visible on the naval  radar, at a very similar spot  just off the Iraqi coast as they  were turning back to the  aircraft carrier to land.  So even though he's so convinced  these are silkworm missiles, he  also knows that these could be  American fighter jets.  So here's this horrifying  dilemma.  On the one hand, if these are  silkworm missiles and he does  nothing then probably some  American battleship, probably  the USS Missouri, he thinks, is  going to be shot down,  is going to sink.  Hundreds of sailors will die.  It will be the most devastating  encounter of the war for the  allied forces, and he will have  watched it happen.  At the same time, if these are  two A6 fighter jets and he fires  his sea darts and shoots them  down, then four American pilots  will die.  He'll be court martialed, his  career will be over.  He'll have to explain to his  commanding officer that he shot  down these two planes because he  got nervous one morning because  his hands got clammy which is  not a very good excuse.  So he's got 45 seconds to make a  decision. 

 The 45 seconds are up, and he  gives the order to fire.  He watches as his sea darts race  toward these two neon green  blips, whatever they are, and  then he watches as these two  neon green blips fall out of the  sky.  He shot them down 700 yards in  front of the USS Missouri.  So he really went to the last  possible second.  Then the question becomes, what  the hell did he shoot down?  His commanding officer barges  into the radar room and asks  Mike O'Reilly how he knew that  these were silkworm missiles.  And Mike O'Reilly says, I don't  know, I just kind of knew.  So then they send out crews to  inspect the wreckage floating on  the surface of the ocean.  Needless to say, the next four  hours, it takes them four hours  to come up with a certain  answer, are the longest hours of  Mike O'Reilly's life.  He's sent back to his bunk and  he just lies there on his bed  not knowing if his career is  over or if he's a hero.  The answer finally comes back  four hours later and it turns  out that they were silkworm  missiles, and Mike O'Reilly was  a hero and that he saved the  day. 

 After the war is over the  British Navy goes back and  investigates the tapes.  They want to know how Mike  O'Reilly actually made this  decision, how did he actually  know that these were silkworm  missiles.  So they look at the tapes from  that morning and they conclude,  based on their investigation of  the tapes, that Mike O'Reilly  was a hero but he was an  accidental hero, he just got  lucky that based on the tapes  themselves there was no way to  know that these were silkworm  missiles and not A6 fighter  jets.  So that's the way the case was  closed, that Mike O'Reilly made  a great decision but he could  have just as easily made the  wrong decision.  So it was hard to make him a  case study because he just  really got lucky, he was  flipping a coin in his head.  So that's the way the matter  rested until a cognitive  psychologist named Gary Klein  got involved.  And Gary Klein does a lot of  consulting for the Marine Corps,  and he had heard the story of  Mike O'Reilly.  He's probably best known, Gary  Klein, for studying the  intuitions of firefighters, how  firefighters have these  feelings, these prophetic  feelings by what a fire is going  to do and even though they can't  really explain where these  feelings, these intuitions, come  from when you trace them back  after the fact you can begin to  understand where their intuition  comes from, what it's actually  rooted in.  So Gary Klein wanted to  understand Mike O'Reilly's  intuition.  So he went back  to the radar tapes. 

 Only he didn't just look at the  radar tapes from that morning,  he looked at the tapes from the  previous six weeks trying to see  if there was some pattern that  Mike O'Reilly gotten used to  seeing that wasn't present that  morning at 5:01 in the morning  of the second day of the ground  invasion.  He's looking for some kind of  discrepancy between the pattern  of blips of A6 fighter jets and  the pattern of blips Mike  O'Reilly saw with the silkworm  missiles.  Sure enough he found a  discrepancy.  And the discrepancy was this.  The A6 fighter jets at that  point in the journey as they  were turning back from Iraq  tended to fly around 10,000  feet.  So when they went wet feet they  became visible on his naval  radar as soon as they hit the  water.  So within a single sweep of the  radar screen Mike O'Reilly could  see them.  Silkworm missiles that because  they were flying at 3,000 feet,  there's a bit more ground  interference.  So they didn't become visible  until three to four seconds  later on the third sweep of the  radar screen.  So even though they were  following the exact same path,  there was a slight timing  discrepancy. 

 And it was that timing  discrepancy, Gary Klein argued,  that signaled to Mike O'Reilly's  intuition, his emotional brain,  that something just wasn't  right, that this wasn't a  pattern he'd gotten used to  seeing.  And it was that slight  deviation, that slight  discrepancy, that Gary Klein  says led to this feeling of  fear, this sweaty palms, the  racing pulse, that led Mike  O'Reilly to be so convinced  these were silkworm missiles and  fire his sea darts and save the  USS Missouri.  And I love this story for all  the obvious reasons.  It sounds like something from a  Tom Clancy novel.  But in the book and one of the  reasons I'm really drawn to the  story is what it can teach us  about the brain.  And about one specific  neurotransmitter system, in  particular, and that's the  dopamine system.  We've all heard about the  dopamine system, It's got a  pretty bad reputation.  It's the chemical responsible  for hedonism and sex, drugs and  rock and roll and too much sex  and too many drugs and too much  rock and roll.  So if people talk about it it's  always associated with kind of  the seven deadly sins, things  we're not suppose to do.  And it's true, dopamine is  responsible for too much sex,  too much drugs and too much rock  and roll. 

 It really is an important  neurotransmitter for the  processing of rewards.  But in the last couple years, in  the last decade or so,  scientists have also discovered  that dopamine is also an  essential element of cognition.  That it's not just responsible  for helping us respond to  rewards and pleasures and  amphetamines but it plays a  crucial role in allowing us to  understand how the world works,  letting us parse reality,  letting us translate the  helter-skelter of the outside  world into understandable chains  of causation and correlation.  And I think some of the most  interesting work has been done  by a guy named Wolfram Schultz  who's a neuroscientist at  Cambridge and Cal-Tech.  And he began studying dopamine  because of its role in rewards.  And he came up with this really  cool experimental paradigm with  monkeys where he'd record from  individual neurons in the monkey  brain, and he'd give the monkeys  squirts of apple juice.  And monkeys love apple juice.  So he'd give them a squirt of  apple juice and record these  dopamine neurons and find that  every time he'd give them a  squirt of apple juice a dopamine  neuron would fire, and that  makes perfect sense.  It's processing reward.  So apple juice, monkey feels  pleasure, monkey's happy. 

 So far so obvious, that's what  dopamine's supposed to do,  right?  It tracks rewards and let's us  experience pleasure from  rewards, be it apple juice, or a  bite of chocolate or whatever it  is.  And then he found something else  interesting which said if you  keep on giving this monkey  squirts of apple juice, after a  while the dopamine neurons stop  firing, they get bored by the  reward.  And that also makes sense.  This is what happens to us too.  We adapt to rewards,  we habituate.  That's why the new iPod is very  exciting for a week and then  it's just that thing in your  pocket or why that new cashmere  sweater makes you so happy for  the week after Christmas, and  then before long you just want  the next new sweater or the next  new thing.  We get kind of ungrateful very  quickly, and you can trace that  back to how our dopamine neurons  stop firing in response to  rewards.  But then Schultz found something  very peculiar.  One day he's walking into his  lab and he opens up the door,  and as soon as he opens up the  door he hears the distinctive  sound of firing neurons, firing  dopamine neurons which he leaves  plugged in.  And that makes no sense. 

 Why would these neurons fire  when he's just opening up the  door.  There's no apple juice anywhere  nearby.  And then he thinks maybe these  neurons know that every time I  open the door that apple juice  is on it's way, that they will  be getting some apple juice in a  couple minutes because I'm now  in the lab.  So he invents this whole new  paradigm where he would ring a  bell and give the monkey a   squirt of apple juice.  And what he found is that after  just a couple trials the  dopamine neurons would fire  whenever he rang the bell.  The apple juice itself, the  reward itself, was boring; they  just cared about the bell.  And if he flashed a light before  ringing a bell, they would fire  whenever he flashed a light.  And if he played a song before  flashing a light before ringing  a bell, they would fire whenever  he flashed a light.  In other words, they wanted to  find the first event in time  that predicted the reward.  The reward itself, not so  interesting. 

 They wanted to find the thing  that predicted the arrival of  the apple juice, that predicted  the arrival of the reward.  He calls these cells prediction  neurons because that's their  business, they predict rewards.  He didn't begin to understand  why this is such a useful  talent.  The monkey that can find the  first event in time that  predicts something they want, be  it bananas or whatever it is  monkeys eat, will get the most  of it, they'll maximize the  reward.  So this is a very useful skill  to be able to find patterns to  predict rewards in advance.  Then the question becomes how do  these dopamine neurons become so  smart?  How do they actually know that  the light predicts the bell  predicts the juice or that the  light predicts the song that  predicts the bell that predicts  the juice.  How do they actually figure that  out?  And here's where something  called the prediction error  signal comes in handy.  And thank you for bearing with  me, I promise this crash course  in computational neuroscience  is almost done.  So let's say you're in a  mischievous mood, you train the  monkeys, flash a light, play a  song, ring a bell, squirt of  apple juice.  Well, what happens if you flash  a light, play a song, ring a  bell, don't give them a squirt  of apple juice. 

 What happens then?  Well here's where you see this  very characteristic signal  called a prediction error signal  which is basically a dopamine  neuron's way of saying we're  wrong, we thought this pattern  was going to lead to apple  juice, this nice delicious  reward but it didn't happen.  So that's the learning signal.  That's the signal to kind of  rejigger, recalculate, try to  rethink what you've come to  expect about reality.  It also leads to a very  unpleasant feeling.  I was talking to one of  Schultz's post-docs and I was  like what does this feel like?  We talk all the time about  prediction error signal, but  what does it actually feel like?  And he told me the story of his  morning.  Which was he dropped his kid  off, it was a frantic morning,  he raced to drop his kid off at  school.  Busy day in the lab so he  skipped breakfast, skipped  lunch, it's 2:00 in the  afternoon, he is just starving.  He's got four quarters, goes to  the vending machine, walks down  the hall, puts in one quarter,  two quarters, three quarters,  four quarters, types in the code  for the Snickers bar, that's all  he wants at this point is a  Snickers bar.  He's been thinking about it for  the last 3 hours.  So he puts in the quarters and  watches the Snickers bar slowly  come forward on the robotic arm,  and right before it drops down  it gets stuck and the prediction  error feeling is the feeling  that leads you to shake the  machine, hit the machine, punch  the machine, it's that feeling  of intense disappointment. 

 And that's what it feels like.  And that intense disappointment  is the brain's way of telling  you we were wrong, we thought  you were going to get a Snickers  bar or we thought the apple  juice was going to arrive but it  didn't arrive.  And that allows your brain cells  to adjust, to recalculate, to  find a new pattern.  It also generates, of course,  this negative emotion.  And over the long-term by  studying all these errors, by  studying what you got wrong,  your cells eventually learn how  to get it right.  They eventually figure out which  patterns are real and which  patterns are pretend.  How to become as precise as  possible in parsing the world in  terms of these very subtle  patterns that we probably have  no conscious awareness of.  Now I think we can go back to  Mike O'Reilly and begin to  understand what was happening  inside his brain.  So there he is, he's looking at  this radar screen, 5:01 in the  morning.  And even though this pattern of  blips looks to someone who  hasn't been sitting in the radar  room for six weeks just like an  A6 fighter jet, even though he  can't explain why it feels so  different, some dopamine neuron  somewhere in his midbrain says  this pattern isn't what I've  come to expect. 

 This isn't the pattern of blips  I've learned to see in A6  fighter jets.  So it fires a prediction error  signal.  That signal is passed from  neuron to neuron until it  reaches a part of the brain  called the anterior  cingulate cortex which  neuroscientists often refer to  as the "Oh, ####" circuit.  (laughter)  Because it's triggered  by these kind of  negative feelings of surprise  and contradiction.  So that brain error is then  responsible for generating these  profoundly negative aversive  emotions of fear and leads to  all these bodily changes, the  adrenaline, the heartbeat, the  sweaty palms, and it's that  emotion which began as maybe  just a small circuit of dopamine  neurons saying something isn't  right here, this isn't the  pattern we've come to expect  that lead Mike O'Reilly, I  think, to fire his sea dart  missiles and save the USS  Missouri.  So hopefully what I've begun to  outline is how we can take these  very profound decisions, these  very mysterious decisions, there  are a few things more mysterious  than intuition, it's as if our  brain knows secrets that it only  sometimes shares with us.  And I think you can begin to use  these models of computational  neuroscience, these very new  ideas about how our brain works,  how these 100 billion neurons in  our brain actually make sense of  reality to begin to explain some  of these mysteries of human  nature and human behavior.  But at the same time, I don't  want to give you the impression  that intuition is something that  we should always trust, that our  emotional brain is always right,  that we should always just blink  and trust our gut because that  would be really terrible advice.  I think we're all living through  a time which was, in large part,  the response of lots of people  trusting their gut and taking on  mortgages and stuff they  couldn't afford and spending too  much on their credit card and  doing all sorts of impulsive  things that if they thought  about it for a while they maybe  would have realized that maybe  my emotional brain is just being  a little greedy right now, and  you need to enforce that  long-term perspective.  I think one of the things that  most intrigues me about looking  at decision-making from the  perspective of the brain is you  can see how the exact same  mechanisms which make us seem so  intelligent, so wise at 5:01 in  the morning on the second day of  the ground invasion of the first  Persian Gulf war, you put them  in a different context and all  of the sudden we look insane. 

 We look crazy.  We look deeply, profoundly,  idiotic.  And in the book I illustrate  this using the story of -- who  was a high school English  teacher in rural West Virginia  when she was diagnosed with  Parkinson's in her early 50s  and experienced all the usual  symptoms, the bodily tremors,  the occasional paralysis, slight  mood disorder.  Parkinson's, by the way, is  caused by the massive cell death  of dopamine neurons in the back  of the brain, in a brain area  called the basal ganglia which  is responsible for all sorts of  things but it's partially  responsible for controlling  bodily movements and that seems  to be responsible for  Parkinsonian symptoms.  So her doctor put her on a very  standard treatment for  Parkinson's, still one of the  most effective treatments, it's  called a dopamine agonist.  And what these drugs do is they  basically mimic the activity of  dopamine in the brain.  So the idea is by saturating  your remaining, your surviving  dopamine neurons and  neurotransmitter, you can kind  of break through the shell of  the disease.  So the few dopamine neurons you  have left, because there's more  neurotransmitter there, you can  get the same signal and you can  compensate for this massive cell  loss.  And for Ann at first her  dopamine agonist, she put it to  me, is like a miracle cure, that  her symptoms all but  disappeared.  She'd forget for hours at a time  that she had Parkinson's. 

 She could go back to work,  continue to teach.  So it was great.  But here's a problem with  dopamine agonist as a long-term  cure.  Which is that your cells  continue to die so you have to  be put on higher and higher  doses of the drug in order to  maintain the same treatment  levels.  And that's when Ann discovered a  terrible side effect of these  drugs, and this is the side  effect that recent studies  estimated afflicts somewhere  between 8% and 12% of long-term  Parkinsonian patients on  dopamine agonists.  The side effect was Ann became a  slot machine addict.  And for Ann this addiction all  but ruined her life.  She lost everything she had.  She lost all of her life  savings, a quarter of a million  dollars.  Her husband left her. 

 She described a typical day to  me like this where she'd wake up  at 5:00 in the morning and go to  the local dog racing track and  she'd gamble there until close,  often around midnight, and then  she'd go to the local  convenience store where they had  slots because it's West Virginia  and she'd gamble there until  2:00 in the morning when that  closed, and she'd go back home  and gamble on her computer, play  slots on her computer, not for  money, just for fun, until the  casino opened again at 5:00  in the morning.  And she'd keep that up for two  or three days straight.  She was living on peanut butter  straight from the jar.  It was a very, very sad life.  And I think for me one of the  saddest parts of Ann's story is  that it never occurred to her  that this might be a side effect  of her drug.  She just thought here is a drug  I'm taking for Parkinson's, why  would it cause me to become  addicted to slot machines?  So she never questioned.  It wasn't until her doctor in  2005 read one of these recent  studies about here is this weird  correlation between patients on  dopamine agonists and they all  become slot machine addicts, or  12% of them do, that he took Ann  off the drug.  She'd been trying to quit the  slots for years and years and  years because she was very  conscious of her life falling  apart.  And it wasn't until her doctor  took her off her dopamine  agonist that the compulsion  disappeared within a week and  she hasn't gambled since.  Now the question becomes why  would a dopamine agonist, why  would having too much dopamine  in your brain, why would it lead  us to become addicted to the  slot machine?  Why would it lead us to squander  our life savings on some stupid  one-armed bandit?  And this is, I think, gets back  to the flip side of the  prediction error signal which is  that let's say you train this  monkey, play a song, flash a  light, ring a bell, squirt of  juice. 

 What happens if you give a  monkey a squirt of juice out of  the blue?  So you train on this elaborate  protocol and then sometimes you  just, here you go you lucky  monkey, here's a squirt of  juice.  (laughter)  What happens then?  Well here's where you see, it's  the opposite of a prediction  error signal, you see this surge  of dopamine that's three to four  times bigger than a predictable  reward.  The brain loves surprising  rewards.  Nothing tastes better than a  surprising squirt of apple juice  for a monkey.  And this also makes  some sense because what your  brain is trying to do is, the  reason you invest extra  attention, extra emotional  reward in a surprising squirt of  juice is your brain wants you to  figure out that pattern.  It wants you to look at that,  stand up and say where does that  juice come?  And what predicts that squirt of  juice, how can I get more of  that?  That's why surprising rewards  are always so exciting, they're  always so alluring because your  brain wants you to figure out  the pattern behind that  surprising reward so that the  next time that reward isn't  surprising maybe you can get  more of it before the other  monkeys get there.  So that's why surprising rewards  are so delicious.  But now you can begin to  understand how slot machines  work.  First of all, it's a basic  psychological paradox why people  find slot machines entertaining,  after all over the long-term  just about everyone loses money  at the slots.  They're programmed, depending on  states' laws, to return  somewhere between 70 and  90 cents on the dollar. 

 So you're not going to make  money at the slot machines,  you're slowly being bled dry  over the long-term.  But over the short-term, you're  getting some surprising squirts  of juice, you're getting some  surprising rewards.  You're putting in your quarter,  crank the one arm and every once  in a while you get some coins,  some clanging coins and that  siren goes off and you get a  reward in return.  So you get this surge of  dopamine going through your  brain.  Your brain gets very excited.  Your dopamine neurons want to  find the pattern.  They want to find the secret,  what predicts this new reward,  this new surprising reward, but  of course the secret is there is  no secret.  The secret is there's a random  number generator inside that  machine.  There is no pattern to find.  So your dopamine neurons  scramble, they get very excited,  but they keep on being  surprised. 

 So you keep on getting these  surges of dopamine.  They want to figure out the  pattern, but they don't realize  there is no pattern.  They can't turn themselves off,  they're too stupid to realize  that.  So they get stuck in this cycle  of surprising rewards, they keep  on being surprised.  And the current thinking is that  when you're on a dopamine  agonist, when your brain is so  saturated in neurotransmitter,  it's simply too hard to walk  away.  The surprising rewards are  simply to potent a cue.  So you simply can't step away  from the machines, and I think  that's what happened to Ann, and  thank God she's able to not  gamble, and she says she doesn't  even feel the compulsion anymore  since she's been taken off the  drug.  So now I've kind of given you a  crash course in computational  neuroscience and temporal  difference learning theory and  all I know about dopamine  neurons and Wolfram Schultz and  Mike O'Reilly.  And I think now the question is  what can we do with this  knowledge?  Neuroscientists are learning all  of these neat new things about  how our brain works and how  dopamine neurons work and how  these electrical cells give rise  to consciousness and lead to  decisions.  How can we apply this new  knowledge to everyday life?  And I think the key here, the  key to making this new knowledge  relevant for all of us is  something called metacognition. 

 And it's a word I love and use  way too much because it sounds  really fancy and really smart  and really intelligent.  But it's actually the simplest  thing in the world.  It's thinking about thinking.  It's something we do all the  time whether or not we know it.  One of my favorite examples is  tip-of-the-tongue syndrome.  Which is when you're walking  down the street and you see  someone and you know you know  their name.  Maybe they're your Facebook  friend or someone you vaguely  remember from high school.  You know you know their name,  it's somewhere in your head, but  you just can't produce it.  And this is happens all the time  to us, but it's actually, if you  think about it, pretty profound.  How do we know we know something  if we can't actually produce the  memory?  How do we know it's somewhere in  there if we can't find it?  And this is an example of  metacognition. 

 The basic idea is that any given  moment your brain is keeping  track, keeping store,  of all the ideas and names and  distant memories floating around  in your head.  So even though you can't find  the memory at the moment,  because you'll probably find it  an hour later and go oh, God,  that's his name, your brain  knows it's somewhere in there.  You're practicing metacognition.  You're thinking about thinking  and that's responsible for the  frustrating feeling.  Now when it comes to  decision-making I think  metacognition allows us to do  two big things which are really  big keys to better  decision-making.  The first, it allows us to see  through our biases.  The brain is hard-wired with all  sorts of peculiar programs which  may have made sense back in the  Pleistocene era, but in the 21st  century probably aren't ideal.  So one of my favorite examples  is something called loss  aversion which is an idea first  outlined by Daniel Kahneman and  Amos Tversky in the 1970s.  And loss aversion is a very  straightforward idea.  If I offer you a bet on a coin  flip, so if I offer you a bet  where you pay me a dollar if  it's heads, how much do I have  to pay you if it's tails before  you accept the bet?  Would you accept a dollar bet?  Probably not. 

 If you do surveys, if you poll  people, most people say, no, a  dollar, why would I waste my  time with that?  How about $1.25?  Most people still say no.  It turns out most people won't  accept the bet unless the payout  is $1.50 or $2.00,  somewhere around there  for a dollar bet.  So what that signals, and that's  not a rational thing, an  economist would say you're being  ridiculous, you should accept  any bet of a dollar and a penny,  that makes sense.  But of course, that's not how  most people act.  And what people extract from  that is the idea that losses  hurt about twice as much as  gains feel good.  This isn't just about stupid  bets on coin flips, this also  applies to social interaction.  So there have been some  psychologists who have studied  marital interactions and they  find that for every criticism  you make of your spouse it takes  about five nice things, you've  got to say five nice things to  equal that.  And I know as a writer you get  one nasty review and it will  ruin your week, a good review  makes you happy for about 30  seconds.  (laughter)  And that's the basic  part of human nature.  We are just intrinsically  pessimistic, we're drawn to the  bad news. 

 But now loss aversion is not  just about spousal interactions  or literary reviews.  It's got some big everyday  consequences too.  And one of my favorite examples  comes from the work of Terry  Odean who is an economist at  UC-Berkeley.  He studied how people choose  which stocks to buy or sell when  they're going through the stock  portfolio and trying to clean it  out.  What he found is people are most  likely to sell stocks that have  gone up in value.  And his explanation for why that  is is that they don't want to  sell stocks that have gone down  in value because that locks in  the loss, that makes the loss  tangible.  It feels so bad so they want to  do anything they can to postpone  the loss.  The reason that's probably not  such a good strategy over the  long-term is that, of course,  you're left with then a stock  portfolio composed entirely of  shares that are going down in  value.  That's why over the long-term  the shares people sell  outperform the shares that they  keep by about three and a half  percent annually which is a  pretty big percentage.  It all gets back to loss  aversion, it all gets back to  the fact that we can't stand the  idea of losses. 

 They feel so bad we just want to  postpone them so we make bad  investment decisions.  Now what does metacognition have  to do with this?  Well I think what metacognition  allows you to do is once you  know about loss aversion, once  you know about this bias built  into some part of the brain that  seems to be built into the  amygdala, which is the brain  area associated with negative  aversive feelings, once you know  about this you can begin to  avoid it.  You can think when you're trying  to figure out which stocks to  buy or sell, why am I selling  the stock.  Is it because it's the right  stock to sell or it's because  I'm loss aversed and I just  don't want to sell the stock  that's going down in value.  So you can kind of out-smart  yourself.  You can begin to think through  these biases which are built  into our brain at a pretty  basic, pretty fundamental level.  So that's one thing  metacognition allows you to do.  The second thing it allows you  to do is become better at  controlling your thoughts.  And that sounds like a very  vague wishy-washy scale, but I  think there's been some very  concrete demonstrations.  I think one of my favorite  demonstrations comes from the  work of Walter Mischel, who's a  Stanford psychologist who's  probably best known for a very  classic experiment done in the  late 1960s called the  marshmallow task. 

 And in this experiment, again a  very straight-forward  experiment, he brought  4-year-olds into his lab and  gave them a simple choice.  He said you can have one  marshmallow right now or if you  can wait while I run an errand,  about 15 minutes, I'll give you  a second marshmallow.  Not surprisingly just about  every kid decides to wait.  They say, I want the second  marshmallow, I want more sugar.  But here's where you see this  wide variation in terms of how  long kids can wait.  Some kids can wait the full 15  minutes.  Some kids can wait two minutes.  Some kids can wait 30 seconds.  Some kids will eat the  marshmallow before you leave the  room.  So you see the same bell curve  you see with all sorts of human  behavior. 

 One of my favorite kids, Walter  has got videos of all these  kids, and he doesn't just offer  them marshmallows, you can  choose between Oreo cookies,  marshmallows, pretzel sticks,  there's a cute little 4-year-old  boy with neatly parted hair, he  chose the Oreos.  And you watch him, there's a  one-way mirror and a video  camera right here, but he's  looking around the room, and  about 30 seconds in he's really  struggling to not eat the Oreo  cookie, and he's getting really  anxious and impatient, and he  kind of makes sure no one else  is in the room, the scientist  really has left.  He picks up the Oreo cookie,  unspools the Oreo cookie, licks  off the cream filling, puts it  back together, puts it back.  (laughter)  And then he had no trouble  waiting the full 15 minutes.  (laughter)  So you see this wide variation  in terms of how long  kids can wait.  And what Walter's interested in  is what allows some kids to wait  so much longer than other kids.  And his initial hypothesis was  that some kids just want the  marshmallows more.  They really need that cookie,  they really want that Oreo, but  that tended to not be the case.  The secret to being able to wait  for a second marshmallow at the  age of four had to do with  distraction.  The kids who can wait, they  wanted the marshmallow just as  bad that's why they were waiting  because they really wanted a  second marshmallow, but they  were able to realize that if  they looked at that marshmallow,  if they were looking and  thinking about how delicious it  was, they would put it in their  mouth. 

 So they were the kids who went  and stood in the corner for 15  minutes.  They played with their shoe  laces.  They tugged on their pig tails.  They pretended to take a nap.  They sang songs from Sesame  Street.  They pretended the marshmallow  was a big puffy cloud.  They did anything they could to  cool off the hot stimulus.  A delicious, sugary marshmallow  for a 4-year-old is a burning  hot stimulus, and they found  ways to think about that  marshmallow in cooler terms, and  that's what allowed them to  exert self-control and delay  gratification.  So that was a very interesting  finding in the mid-'70s when  Walter first published it.  And then he was talking to his  three daughters and they all  went to Bing Nursery School as  well, which is the nursery  school where these experiments  were done at Stanford, and he  was talking to them and he said  how is Jane?  And they'd say Jane is great. 

 She's a straight-A student.  She's going to go to Harvard.  She's doing great.  And he'd say, oh, that's funny  because Jane was a high delayer  and she could really wait the  full 15 minutes.  So how's Joey?  Joey's a mess.  He may not even graduate from  high school.  He really struggles in class.  And he'd say, oh, well that's  interesting because Joey waited  like 10 seconds for that  marshmallow.  So he began to think about well  maybe there's a long-term  correlation here.  So he sends out this exhaustive  survey when the original cohort,  the original group of kids were  high school seniors, sent the  survey to the parents, school  administrators, their teachers,  asking them how they rate their  kids on everything from number  of friends, how intelligent they  seem, their GPA, their SAT  scores, all sorts of different  things. 

 And what he found was that the  marshmallow task was basically  the most predictive test you can  give a 4-year-old.  It's more predictive than the IQ  test given to 4-year-olds.  The data point that gets tossed  around a lot is that the  difference between, the  difference in SAT scores between  the kid who can wait 30 seconds  and the kid who can wait 15  minutes at the age of four is  that the kid who can wait 15  minutes has an SAT score 210  points higher.  So it's a very profound  difference, it's a very  significant difference.  And then the question becomes  why does being able to wait for  a marshmallow, why does that  matter?  And what Walter argues is that  the same skills, the same  cognitive skills that allow you  to wait at the age of four also  allow you to do your homework at  the age of 15.  You really want to watch your  favorite television show, you  really want to watch the  ball game, but you know you've  got to do your pre-algebra  homework.  And so because those same skills  that allow you to find a way to  orient your thoughts to  accomplish your longer-term  goal, be it waiting for the  marshmallow or doing your  homework, they also allow you to  do those same things throughout  life.  They also allow you to cool off  your temper so you have more  friends.  And why you see this incredible  correlation between kids at the  age of four and all these  various other skills you can  measure at the age of 15, 16,  17, 18.  They're still tracking these  kids and they're now in their  early 40s. 

 And you see everything from body  mass index, as you can probably  guess people who could wait at  the age of four for a second  marshmallow have a much lower  body mass index, they're less  likely to do drugs, to have kids  out of wedlock, to have gone to  jail.  All these various things you can  predict by simply looking at how  kids behaved at the age of four.  And this gets back to  metacognition.  This is what Walter argues he's  measuring is metacognitive  skills.  That what metacognition really  is thinking about thinking, and  even at the age of four some  kids seem to be a little bit  better in realizing how they  think and how they have to  structure their thoughts to  accomplish their goal.  So they're able to realize that  what self-control really is  isn't just gritting your teeth,  it's finding a way to distract  yourself.  And that's something you learned  from metacognition, and  metacognition is something you  all practice and seems to have  had the snowball effect  throughout life.  Now there's something I think  disturbing that the marshmallow  task and that's that it seems  very deterministic.  It seems like there's some kids  who at the age of four just have  these skills and if you don't  have it then we should just kind  of write you off and maybe you  don't need to learn pre-algebra  after all.  (laughter)  And I think when you  talk to Walter you quickly  realize that that's exactly the  wrong conclusion to draw from  it. 

 He's also done some very  interesting work with children  in the south Bronx of a lower  socioeconomic status.  And what he finds is that they  have a little bit more trouble  waiting.  Because these are, the kids at  the Bing Nursery School are  children of Stanford faculty,  they're largely white, upper  middle-class, they're a very  specific kind of population to  study even at the age of four.  So in general you see kids in  the south Bronx struggle a  little bit more to wait for a  second marshmallow.  Not a big difference, not even  particularly significant, but  the mean waiting time is a  little bit lower.  But then Walter found you could  teach these kids a very basic  set of metacognitive strategies,  a very simple set of  metacognitive skills.  And all of the sudden the kid  who couldn't wait 10 seconds can  now wait 20 minutes.  And sometimes all these skills  are is you just suggest to the  kid why don't you draw a picture  frame around the marshmallow.  Pretend it's just a picture of a  marshmallow.  Sometimes that's enough to let  the kid wait 20 minutes. 

 You simply teach him stuff like  pretend the marshmallow is a  cloud.  Why don't you just try not to  think about the marshmallow.  Or pretend the marshmallow is  something else.  Or think about your favorite day  ever.  All those simple prompts, all  you're doing is planting the  idea in the kids' head that they  can control their thoughts.  That they're capable of  structuring the contents of  their own mind, control the  contents of working memory.  That seems to be enough to teach  kids that wait I don't have to  eat the marshmallow.  I can control my own desire.  I can think, by thinking about  how I think, I can think better.  Now the question is are those  lessons just applicable to the  marshmallow task?  And that's why they're now going  into schools, I've teamed up  with a bunch different schools  in Philadelphia and New York and  they're going in and actually  doing a long-term longitudinal  study seeing if we teach kids  these metacognitive skills,  which at the age of four largely  consists of showing them videos  of how other kids do it. 

 So you show them successful  videos of kids who go stand in a  corner instead of eating the  marshmallow.  And that seems to be enough, and  now they're seeing if that  correlates over the long-term  with everything you'd expect,  GPA, all the stuff that they  measured back in the late 70s  with those high school seniors.  So the basic idea of  metacognition is, as I said, the  mind is stuffed full of all  these different tools.  Sometimes we want to trust our  emotions.  Sometimes we want to trust our  sweaty palms.  And sometimes you really want to  think things through.  Sometimes you really want to be  rational and deliberate.  I wish there was some universal  solution to the problem of  decision-making, but it turns  out the world is a little too  complicated.  But I think the beauty of the  brain, and this is one of my  favorite metaphors for the  brain, is it's a bit like a  Swiss army knife.  It really is stuffed full of all  these different devices. 

 Cork screws, knives, serrated  knives, nail filers, and the key  to using a Swiss army knife and  the key to using your brain,  it's an awfully -- metaphor, but  it's kind of apt is to make sure  you're using the right tool at  the right time.  That's ultimately what  metacognition gives you.  It makes sure that you're able  to think not just in the way  Plato told you to think but  think according to the terms of  the situation.  So you can look at this decision  and say how much information  does it involve?  Do I have experience in this  domain?  How many variables are there?  Is it a hard decision, an easy  decision?  And based on the terms of the  decision itself, based on  diagnosing the decision, whether  or not you're buying a car or a  box of Cheerios, you can  structure your decision-making  process accordingly.  So thank you all so much for  listening.  It really is a pleasure and  honor to be here.  I'd love to take some questions  and answer, I think we've got  some time.  So thank you again for being  such a great audience, I really  appreciate it.  (applause)