Tag Archives: decision making

Don’t Stop?

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It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.

Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!

Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.

I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.

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Choice and Accountability – Maybe NOT?

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Brain regions (shown in green) from which the outcome of a participant’s decision can be predicted before it is made.

Brain regions (shown in green) from which the outcome of a participant’s decision can be predicted before it is made. (Illustration from original press release)

From the Max Planck Institute press release:

Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. “Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings.” (Nature Neuroscience, April 13th 2008)

Did I read that correctly? My brain is making a decision a full 7 seconds before I’m aware of the decision? Wait a minute!! What about choice and accountability? That is, how can the universe (“God”) hold me accountable for a choice when I didn’t consciously make it? What the hey!!!??!!!

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Amplified Rewards Lead to Success

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If your end result imagery is vivid and compelling enough, you'll achieve it.

If your end result imagery is vivid and compelling enough, you’ll achieve it.

Want to succeed at something? Will it take some time? Then you need vivid, compelling outcome rewards!

Research out of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a part of the brain implicated in reward-based decision making, together with the hippocampus took part in predicting the degree to which forward thinking impacted current decision making. Further, the researchers discovered that the more vivid and compelling the end result imagery, the stronger the degree of impact on short-term distractions. In other words, the more vivid and compelling the end result imagery, the more likely the subjects of the research were to modify their behavior toward achieving the end result and declining short-term distracting rewards.

Let’s work with an example. Suppose you want to lose a few pounds but are faced with the temptation to eat something you know you shouldn’t. The short-term reward is obvious while the long-term reward fades away into what feels like the very distant future – “out of sight – out of mind”.

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Spend Wisely on Happiness

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There's just nothing quite like a good massage...

There’s just nothing quite like a good massage…

Thomas Gilovich, Cornell University professor of psychology and Travis J. Carter, Ph.D., also from Cornell, studied the relationship between spending and satisfaction with consumer purchases. They found, as is no surprise to many of my readers, is that spending on experiential purchases – like massage or hypnotherapy or Rapid Eye Technology – left consumers feeling happy with their spending choice – and that their happiness grew with time after their purchase in comparison to spending on material goods like flat screen TVs where spending felt good at first but quickly gave way to less happy feelings.

“Buyers’ remorse” often sets in after buying a material good. Consumers ruminate about better deals and more features they may have missed later. However, such feelings rarely come up after spending money on a massage or after doing a Rapid Eye Technology session. Quite the contrary, according to Gilovich and Carter -~ “Consumers found that satisfaction with ‘experiential purchases’ – from massages to family vacations – starts high and increases over time. In contrast, spending money on material things feels good at first, but actually makes people less happy in the end”

It’s fine to purchase items that you can enjoy with use – and, in fact, focusing on the enjoyment of use makes the purchase choice sweeter and so much better emotionally over time.

Still, there’s just nothing quite like a good massage…

Study Paper: “The Relative Relativity of Material and Experiential Purchases,” – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychological Association, January 2010.

Neurobiology of Dread

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The dread of having something hanging over your head is worse than the thing that you are dreading...

The dread of having something hanging over your head is too often worse than the thing that you are dreading…

In order to better understand how people make decisions when the outcomes are known to be unpleasant, a team of Emory neuroscientists led by Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine the areas of the brain that are activated when someone experiences dread. The study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA), was published in the May 5, 2006 issue of the journal Science. The study was part of a research program in the growing field of neuroeconomics, an area in which neuroscience methods are being applied to economic questions.

“Most people don’t like waiting for an unpleasant outcome, and want to get it over with as soon as possible,” explains Dr. Berns, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. “The only explanation for this is that the dread of having something hanging over your head is worse than the thing that you are dreading. It is a commonplace experience, but standard economic models of decision-making don’t deal with this issue. So, we decided to take a biological approach and see what happens in the brain that might cause people to make such rash decisions.”

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Where We Change Our Mind In The Cerebral Cortex

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Whether finding your way through an unfamiliar neighborhood to a friend’s house or deciding on a political candidate, your brain is adept at adapting. It can make decisions based on incomplete information and update those decisions based on new information.

The nature of such sophisticated decision making in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for high-level processing, has been “poorly studied and little understood,” according to Wako Yoshida and Shin Ishii of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Now, however, in an article in the June 1, 2006, Neuron, they describe experiments that enabled them to tease apart how different regions of the cerebral cortex process uncertain information and integrate it into decision making.

In particular, their aim was to analyze subjects’ navigation through a virtual maze, to explore how different cortical regions function in solving “partially observable decision-making problems.”

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My Biases

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Biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence.

Biases drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence.

As a human being, I’m proud to say I have biases. Having biases is what separates me from the machines I live with. Although it is debatable, I tend to believe that biases serve a useful purpose – to some degree. Knowing I have biases helps me communicate, make choices, respond, and live with far less stress.

To believe you are unbiased is to say you are inhuman or a machine. Admitting your biases helps you take charge of them. And in taking charge of your biases you can take charge of your life. Further, in understanding your biases and how they work you become a more useful and stress-free member of your society.

In this article, I have copied liberally from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. As you read the list of cognitive biases along with their variants, I hope you, too, will find some value. Maybe you’ll notice some biases you didn’t know you had. You can’t truly gauge any of the biases you might be operating under since it’s not possible to accurately observe a system of which you’re a part. Still, you may be able to note biases you see in others and by association assign them to yourself – and maybe notice how you might operate the same bias you see in another.

Remember: knowing you have biases helps you take charge of them. Understanding how your biases work helps you understand yourself and others better. This understanding can serve you and your community in a number of ways.

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Sheeple?

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Is your fear useful to you?

Is your fear useful to you?

“I was just wondering if it is possible for a person to intentionally surrender his will in an attempt to avoid taking responsibility… is this evil? or maybe the person is hypnotized? How do you explain a situation where a person convinces himself that the blood of another man has been used… and will continue to be used to wash away his transgression? Meanwhile, the man in question says, “What you sow you shall reap.” How do you explain a situation where a person convinces himself that a man CAME TO DIE FOR HIM… when the man in question CURSED whoever it was that would betray him! How do you explain a situation where a man goes to explode his life… taking the life of others as well with the believe that he would get a better life?”

The short answer is that everyone is under a form of hypnosis of some description. Everyone is acting from some form of trance-installed belief and posthypnotic suggestion. The trick is to determine what those are and decide whether they are truly ‘useful’.

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10 Cognitive Thinking Errors

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One of 10 Cognitive Thinking Errors?

And what to do about them.

Based on the work of Aaron Beck and others, in Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, David Burns outlines 10 common mistakes in thinking, which he calls cognitive distortions.

  1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING – Also called Black and White Thinking – Thinking of things in absolute terms, like “always”, “every” or “never”. For example, if your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. Few aspects of human behavior are so absolute. Nothing is 100%. No one is all bad, or all good, we all have grades. To beat this cognitive distortion:
    • Ask yourself, “Has there ever been a time when it was NOT that way?” (all or nothing thinking does not allow exceptions so if even one exception can be found, it’s no longer “all” or “nothing”)
    • Ask yourself, “Never?” or “Always?” (depending upon what you are thinking)
    • Investigate the Best-Case vs Worst-Case Scenario NLP Meta program
  2. OVERGENERALIZATION – Taking isolated cases and using them to make wide generalizations. For example, you see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat: “She yelled at me. She’s always yelling at me. She must not like me.”
    To beat this cognitive distortion:

    • Catch yourself overgeneralizing
    • Say to yourself, “Just because one event happened, does not necessarily
      mean I am (or you are or he/she is…[some way of being])”
    • Investigate the Big Chunk vs. Little Chunk NLP Meta program

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What and How

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Perhaps you already know that you have two hemispheres to your cortex. Although each hemisphere seems to govern certain types of thought patterns, they communicate with each other to such a degree that it is hard to discern their separate functions. However, by taking charge of those hemispheres you can take charge of your mood, your choices, and your communications – making it easier for you to function, achieve goals, study, interact, and communicate with yourself and others.

brain_1.jpgYou don’t need to be a neurosurgeon or brain specialist to take charge of your brain. Just as you don’t have to understand how a computer works to make it work for you, you can obtain substantial benefit from your brain without having to understand how it works. You just need the right “software” a program you can run. And just as with your computer’s software, which program you run and what you input into the program can make quite a difference in the output you get.

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