How We Decide (3 page)

So how does a quarterback do it? How does he make a decision? It's like asking a baseball player why he decided to swing the bat at a particular pitch: the velocity of the game makes thought impossible. Brady can afford to give each receiver only a split second of attention before he has to move on to the next. As soon as he glances at a body in motion, he must immediately decide if that body will be open a few seconds in the future. As a result, a quarterback is forced to evaluate each of his passing alternatives without knowing how he's evaluating them. Brady chooses a target without understanding why exactly he's settled on that target. Did he pass to Troy Brown with twenty-nine seconds remaining in the Super Bowl because the middle linebacker had ceded too much space, or because the cornerbacks were following the other receivers downfield and leaving a small gap in the center of the field? Or did Brady settle on Brown because all the other passing options were tightly covered, and he knew that he needed a long completion? The quarterback can't answer these questions. It's as if his mind is making decisions without him. Even quarterbacks are mystified by their talents. "I don't know how I know where to pass," Brady says. "There are no firm rules. You just feel like you're going to the right place ... And that's where I throw it."

The mystery of how we make decisions—how Tom Brady chooses where to throw the ball—is one of the oldest mysteries of the mind. Even though we are defined by our decisions, we are often completely unaware of what's happening inside our heads during the decision-making process. You can't explain why you bought the box of Honey Nut Cheerios, or stopped at the yellow traffic light, or threw the football to Troy Brown. On the evaluation sheets of NFL scouts,
decision-making
is listed in the category Intangibles. It's one of the most important qualities in a quarterback, and yet nobody knows what it is.

The opaque nature of this mental process has led to a surfeit of theorizing. The most popular theory frames decision-making in epic terms, as a pitched battle between reason and emotion, with reason often triumphing. According to this classic script, what separates us from animals is the godly gift of rationality. When we are deciding what to do, we are able to ignore our feelings and carefully think through the problem. A quarterback, for instance, is supposed to choose a receiver by calmly contemplating all of the information on the field, translating the helter-skelter of the pass play into a series of discrete math problems. A more rational quarterback, with a higher Wonderlic score, should be a better quarterback. This ability to analyze the facts—to transcend our feelings, instincts, and impulses—is often seen as the defining element of human nature.

Plato, as usual, was there first. He liked to imagine the mind as a chariot pulled by two horses. The rational brain, he said, is the charioteer; it holds the reins and decides where the horses run. If the horses get out of control, the charioteer just needs to take out his whip and reassert authority. One of the horses is well bred and well behaved, but even the best charioteer has difficulty controlling the other horse. "He is of an ignoble breed," Plato wrote. "He has a short bull-neck, a pug nose, black skin, and bloodshot white eyes; companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined." According to Plato, this obstinate horse represents negative, destructive emotions. The job of the charioteer is to keep the dark horse from running wild and to keep both horses moving forward.

With that single metaphor, Plato divided the mind into two separate spheres. The soul was seen as conflicted, torn between reason and emotion. When the driver and horses wanted different things, Plato said, it was essential to listen to the driver. "If the better elements of the mind which lead to order and philosophy prevail," he wrote, "then we can lead a life here in happiness and harmony, masters of ourselves." The alternative, he warned, was a life governed by impulsive emotions. If we follow the horses, we will be led like a "fool into the world below."

This division of the mind is one of Plato's most enduring themes, an idea enshrined in Western culture. On the one hand, humans are part animal, primitive beasts stuffed full of primitive desires. And yet, humans are also capable of reason and foresight, blessed with the divine gift of rationality. The Roman poet Ovid, writing in
Metamorphoses
a few centuries after Plato, captured this psychology in a few short sentences. Medea has fallen in love with Jason—she was literally struck by Eros's arrow—but this love conflicts with her duty to her father. "I am dragged along by a strange new force," she laments. "Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong."

René Descartes, the most influential philosopher of the Enlightenment, agreed with this ancient critique of feeling. Descartes divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul capable of reason, and a fleshy body full of "mechanical passions." What Descartes wanted to do was purge the human intellect of its falsehoods, to get beyond the illogical beliefs of the past. In his seminal work, the awkwardly titled
Discourse on the Method for Properly Conducting Reason and Searching for Truth,
Descartes tried to provide an example of rationality in pure form. His goal was to lead humanity out of the cave, to reveal the "clear and distinct" principles that our emotions and intuitions obscure.

The Cartesian faith in reason became a founding principle of modern philosophy. Rationality was like a scalpel, able to dissect reality into its necessary parts. Emotions, on the other hand, were crude and primitive. Over time, a variety of influential thinkers tried to translate this binary psychology into practical terms. Francis Bacon and Auguste Comte wanted to reorganize society so that it reflected "rational science"; Thomas Jefferson hoped that the "American experiment would prove that men can be governed by reason and reason alone"; Immanuel Kant came up with the concept of the categorical imperative so that morality
was
rationality. At the height of the French Revolution, a group of radicals founded the Cult of Reason and turned several Parisian cathedrals into temples of rationality. There were no temples dedicated to emotion.

The twentieth-century version of the Platonic metaphor was put forth by Sigmund Freud. Although Freud liked to say that he spent his life destroying illusions, his basic view of the mind differed little from Plato's. In his "speculative science," Freud imagined the human mind as divided into a series of conflicting parts. (Conflict was important to Freud, since it helped explain neuroses.) At the center of the mind was the id, a factory of crude desires. Above that was the ego, which represented the conscious self and the rational brain. It was the job of the ego to restrain the id, channeling its animal emotions in socially acceptable ways. "One might compare the relations of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse," Freud wrote in a direct allusion to Plato. "The horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it."

The purpose of Freudian psychoanalysis was to fortify the ego, to build up the strength needed to control the impulses of the id. In other words, Freud tried to teach his patients how to hold back their horses. He believed that most mental disorders, from hysteria to narcissism, were due to the effects of unrestrained feelings. In later years, Freud would turn this Platonic vision into a theory of everything. He saw civilization, or
kultur,
as the individual mind writ large. "The events of human history," Freud wrote, "are only the reflections of the dynamic conflicts among the id and ego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual—the same events on a wider stage." According to Freud, the survival of modern society depended on people sacrificing the emotional desires of their ids—what he termed the pleasure principle—for the sake of the greater good. The possibility of human reason was the only thing that kept civilization from descending into barbarism. As Goya put it, "The sleep of reason produces monsters."

Over time, Freudian psychology lost its scientific credibility. Discussions of the id, ego, and Oedipus complex were replaced by references to specific areas in the brain; Viennese theory gave way to increasingly exact anatomical maps of the cortex. The metaphor of the Platonic chariot seemed woefully obsolete.

But modern science soon hit on a new metaphor: the mind was a computer. According to cognitive psychology, each of us was a set of software programs running on three pounds of neural hardware. While this computer metaphor helped stimulate some important scientific breakthroughs—it led to the birth of artificial intelligence, among other things—it was also misleading, at least in one crucial respect. The problem with seeing the mind as a computer is that computers don't have feelings. Because emotions couldn't be reduced to bits of information or the logical structures of programming language, scientists tended to ignore them. "Cognitive psychologists subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, and so we diminished the importance of everything else," says Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. When cognitive psychologists did think about emotion, they tended to reinforce the Platonic divide: feelings interfered with cognition. They were the antagonists of rationality, and they messed up the machine. That was the version of the mind put forth by modern science.

The simple idea connecting Plato's philosophy to cognitive psychology is the privileging of reason over emotion. It's easy to understand why this vision has endured for so long. It raises
Homo sapiens
above every other animal: the human mind is a rational computer, a peerless processor of information. Yet it also helps explain away our flaws: because each of us is still part animal, the faculty of reason is forced to compete with primitive emotions. The charioteer must control those wild horses.

This theory of human nature comes with a corollary: if our feelings keep us from making rational decisions, then surely we'd be better off without any feelings at all. Plato, for example, couldn't help but imagine a utopia in which reason determined everything. Such a mythical society—a republic of pure reason—has been dreamed of by philosophers ever since.

But this classical theory is founded upon a crucial mistake. For too long, people have disparaged the emotional brain, blaming our feelings for all of our mistakes. The truth is far more interesting. What we discover when we look at the brain is that the horses and the charioteer depend upon each other. If it weren't for our emotions, reason wouldn't exist at all.

In 1982, a patient named Elliot walked into the office of neurologist Antonio Damasio. A few months earlier, a small tumor had been cut out of Elliot's cortex, near the frontal lobe of his brain. Before the surgery, Elliot had been a model father and husband. He'd held down an important management job in a large corporation and was active in his local church. But the operation changed everything. Although Elliot's IQ had stayed the same—he still tested in the 97th percentile—he now exhibited one psychological flaw: he was incapable of making a decision.

This dysfunction made normal life impossible. Routine tasks that should have taken ten minutes now required several hours. Elliot endlessly deliberated over irrelevant details, like whether to use a blue or black pen, what radio station to listen to, and where to park his car. When he chose where to eat lunch, Elliot carefully considered each restaurant's menu, seating plan, and lighting scheme, and then drove to each place to see how busy it was. But all this analysis was for naught: Elliot still couldn't decide where to eat. His indecision was pathological.

Before long, Elliot was fired from his job. That's when things really began to fall apart. He started a series of new businesses, but they all failed. He was taken in by a con man and was forced into bankruptcy. His wife divorced him. The IRS began an investigation. He moved back in with his parents. As Damasio put it, "Elliot emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly, especially when the decision involved personal or social matters."

But why was Elliot suddenly incapable of making good decisions? What had happened to his brain? Damasio's first insight occurred while talking to Elliot about the tragic turn his life had taken. "He was always controlled," Damasio remembers, "always describing scenes as a dispassionate, uninvolved spectator. Nowhere was there a sense of his own suffering, even though he was the protagonist ... I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration." Elliot's friends and family confirmed Damasio's observations: ever since his surgery, he'd seemed strangely devoid of emotion, numb to the tragic turn his own life had taken.

To test this diagnosis, Damasio hooked Elliot to a machine that measured the activity of the sweat glands in his palms. (When a person experiences strong emotions, the skin is literally aroused and the hands start to perspire. Lie detectors operate on the basis of this principle.) Damasio then showed Elliot various photographs that normally triggered an immediate emotional response: a severed foot, a naked woman, a house on fire, a handgun. The results were clear: Elliot felt nothing. No matter how grotesque or aggressive the picture, his palms never got sweaty. He had the emotional life of a mannequin.

This was a completely unexpected discovery. At the time, neuroscience assumed that human emotions were
irrational.
A person without any emotions—in other words, someone like Elliot—should therefore make better decisions. His cognition should be uncorrupted. The charioteer should have complete control.

What, then, had happened to Elliot? Why couldn't he lead a normal life? To Damasio, Elliot's pathology suggested that emotions are a crucial part of the decision-making process. When we are cut off from our feelings, the most banal decisions became impossible. A brain that can't feel can't make up its mind.