Instant Genius - How to hack your brain to make better decisions

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Every day we’re presented with hundreds if not thousands of decisions: What do we want for breakfast? Should we call our mothers or spend time with our friends? Should we go out for a workout or watch TV and eat snacks? Of course, some of the choices we make are more significant than others and can have huge impacts on our lives. But what do these decisions say about us and how can we try to make better choices? In this episode, we catch up with neuroscientist and professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania Emily Falk to talk about her latest book What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. She tells us how certain regions of our brains are involved in the many decisions we make, how we weigh up short and long-term rewards, and how we can all make more thoughtful choices that align with our goals if we just make a few tweaks to our behaviour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello, and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Every day we're presented with hundreds, if not thousands of decisions. What do we want for breakfast? Should we call our mothers or spend time with our friends? Should we go out for a workout or watch

TV and eat snacks? Of course, some of the choices we make are more significant than others and can have huge impacts on our lives. But what can these decisions say about us and how can we try to make better choices? In this episode, we catch up. with neuroscientist and professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Falk, to talk about her latest book, What We Value, the Neuroscience of Choice and Change. She tells us how certain regions of our brains are involved in the many decisions we make, how we weigh up short and long-term rewards, and how we can all make more thoughtful choices than align with our goals if we just make a few tweaks in our behaviour. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

So today we're talking about your new book, What We Value, the Neuroscience of Choice and Change. So let's start off with something that you talk about in the very first chapter, which is this notion of value calculation. So this is fundamental to the entire concept. So what does that mean? Yeah. When we talk about value, I think many people think about things like how much things cost at the store or sometimes people think about. bigger values, like religious values or moral values. And when neuroscientists think about values, we mean something a little bit different, which is that there's a brain system called the value system, which calculates a subjective value for any different choice option when we're making a decision. And so our brains are shaping what we value, even when we don't necessarily give it a lot

of attention or realize it. And so there's been a lot of neuroscience research, first in monkeys and then in humans that shows that all of these kinds of daily decisions that we're making about things like what to eat for breakfast or whether to, you know, call our mom back or meet a work deadline, whether I should go for a run or watch television, are handled by this value system in our brain. And that network of regions computes these choices using a value calculation. And so each of these choices is first shaped by the options that our brain sees. and is considering. So when I imagine, for example, choosing between mint tea or a glass of lemonade, my brain is making that kind of value calculation. And likewise, if I'm choosing between whether

I'm going to go to my friend's wedding or, you know, keep my word for a book talk that I have scheduled next week, that's also a different kind of value calculation. So the brain system, this value system assigns a subjective value to each of those options, then executes the choice that it thinks is going to be more rewarding for me in this moment, and then keeps track of how well it went. Like, was it better than I thought it would be, or is it worse than I thought it would be, which is called prediction error, and that helps us learn for the future. And this happens in a certain specific region or regions of the brain. Exactly. It's a network of brain regions. So some of the key regions that are part of that network

include the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which sits just behind your forehead, and the ventral striatum is another really important part of that value system. But there are lots of other regions as well. And this brain system takes inputs from all over the brain, from sensory processing systems, from emotional processing systems, from our more rational, deliberate parts of our prefrontal cortex, from parts of our brain that help us decide whether something is me or not me. So our self-relevance system, and then parts of our brain that help us think about what other people are thinking and feeling, like our social relevance system. Yeah, so we'll get on to some of that in a minute. But, you know, how do we know that that's what's going on in these specific regions of our brains?

Well, there are a lot of ways that we know that. There's been decades of research on reward processing. So there's early work in animals, like in, you know, mice and rats, where they found that animals, would be willing to sacrifice all kinds of things in order to be able to stimulate these parts of the brain. That's a little bit different, though, than what we think of as kind of a human subjective value calculation. So later work looked at what happened with monkeys when they were making choices between different kinds of juices, so things like grape juice or lemonade or water or even mint tea, actually. And what they found was that in these monkeys, there were particular parts of their brains

that would activate in proportion to how much they wanted the different kinds of liquids. So, for example, in the book, I made up a name for one of these monkeys. Gizmo, I would love to know actually what the monkey's real names were in those studies. I should check with the authors. But let's imagine that on a Tuesday, Gizmo is really in the mood for grape juice. So maybe he's willing to take one drop of grape juice where he would otherwise require four drops of water. to go with the water choice. So in general, monkeys prefer more, but if he really is into the grape juice, he'll prefer that. And the amount of activation in analogous regions to the human value

system would correspondingly increase. And so there's this early work in monkeys that suggested that it wasn't just, for example, the amount of sugar that was in the drinks, or just the quantity, or just the nutritional value. Like we could imagine that there might be brain systems that would be tracking each of those things. But instead, what they found was that there was really this final common pathway, this integrative value system that was assessing how much the monkey thought it would be rewarding to have that treat on any given day. And then the big leap was to see that there was the same thing happening in humans. So some of the early studies in humans looked at what happened in people's brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, neuroimaging technology, as they were

choosing between things like, you know, different snack options. Like, would you rather have a Snickers candy bar right now or some Doritos? And our brains are able to make those calculations relatively seamlessly. We can make those choices right now. I'd prefer to have the Doritos than the Snickers bar, let's say. And so that leap from juices and monkeys to snacks and humans is not such a big leap. But again, it was not obvious before that it would be one brain system that would integrate all of these things and be able to handle comparing things that aren't necessarily inherently comparable. So with snack foods, there's a lot of different things that are going on. Like, how salty is it? How sweet is it? How many calories does it have? Like, is your friend eating it also? But these same brain

systems then even go farther. We can compare not just snack foods, but would you rather have a snack, or would you rather, you know, read a delicious book? Would you rather go out to the movies with a friend? Would you rather go to the ballet? I don't know. There's all different kinds of things, and our brains are able to compare those things. And even if I say to you, you know, one that I sort of like is like, would you rather snuggle a puppy right now or have $5 or I guess five pounds?

And there's really very little about that choice that is directly comparable if you tried to list the attributes of it. But yeah, your brain can still handle it. And it's in this kind of one system that computes value for us. Yeah, so I don't want to lean on analogy too much, but is it safe to say that our brains build up a sort of database of experiences? And so we can sort of, I guess, crudely speaking, make a hierarchy of reward, if that makes sense? Well, the thing is that our context matters a lot. And so early on, I think people thought it was possible that maybe there is just one objective ordering

where you would always prefer to snuggle the puppy over the five pounds. or you would always prefer the Doritos over the Snickers, or you would always prefer to go to the ballet over going to a movie. But in reality, when I list those things, it's probably clear that that's preposterous. Like sometimes you'd rather go to the ballet, and sometimes you'd rather go to a movie, and it probably depends how much energy you have

and whether the person that you might be going with likes one of those things more than the other, whether you've had that experience recently or not, maybe something about what your education is and whether people focused on one of those things is more enjoyable or a not. And so it's not that we just have one fixed database that is deterministically setting our preferences, but rather that in the moment we do take into account our past experiences, like whether things have been good or bad for us in the past, our current needs and our future goals. So what is it that I'm trying to achieve in the future as well?

So another thing that you talk about in the book is something called the sort of self-relevance system. And tied into this is all sorts of different interesting things, including the kind of notion of what our authentic self is, I suppose. So can you unpack that a bit for us? Sure. The brain's self-relevance system makes me, not me, judgments. So for example, if I were to say to you, you know, Jason, are you funny? You might be able to tell me whether in general you think of yourself as a funny person or not. So I'm getting from your body language. And, you know, if I said to you, are you messy? You might also be able to tell me like you might think about like, well, what does my bedroom look like? What's my kitchen look like? What do you think? Are you messy? Oh, I'm one of those

people that maybe is a bit, but also it will reach a point where I'll just have to go into, to absolute cleaning and tidying mode. So in general, I like order, but I don't always, you wouldn't always tell that if you came to my home. Sure. How about, are you punctual? Yeah. Yeah, see?

And so you can make these judgments really well, right? Like you can tell me, well, you know, a lot of the time I'm like neatness in order, but sometimes I'm a little bit messy. Like, I am punctual. Like, I work in radio. And so those kinds of judgments are handled by our self-relevance system. And the self-relevance system is really tightly intertwined with the value system. So for these kinds of

judgments, often people are more willing to say that they are things that they think of as good. So people generally think of themselves as kind, generous, honest, things like that. People are more hesitant to endorse things that they think of as negative traits, right? So they are unlikely to say that they are a liar or that they are really mean or that they're really greedy. And those kinds of biases that we have, where our self-relevance and value systems are really intertwined, can be really helpful for helping us maintain a positive sense of self and a coherent sense of self. But it can also really limit what we think of as possibilities because when our identities and what we think of as self-relevant is shaping so much of what we value, then that means that things that are different than what we've done in the past

or things that are not necessarily prescribed for the people like us in society, that we might not think of those as being as likely to be rewarding for us, and therefore we might give up opportunities that would otherwise be useful or enjoyable or opportunities for change, like to do something different than what we've done before. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So let's widen out from the individual to the sort of societal, I guess. So people will often talk about things like peer pressure and even the cultural environment that we're brought up in. So what sort of effect do these, I suppose, external factors have on this whole idea? Well, there's another brain system called the social relevance system. Sometimes scientists call that the mentalizing system or the theory of mind system. but these brain regions that I'm calling the social relevance system help us understand what other people think and feel.

And by default, we spend a lot of energy thinking about that, about what other people are thinking, what other people are doing, we notice it, we track it. So in studies of people's social networks, for example, even when folks are just lying in a brain scanner and passively looking at the faces of other people, their brains are automatically, sort of calling up and evaluating things like how empathic are those other people, how popular are those other people like to other people nominate them as being well liked. So we're keeping track of a lot of social information on a day-to-day basis. And when we see what other people do, it shapes our own value calculations, again, whether we realize it or not. So many people don't necessarily think of themselves as being susceptible to peer pressure, right? We say other people are susceptible to peer pressure,

but we don't notice it so much when we're soaking up the values or the behaviors or the preferences of people who surround us. But mountains and mountains of data show that this happens in all different domains. So ranging from how attractive we think other people's faces are to whether we get exercise, what foods we think are tasty, what art we think is beautiful, whether we behave in cooperative or competitive ways, like all of these kinds of things are shaped by the norms in the environments that we're in. And so in the brain, what neuroscientists have seen is that, for example, when people look at

photos of other people's faces and make judgments about how attractive they think they are, and then learn that their peers thought that the face was, let's say, more attractive than they thought, that it not only shapes what that person will say in the future about how beautiful that faces, but also their brain's underlying value calculation. So these peer norms are influencing the ways that we calculate value. And you brought up the idea of culture. Like one of the things that I think is really important for people to keep in mind is that just like other people are influencing us and the culture that we're part of is shaping our goals and what we think is desirable, we are also serving as those references for other people.

So when we make choices, you know, it's a small effect, but it adds up to influencing the people who are in our spheres as well. Yeah, so another thing, so often like sort of sticking with this assessment of values, if it comes to things like choices in romantic partners, a lot of people will say, if you ask them what's important, they say, well, you know, overall, having shared goals and values is very important for a successful relationship. And in the book, you mentioned the sinking of brains, which I think is really interesting.

So can you explain that a little? In the past decade or so, there's been a lot of interest in neural synchrony. So you may be familiar with the idea that sometimes people mirror each other's gestures or that when people are having similar experiences, their physiology follows similar profiles. And a similar thing happens in our brains as well. So, for example, when we're watching the same movie, if it's a really captivating movie, then our brain activity is going to go up and down in the same regions at the same time. So amazing films, strong political speeches, lots of these kinds of experiences. If we're having the same basic experience that someone else is having, we're also going to have neural activity that's synchronized between people.

And what's interesting is that this happens more between friends and between strangers. So, for example, if my best friend and I are watching a video clip, like a video clip that's meant to be funny from the internet, our brain responses are probably going to be more similar to each other than our friends of friends of friends, like people that were not as close to. And scientists have speculated that maybe some of that might be our shared experiences, like when we make similar meaning. of content, then we're going to have similar brain responses. And it's also the case that when people communicate, so when people tell a story and then someone else hears it, the degree to which the speaker and listener's brains follow similar patterns is also associated with more shared understanding. So, for example, the listener remembering the facts of that story more accurately or more true to the way that the speaker originally meant them. And then taking that even a step

Further, there have been some really fantastic studies looking at the assumptions that people bring into that listening. So there's one study that I really love where different groups of participants were given different backstories. And when people heard then the same exact story about what was happening in a relationship, the people who had been given the first backstory showed similar brain responses to one another, but different brain responses from people who were given an alternate backstory. And then taking it even a step beyond that, looking at what happens like in our political lives, researchers have looked at what happens when they look at the brains of liberal and conservative Americans being exposed to the same news clips. So research from my lab and from other labs has found that when people share partisan identities, their brains respond in similar ways, even though they're looking at the same news clips, but that might be different from people. who hold different political views. And so, you know, some of that probably comes from the media that we consume, like people

with different political orientations tend to engage with different news, the kind of assumptions about the world and the culture that we're bringing into it, and so on. And so there are a lot of these kinds of situations where having synchronized brain responses is associated with more shared understanding, like making a similar meaning from a story. So let's shift gears now to specifically talk about choice. So I think one thing that most people will be able to relate to is that typically, I'd say most of us tend to prefer, well, to make choices that lead to sort of immediate or short-term rewards. Even if we know it's perhaps not great long term, you know, just sort of having that fourth martini or something when you know you're going to regret it the following day. So why are we so prone to that?

Sounds like your tolerance is much higher than mine. I have like one or two. I'm toast. So, yeah, why are we prone to those weighing the short-term rewards? One reason is that our value systems are calculating reward in a way that really prioritizes short-term rewards. So the me that exists right here right now is more vivid and salient than that person who's going to exist next week or, you know, in 10 years, hopefully. And that is sort of a, a, factor that's weighed in our value calculations where most of us tend to prioritize immediate rewards over more delayed rewards. So, for example, my colleague Joe Cable here at Penn has done a number of really beautiful studies about what we call delayed discounting. And so if you give people the

choice between $20 today or $25 next week, some people are going to be patient enough and they're going to say, wow, five extra dollars, like I'll wait a week for that. But some people are not to be that patient. Some people are going to say, no, I'd rather just take the 20 bucks now. There's all kinds of things I can imagine doing with it. I'll go buy myself lunch or, you know, some fun little thing, right? And people vary in terms of how patient they tend to be by default. So some people are willing to wait a long time for a very small additional amount of reward. But largely most of us would prefer short-term rewards if we can have them. So let's have a look at ways in which we perhaps say, you know, not speaking personally, but say, for a hypothetically, I've made a lot of

decisions that I regret. And I want to, you know, have a bit more self-awareness, look back at those and think, you know, what could I have done better? Are there any sort of proven, tried and tested techniques that I can use to begin making better decisions? Yeah, I mean, I would say, first of all, my hope is that after people read this book, that it will help give them a little bit more compassion for themselves because, yeah, sure, we all have made choices that we regret. And we do our best with the information that we have at the time. But if you're saying, you know, how might I align my day-to-day decisions and my day-to-day behaviors with bigger picture goals and values?

So let's imagine that I have noticed that sometimes I tend to go for the drink instead of preparing for the work presentation the next day, right? like you were saying, sometimes people might regret having a few martinis or something. So I'm just going to put the physiological addiction part of alcohol aside for the moment and just say, like, there's an element of like, well, what is rewarding about that right now? Like, one is the social rewards. It's really fun to get to hang out with our friends. There might be some amount of like peer pressure. Like it's immediately obvious if my friends like are excited that I join them at the pub. and that reward of career progression may be more in the distant future, more abstract, and so on. And so there are a lot of different kinds of techniques that scientists have studied for bringing those rewards closer. So one is to think about ways to make the thing that feels compatible with my longer term goals more rewarding now.

So like maybe there's a way that doing the work preparation or the work presentation could also be social. Maybe there's somebody that you really like working with at work and that you could do that work now in a way that feels joyful or where you'd still get to joke around and get some of whatever it was that going to the pub was going to offer you. Then there's also that we can use our brains to deliberately more vividly imagine that future self. So I can imagine more vividly how rewarding it might feel if my boss gives me positive feedback and like what exactly is that going to be like? like, you know, what are the circumstances going to be? And by sort of bringing in more of those sensory details, more vividly imagining things, we can bring that future self a little bit closer. So to be more concrete, there have been some really nice research studies thinking about retirement savings. So helping people save more for retirement now instead of just immediately

spending their paycheck, let's say. And one technique that the researchers used was to show folks an aged avatar of themselves. So making it like much more concrete what their future self might look like and might be like. And when they imagine that more vividly, then they're more willing to delay a little bit of that gratification. Or likewise, when we think about, let's say, food choices, I run into this a lot. Like, I love dessert. I think dessert is so fun. I love sugar. But, you know, honestly, there's a lot of variability in how good dessert is, right? And so when I'm not paying a lot of attention, Sometimes I just like eat the dessert because it's there, right? Rather than thinking about like, is this going to feel amazing in like an hour or tomorrow?

And like sometimes when I think about it, the answer is yes, absolutely. Like let's say that there's like a chocolate moose cake or something and like I've eaten some growing food. Like I already like lined my stomach with broccoli or something. That's a great decision, right? Totally stand by that. But let's say that I'm just like at a kid birthday party. I have two nine-year-olds. So I'm at a kid birthday party and there's like a supermarket sheet cake and it's like probably actually not going to taste that good. Like thinking about how might I have

the enjoyment that I want to have at this party and still be part of the social experience without necessarily eating a whole bunch of cake that's going to make me feel gross later. So a couple of things. Like one is how can I make the short term rewards for the thing that's compatible with my long-term goals salient and like focus on that. Another is bringing that future self closer by vividly imagining the consequences for that person, what that situation will be like. So say I've been to the children's birthday party and I've turned down the, you know, not exactly delicious ice cream or cake or something. And then the following day, I'm sort of really pleased with myself for doing that. Is it true that the more I do that, like these little winds, then the easier it will become to be.

behave like that in the future. And possibly will that have like a sort of expanding effect on other decisions I'm presented with? Well, there's a couple different pathways through which that could be true. One is that for things that we do over and over again and we get rewards, those get handed off to a different brain system that controls habits. And so when we do the same kind of thing over and over again that's compatible with our bigger picture goals or that's not compatible with our bigger picture goals, then those things become habitual. So for example, if you're a coffee drinker and you make your own coffee, when you come downstairs in the morning, it's probably not like a decision that you're actively deliberating about or making. You do it on automatic pilot. You could do other things while you're doing it, like you could talk on the phone,

or you could read the newspaper and you don't have to, like, devote a lot of cognitive resources to it. So when we have a situation where there's a queue, like coming downstairs in the morning, a behavior that's repeated, like making your coffee, a reward that comes with it, that's when these kinds of decisions get handed off from the value system to a more habit system. And when it's on automatic pilot, then it really happens without a lot of effort on our parts. So, for example, people will talk about, like, if you want to get more exercise, having a routine where you do the same kind of thing where, let's say, you're running shoes or near the door, and you put them on, you go for a similar, you know, jog in the morning maybe, and then afterwards,

you get some kind of reward, like your body feels good. You've had a little bit of me time. You feel less stressed. That turning those things into habits definitely makes it more likely that you'll do it again in the future. In order to kind of bring the rewards closer, there are other techniques as well. Like my colleague Katie Milkman coined the term temptation bundling, which is like sometimes the thing that we want to do that's hard, doesn't feel inherently rewarding. Like for some people going for the jog, the me time or the chance to do it with a friend or focusing on the endorphins. Like, people are like, no, that's not enough. But you compare it with some other immediately rewarding thing, like listening to a very exciting audiobook or, you know, going to the gym and watching an exciting

show on the treadmill or something. And so when we do those things and we see that it can be rewarding, you're totally right that that can make it more likely that we do it in the future, that kind of positive prediction error that we talked about earlier, ooh, this thing is better than I thought it would be. That makes it more likely that we do it again in the future. So we've covered an awful lot there. So sort of, that's a kind of summing up question. You know, what would you like people listening to take away?

You know, what are a couple of things you think anyone can learn from this? Yeah, I think that there are a couple of things that we've touched on. One is how we can work kind of with the brain's value calculations rather than against them. We've talked about a lot of ways where we might be able to bring rewards closer, so choosing options that are both tasty and healthy, let's say, or where, you know, we get to do a project that feels really rewarding to us and maybe compatible with our identity, or we get to do it with somebody who we really enjoy spending time with. And bringing those rewards closer makes it easier to align our day-to-day behaviors with those bigger picture goals. Another thing that we touched

on is the idea of how identity and value are intertwined. And so we can lean into that by thinking about the ways that the goals that we have and the behaviors that we want to do are consistent with who we want to be. And then the third thing that we've sort of touched on is noticing who's around us and what kinds of examples we're probably soaking up and then how we might be that for other people. So I hope that one of the things that that people take away from reading the book is that sometimes when we're feeling stuck, it can feel like there's just one choice or there's just one good choice, when in reality, there are so many other ways that we can think about, our decision making, and so many other ways

where we might not have to choose between, you know, something joyful and enjoyable and something that's, like, good for our future self, that we can bring those things together in more creative ways. And then, like I said before, I hope that it also gives people a little bit more compassion and curiosity, both about their own decision-making and other people. So instead of just saying, oh, that was a good choice or that was a bad choice, sort of understanding why people are doing what they're doing, because the brain is amazing and incredible and really complicated. And I hope that when people read the book, that they'll get a little bit of a sense of some of the places that we might be able to have a little more agency.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. Brought to you from the behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Emily Fonk. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book, What We Value, the Neuroscience of Choice and Change. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius

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