That Neuroscience Guy - Season 11 Premiere - Decision Making Series Part 1

Episode Date: November 9, 2025

In the first episode of season 11 of That Neuroscience Guy, we start a new series on decision making by discussing the neuroscience behind how we assign value to decisions. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Krogolsson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. And we're back. My apologies for the massive delay. It's been a crazy summer. I'm just going to tell you the truth. My son went to university.

I've moved to Portland. I've got a year off, and I'm doing some cool stuff down here that I'm not supposed to really talk about. I mean, a lot of upheaval, and it just kept us off the air. And we've got the podcast back now. The team is committed, and we're going to start our next season. One of the biggest changes we're going to make is we're going to commit to releasing at a set night. All right. So you'll get the podcast every week at a set time.

We used to do that at the outset. I'll be honest, we got a bit busy and a bit lazy. But we're going to fix that. And we're going to release at the same time. every week. And if we're going to miss, we're going to tell you in advance. So our apologies for the big delay. Hopefully you can forgive me and the team. And without further ado, let's get on with it. So with the start of this new season, we're actually also going to approach it a bit differently. I'm going to do a deep dive into human decision making. We're going to do a series of episodes

on human decision making. And every once in a while, we're going to take a break and interspersed it was something about daily life or possibly an interview, but we're going to focus for the next 10 to 12 episodes on human decision making, almost like you're taking a course and becoming an expert in decision making. Hopefully you find that interesting and hopefully it appeals to your daily life. If you're going to talk about decision making, you have to start with a very key concept. Now, we've talked about it before,

but we're going to spend the next 10 to 15 minutes just focusing on the concept, of value and what we mean by value. And when we talk about value, it doesn't have to be a financial cost, but it could be. So, for instance, we know that certain cars cost more than other cars, so they have a higher value in that sense. But what about your favorite sweater? Your favorite sweater might not even be worth that much anymore because it's old and worn. so its financial value might be low, but it's got value in another sense.

So value is this sort of encompassing thing that does include its financial worth, but it's not dependent on it. It could have an emotional component to it, and it's just how much that thing means to you. A good example of value that I like to use is your favorite food. For me, there is no doubt it's pizza. All right, the value for pizza in my life is exceptionally high. For other people, it might be sushi.

It might be a cheeseburger. You can imagine what your favorite food is. And because it's your favorite, that means it has high value. Now, if you think of my least favorite food, my apologies, if this upsets you, but it's tofu. To me, tofu has very low value. In fact, value, you typically talk about it in terms of positive values. and negative values. Things that have negative value are things that you don't like.

And things that have positive value are things that you do like. And the amount of value that something has, well, guess what? That shows you how much you like it or dislike it. All right. So it's a scaled thing. And this is how our brain actually works. There's a really cool fMRI study that I really like. I've mentioned it in the past, but I'll review it.

And they had people in an FMRI scanners. That means they're lying on their backs, and they're looking at a series of images. And what they did is they showed people three different types of cars. Sports cars, let's just call them average cars, and then small little compact cars. And people saw this series of images. And while they're doing this,

they're measuring activity in the brain. And what they found was that people's brains had the largest emotional response to sports cars. And they had an medium response to average everyday cars. And then they had this reduced response to compact cars. Now, some of you might love compact cars. I'm not making a statement about what kind of car you should like. But what the authors took that to mean was that the brain was encoding value in some sense.

And funnily enough, when they surveyed the participants, that's what they did. They rated the sports cars as the things they liked the most, the everyday cars, the thing they kind of liked, and then they liked the compact cars the least.

So their subjective perceptions of like were encoded in the brain in emotional parts of the brain, and it was a form of the brain stating value. This is also being shown in monkey models, right? In monkey models, they can show that if a monkey

likes something, then parts of the brain have greater neuronal firing rates. The most common area is called LIP. It's the interparietal sulcus. And they show that there's greater firing if the monkey is presented with something that they like and there's reduced firing if there's something the monkey doesn't like.

The point of this is that the brain seems to encode value, whether it's this firing rate in individual neurons or whether it's fMRI activity. and the reason that value is so important is the concept of utilitarianism. Now, this is from John Stuart Mill in 1861, and it's always been one of my favorite thoughts about the way the brain truly works. And what Mill said was that people seek actions that increase utility and avoid actions that decrease utility.

Now, I've been talking about value, what's utility? Utility is an economics phrase basically means value. So in psychology and neuroscience, we talk about value. If I was an economics major, I'd be talking about utility. But if you go through that, basically what happens is it means that people make choices that increase value and they avoid choices that decrease value.

Now, we'll come back to this idea of choice, but the point is that we want value in our lives. I want to eat a lot of pizza. Some of you want to eat a lot of tofu. I personally want to drive a sports car. Some of you want to drive a compact car because these are things that have high value. And value and the concept of value extends to high-level constructs. For instance, the career that you want to do, you know, when I was in university,

I wanted to be a high school basketball coach. So at the time, that had the highest value possible. Obviously, that changed in a higher value. option came in front of me, which was becoming a neuroscientist. You know, my son right now is at university, and he's trying to decide, you know, engineering, medicine, law, and he's cycling the value, through the value of each of those choices to him. And this even gets down to people, right? You know, your partner, you choose a partner that you perceive to have high value.

And that illustrates, you know, it's not a financial thing. It's just, what is that, what's the worth of this thing to you? So it's important to understand that this idea of value, or at least to try to wrap your head around it, and the fact that your brain encodes value. Now, I'm going to tell you about another person. He actually predates John Stewart Mill, because Mill was talking more about, you know, what drives us.

But Christian Hoygens in 1657 came up with the concept of expected value. So we're going to modify our description of value a little bit, bit here. It's important to do so. And what Hoykin said was that things have value, yes, that's a true statement. But what we really see them as is expected values. And an expected value is just the value of something times the probability of getting it. All right. So an expected value is just the mathematical product of the value times the property. All right, what the heck does that be, Dr. K? Well, I'll give you a simple expected value. I'm going to say this very slowly so you can work out the answer.

Would you play a gamble that has a 40% chance to win $1,000 or a 70% chance to win $600? So would you play a gamble that has a 40% chance to win $1,000 or a 70% chance to win $600? Now, if you do the math here, you compute expected values. You take 1,000 and you multiply it by 0.4, and you take 600, and you multiply it by 0.7. And hopefully you can figure out that you should take the 70% chance to win 600, because it's got a higher expected value. Now, this goes a little bit further in the concept of expected values, because think about your driving home today.

And if you don't drive and it's before your time, you ride your bike or your water, You know, when you drive home, you have a lot of choices to make. Should I go this route, this route, or this route. And each of those routes has a value, but it also has a probability associated with it. And that probability might reflect the time of day, for instance. You know, where I drive from now to where I live, sometimes there is a high value route, but the expected value at certain times of day is low because the probability of it being quick is very low.

Another way to think of expected value is playing a game like Tic-Tac-Tow. You know, if X goes first and goes in the top left corner and O goes in the middle, there's an expected value for each of the open squares for X's next move. And the expected value in this sense reflects, you know, your chance of winning. And in fact, you can take this a little step further. This is why you should never play the lottery, all right? the lottery is usually for some ridiculous amount of money. All right, let's call it $100 million.

Now, the expected value of the lottery or playing the lottery is that $100 million times by the probability of winning, which is incredibly small. Now, the expected value of not playing the lottery is the money you would have spent on the ticket, $5, times 100%. So you should never play the lottery because guess what?

The expected value of playing is less than the expected value of not playing. So if you play the lottery for the less of your life, you're going to lose money. And this, this of course is what Las Vegas is built on. You should never gamble ever. All right. Las Vegas wouldn't work if the expected value of winning

was even equal to the expected value of losing. The expected value of winning in Vegas is always lower than the expected value of losing. And there's always some people, in fact, I teach a stats class. I remember one student who was convinced that's not true. I have a way that you can win it, Blackjack. No, you can't. Because if you could win it Blackjack without cheating,

and yes, we all saw the movie about card counting, Vegas wouldn't exist. Now, before I wrap this up, I want to point out two key things. One, there is an inherent problem with value. And I'll give you two examples of that. And what it stems to is that people are bad at estimating value. If I asked you what cheeseburger is actually worth, you'd say 99 cents or whatever it is these days. I don't go to McDonald's.

Let's just call it 99 cents. And, you know, that's the value of the cheeseburger. Now, before my mother passed away, I used to fly from Vancouver, Canada to Auckland, New Zealand, at least twice a year, 14 and a half hour in the air. An airline food is not that great. If you had have offered me a McDonald cheeseburger, you know, in the middle of that flight, I would have paid $10 for it.

So the problem with value is it's always relative to context, right? And you have to take that into account. And to illustrate that even further, I'll give you another good example of value. It's another one I like. Imagine you want to get new tires for your car, and those tires are going to cost $400. all right so you think all right four hundred dollars that's fair but then a friend of yours tells you that

the exact same tires are on sale on the other side of the city for three hundred dollars so what do you do you drive across the city because you're saving a hundred dollars right it's a good deal now imagine you frame this a little bit differently you're going to buy a new car and that new car is forty thousand dollars but if you drive across the city you can get the exact same car for $39,900. And the difference, that $100 difference is because of the tires. Most people don't do it. They're like, ah, it's only $100.

It's ridiculous. It's still $100. Value is value. So one of the biggest problems with value is people have a hard time estimating it because of context. And people are even worse with probability. I've already sort of made fun of Las Vegas, but gambling is the ultimate example of people being bad at

probability. You know, they look at a hand of blackjack and they think, oh, yeah, well, you know, I think I know what's going to happen here and they don't, right? And an even simpler example of this, and this is one that happened to me just the other day, which is why I'm using it, which is what is the best time of day to go to the doctor's office? People think they know and they have these estimates, but generally these are bad estimates of probability because they don't really know. So what I wanted to talk about in this very first dive into decision making is this concept of value. All right. Value is the inherent worth of something to you.

It's not its financial cost. It could be have an emotional component. It could be for a bunch of reasons. But it's important that you think about and understand the concept of value. And I'll go back to an example I used. What is your favorite food? Just sit there as you're listening or stand. there as you're listening or drive your car as you're listening and think to yourself,

what is my favorite food? And that food has the highest value. And it might not be the most expensive food you can buy. I want to make sure it's not just a money thing. And then ask yourself, what is your least favorite food? And that food has the lowest value to you. So that's your homework before we get to the second lesson on decision making or the second podcast. Think about value and try to wrap your head around the concept of value. And don't forget about the concept of expected value, this idea that it's not just the value, it's also the probability of getting that value.

All right, that's us coming back. Hopefully you find this interesting and hopefully you like this deep dive into decision-making. Myself and the team thought it would be kind of cool. You can send us feedback. Of course, we still have the website that neuroscience guy.com. There's links to our Etsy store. and Patreon.

We have social media presence. Jen will be posting stuff again. Instagram X threads at that Neurosai guy. And of course, the podcast itself. I realize because we've been gone for two months, some people might have unsubscribed. Hopefully you come back.

And if you haven't subscribed yet, please do. We're going to be back on a regular basis. All right. And we're going to be bringing you lots of cool new stuff about neuroscience and the neuroscience of daily life. My name is Olive Kirk Olson.

And I'm that neuroscience, guy. I'll see you soon for another episode of the podcast.