That Neuroscience Guy - That Neuroscience Guy Lecture Series - Part 3

Episode Date: May 11, 2025

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we wrap up Dr Krigolson's lecture, "Why we do the dumb things we do", discussing some important caveats to models of decision making. Be sure to check out Parts 1 and 2 if you haven't yet!

Hi, my name is Lone Wolf Krogolson. Hi, I'm Brayden Allen. I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. I'm a neuroscience undergraduate student at Indiana University. And we're the Neuroscience Guys. So on today's podcast, it's going to be a bit different. I'm going to give you the lecture that I gave to the students at Indiana University, why we do the dumb things we do.

But of course, we've said Huygens didn't have it right with expected values because of the problems with value and probability. And we got into intuitive decisions versus analytical decisions. But of course, there's more to this story than fast and slow decisions. I always like to think of Star Trek at this point. What we want to be according to Huygens is we want to be Spock, right? Spock would be the perfect example of expected values.

And if you watch old Star Trek, especially, like the first series, you know, Spock's always sitting there going over like, well, the logical thing to do or the analytical thing to do. And Kirk, on the other hand, is your emotional system, right? Kirk's just always seat in the pants going, let's just do this, all right?

And that's the problem with decision- with a fast and slow model is you have to factor in emotion as well. All right. So we've talked about the amygdala in the past. In fact, you know, I almost feel like the amygdala is a sort of a secret joke of the podcast. You could probably gamble on a given episode with a probability greater than 50% that% that I'm

going to drop the amygdala out there. But basically with the amygdala, it's your emotional response to things. All right? And we've talked about it a lot, so I don't want to spend a lot of time on the amygdala. But we also have the prefrontal cortex. And the way I think of these systems, this emotional response versus the prefrontal cortex is literally a tug of war, right? The prefrontal cortex is arguing for one option

and the amygdala and to be fair, other parts of the brain are biasing a more emotional choice. And these brain regions are literally in a tug of war. And there's some really cool research that shows this. I'll talk about two specific studies. I've mentioned them in the past, but I'll review them here to highlight the point.

The first is called the ultimatum game. The way the ultimatum game works is pretty simple. The original research was done in Grand Central Station in New York. The researchers would just pick two people that make sure they didn't know each other, and then they'd explain the rules of the ultimatum game. And the way it works very simple is one person

chosen at random was given an amount of money. I forget the amount in the original study, let's call it $10, right? And their job was to offer some proportion of money to the other player. And they could make a fair, you know, just a 50-50 split. They could be greedy and say, well, I'll keep seven and I'll give you three.

Or they could be altruistic. You know, I'll keep $1. I'll give you a nine. Now, the key rule that was explained to the participants is they're only playing one time. They'll never get to play again. If they get picked randomly the next day, as soon as the researchers find out they've played the ultimatum game, they don't get to play again.

So this is a one-time offer. Why this is important is when you actually play the ultimatum game, if people offer a 50-50 split, 100% of people say yes. If you offer say a 70-30 split not everyone says yes but as soon as you get to like an 80-20 offer about half the people say no to the offer and if you get to 90-10 only about 40% of the people accept the offer. And this doesn't make sense from a logical decision-making perspective. If we are analytical, we're being spock,

we should take any amount of money, because I'm only playing one time, and any amount of money is better than no money. And this is why that rule is important, this rule that you only play one time. Because if you played more than once, then rejecting an unfair offer becomes a strategy. You're sending a message, you're basically saying,

well hey, if you mess with me, you know, no one's gonna get any money, so give me fair offers. But if you're only playing one time, you should take any offer. And what was interesting about this study is the original version was 100% behavioral, but the one I'm thinking of was done in an fMRI scanner, all right?

So you're on your back in an fMRI scanner. And what the researchers found was the tug of war. They basically found that there was activity in the prefrontal cortex, and specifically in this one study, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There was also activity in the insular cortex, left and right, that's the emotional response. And there was activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of the ACC.

The key parts of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex. Basically, if there's more activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex than the insular cortex, people accept the offer, the unfair offer. But if there's more activity in the emotional parts of the brain than in the pre insular cortex, people accept the offer, the unfair offer. But if there's more activity in the emotional parts of the brain than in the prefrontal cortex, they reject the unfair offer.

So you can actually predict what people are going to do if you measure their brain activity. And at the same time, you can see that tug of war between the analytical system and the emotional system. If you actually map it out over time, it gets really interesting, because you can, like I said, you can see what people are going to do. And there's actually research groups now that are doing this in real time.

So they're able to predict before people make the response what the person is going to do just by measuring their brain activity and looking at the relative activity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, sorry, the insular cortex and the prefrontal cortex. The insular cortex is just another part of the emotional system, like I said. Now this one I know we've talked about, system, like I said. Now, this one I know we've talked about, but in case you haven't heard it before, because you're new to the podcast, this one is called the Trolley Dilemma.

It's an amazing researcher, Joshua Green. I'm not sure which university he's at these days, but it's big into moral decision making. And basically, the way the Trolley Dilemma works, it's big into moral decision-making. And basically the way the trolley dilemma works, it's become pretty famous, right? That there's a trolley running out of control on a track, and the trolley, if it keeps going, is gonna run over five people

who happen to be lying on the track. Now why these people are lying on the track is never explained. I've never heard a good reason for it, but they are. You happen to be standing at a switch where the track can be diverted, and if you flip the switch, only one person gets run over. So the question is, do you flip the switch? Do you pull this switch and push the train onto another track, and you run over this one person as opposed to five. Well, it turns out most people pull the switch.

They see that logically one person dies versus five, I pull the switch. What's interesting with the trolley dilemma is that if you frame this differently, right? Trolley's running out of control down a track, it's going to run over five people, but you're standing on a footbridge over the track and there's a large person on the edge of the footbridge. If you push that person down, they're going to land on the track, all right, and they'll block

the trolley. And these dilemmas are always absolutes. You know with 100% certainty they're going to block the trolley. Do you push the person? It turns out a lot of people don't push the person and it's because this idea of direct physical engagement, right? And what's interesting with it with this dilemma is if you look at brain activity, again you can predict what people are gonna do. If there is a lot of activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, people would make the utilitarian or logical decision and they would push the large person onto the tracks. However, if that activity is low and not large,

then people tend to not push the large person. So again, you can predict what people are gonna do by looking at the brain activity in their prefrontal cortex, their analytical system, and in the insular cortex and the amygdala, their emotional system. So what you have is you can see that tug of war. So where we're at now is we've got this idea of Huygens and expected values, but we realize there's problems with them.

So we fell into this idea of gut hunch decisions versus analytical decisions. And now I've thrown this idea of emotion at you as well. And you have to factor all this in when you're really thinking about understanding decision-making. But there's some other factors as well. And I'll take you through some of them

in the next 10 minutes or so. One is experience. Again, this is research that I did a couple years ago with a wonderful person named Pam Hreska. We published this back in 2016. As it turns out, the medical community really likes the system one, system two idea. And they almost live in fear of it a bit

because they don't want experienced doctors to make gut hunch decisions.'t want experienced doctors to make gut hunch decisions. They want experienced doctors to make systematic or analytical decisions. So they really believe in this. So we thought we'd look at this. And what we did is we put a bunch of senior medical students into an fMRI scanner,

but we also put in a bunch of experienced clinicians and we got them to diagnose medical cases. All right, so I've talked about fMRI. I don't want to go into methods detail too much, but basically with fMRI, you're measuring blood flow in the brain and you can get an idea of what brain regions are active. So medical students experience clinicians in an fMRI scanner one at a time and they're diagnosing clinical cases.

All right. And we were focused primarily on liver diseases. That was just a set of cases we were given. And they basically get all these measurements and readings. And if you have a medical degree, you can look at these numbers and you can diagnose the case. So we had the students and the experienced clinicians diagnose the case. So we had the students and the experienced clinicians

diagnose the cases, and we were expecting to see more of the system one, system two result, midbrain sort of stuff versus prefrontal, but we actually didn't see that. What we found was that the novices were using more left frontal activity, and if you dive into the literature, you were using more left frontal activity. And if you dive into the literature, you find out that that left frontal activity is associated with book-based knowledge. It's, it's,

it's basically the medical students were going through what they learned in class and they were trying to think, okay, well, we took a class on this, you know, or what did the textbook say? Whereas the exports had more right frontal activity, which is basically associated with experience. That's the experience, that's the experts not making a gut hunch decision. They're sorting through all the clinical cases they've seen,

going, okay, when have I seen numbers like this before? And what did they mean? So it was kind of a cool finding. So it showed that with experience, even which side of the prefrontal cortex gets engaged in decision-making changes and whether you're using book-based knowledge versus experience-based knowledge.

Another factor, again, that we've talked about on the podcast, but I'll throw in here because it was in the talk, was the concept of ownership or relevance to self. In our paradigm, we basically had people gambling for some amount of money and you were queued by a frame around that would show people say $5 and then we'd put a queue around the outside and that queue was either blue or red, or blue or red, blue or green. I think it was blue and green. And if it was blue, that meant you're gambling for yourself.

If it was green, you're gambling for someone else. And this is interesting because we were curious to see, you know, what is the brain doing when you're making a decision for yourself relative to making a decision for someone else? And what we found out was that there was this massive response to wins when you were gambling for yourself, but that response wasn't there when you were gambling for someone else.

So in other words, the ownership effect is basically your brain is prioritizing things that are about you in terms of your learning and decision-making systems. But when you're for other people your brain doesn't seem to care as much and you might go well, no kidding Well as someone that has money in the hands of an investment banker I'm quite concerned whether his decision and reward system is ignoring, you know Wins and losses when they're looking at financial results That's the ownership effect. It impacts decision-making. Fatigue's one again, I've talked about on the podcast, but it obviously impacts

decision-making and specifically cognitive fatigue. The medical community, again, we do a lot of work with the medical school here, University of Victoria. They're living in fear of tired physicians because tired physicians make mistakes. We know that. And what we did is we basically looked to measure this directly. We looked at students who were actually making decisions in a clinical simulation room. So the students were doing a 12-hour simulated night on call, and we measured their brain activity before they started the shift, and then we measured it at the end. And lo and behold, we found that their brainwaves, the ones that are associated with memory and recall,

and play a key role in decision-making, were reduced with fatigue. This is important because it just shows that your decision making systems are impaired when we're tired. Now we know that, alright, everyone knows that, but yet we still let doctors work 20 hour shifts. We still let, there's a lot of professions where people work ridiculous amounts of time, and we know for a fact that their brains aren't able to make decisions on that timeframe. Alcohol, another obvious one. Alright, what's interesting about alcohol, and we've talked about it before so I won't spend long,

I don't think we've talked about this specific study, is you've got the prefrontal cortex. What does alcohol do? It basically, it sort of inhibits your analytical decision-making system, but at the same time, it's ramping up your emotional decision-making system. So we had people perform a simple decision-making task. It's typically with our lab, it's a gambling game. Do you wanna pick the blue square or the red square or the blue square or the green square?

And you'll learn which one's better and away you go. Now in this case, this is work done by a former student of mine, Harvey House. What was interesting with Harvey's work is she actually didn't look at when people were intoxicated. She looked at when they were hung over. So people got intoxicated. And then when they were hung over,

we measured their brain responses in this decision-making task. And lo and behold, when they were hung over, their brain responses were impaired. So your decision-making is impaired when you're inebriated, but it's also impaired the day after. What's interesting about that is, you know, in a lot of people, in a lot of professions, they go out the night before, they get their sleep, they drink a glass of water, and they think, well, I'm okay to go. But if you're hungover, your decision-making system is still not functioning as well as it could. So why do we do the dumb things we do? Well, you're balancing exploration with exploitation.

Your knowledge of values and probabilities is skewed and difficult to figure out. You've got this problem of system one versus system two decisions. Your gut hunts decisions aren't always right, but sometimes they are. And your analytical decisions, to be fair, sometimes you arrive

at the wrong conclusions. You've got this battle between an emotional system and a logical system. And then you've got all these other factors that I've mentioned. So if you take all of this together, there's a lot of room to make mistakes. And that's why we do the dumb things we can do. Now I'm going to do this very quickly because I've talked a lot about brain health on the podcast, but I did include it in the talk. How can we improve decision making? One, sleep.

Easiest way to improve decision making. Two, diet. People on a healthy diet and avoid high sugar diets, avoid alcohol, typically make better decisions. Exercise, we've talked about exercise in the podcast. Even a 15 minute walk outside, preferable to indoors, talked about that too, research from our lab, improves decision making. Try to do a better job of evaluating value and probability. Write things down, try to make actual estimates and think to yourself,

what is this really worth to me? What is the likelihood of it making me happier, being a good outcome? And be wary of the gut hunch. If you're making decision making, if you just drive a decision very rapidly, just maybe take a step back and count to 30 and think about it. And that's it. That's the talk I gave at Indiana University. I just want to say thank you again to the Neuroscience Club at Indiana University, and a special thank you to my new friend, Braden, for inviting me.

It was such a great, great time coming back to Indiana and I really had fun giving the talk. Just a reminder, there's the website, right? Thatneuroscienceguy.com. These slides are gonna be there. I'm gonna post them as soon as I'm hit stop record, so they'll be up for you to look at. There's also links to Etsy and Patreon.

Don't forget, you can buy merch. You can donate to the podcast. The money goes to graduate students in the Craig Olson Lab, supporting them in their neuroscience training. Follow us on Instagram, X or threads, at thatneurosciguy. Jennifer's putting up lots of cool stuff on Instagram about the podcast. Check it out. And of course, send us a message on X or threads or even at

thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com because we really want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. And of course, as ever, the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't already. My name is Olav Kregelsen and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another episode of the podcast. Thanks for listening.