The One You Feed - David Redish

Episode Date: April 7, 2015

This week we talk to David Redish about decision makingDavid Redish is currently a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He received his undergraduate degree in writing and computer science from Johns Hopkins in 1991 and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, where he was a student member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition under the supervision of Dr. David Touretzky. He was a postdoc with Drs. Bruce McNaughton and Carol Barnes at the University of Arizona from 1997-2000. He has been at the University of Minnesota since 2000, where his lab studies learning, memory, and how animals (including humans) make decisions. His latest book is called The Mind within the Brain: How We Make Decisions and How those Decisions Go Wrong.   In This Interview David and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.What a decision is.The four decision making systems in humans.For more information visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

That's a great question, and unfortunately, the answer seems to be, we don't know yet. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is David Reddish, professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. David's laboratory studies learning, memory, and how animals, including humans, make decisions. His latest book is called The Mind Within the Brain, How We Make Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong. Here's the interview. Hi, David. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to get you on. Your book is called The Mind Within the Brain,

How We Make Decisions and How Those Decisions Go Wrong, which is a very, this is a pretty, it straddles the line between what I would call sort of a popular science treatment and a pretty deep exploration of a lot of these things. So I found it kind of, it was certainly deeper in a lot of categories than I'm used to going into some of this stuff, but it was very, very interesting. Thank you. The goal was to make a book that was both readable by, you know, by everybody, but also wouldn't tick my colleagues off. That's a tough line to walk in the academic world, isn't it? It is. I hope that it succeeded. I think you did a good job of it. I think it is

readable, and yet it's not, you know, you're definitely going into a lot of depth. So we'll start off with the parable, and then we'll jump more into the book. So there is an old parable, the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, In life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, Grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think this is a fascinating parable because it speaks to the human social interaction. You notice that all of the wolves, I don't know, you know, their accoutrements, what they're about are all the things about interacting with other people. And one of the things that we now really know in neuroscience is that this is a part of us, these kind of social interactions, and they come not from the very cognitive kind of perspective, but rather from those deep emotional relationships.

And what we now call the Pavlovian system, which I'm sure we'll get into eventually. But the system that is the species specific things that make us human. So I find this, this power, it's very interesting because of course one of the big issues is how do you connect up with that part of yourself how do you how do you feed the parts of yourself that you want to be in these kind of less i don't want to say conscious but less deliberative, less cognitive kind of components. Right. In your book, you talk about that there are multiple decision-making systems within each of us and that the actions that we end up taking are a consequence of the interaction of those systems. Can you explain what some of those different decision-making systems are? Sure. So we can start with the idea that what a decision is, is it's taking kind of things from

your past, things that you're seeing around you, the sensory signals that you're seeing now, and your goals, and kind of driving to create an appropriate action. But there are lots of, we would say, computations that you can do, lots of ways to solve that question. And it turns out there are at least four different systems in the human system, in fact, in all mammals, that solve that task. Do you want me to go through them now? Do you want to?

Sure. Yeah, let's just just let's dive into them let's dive in so the the interesting thing is that they are you know obviously there is the the big what we would call the deliberative system this is a system that allows you to imagine a future put yourself into that future and then make a decision between those two choices. This deliberative system is very slow. It takes a lot of effort. Think of it as what job am I going to take? What college am I going to go to? It's good for big decisions like that. But if you're going to do something fast, for example, hitting a baseball, you really don't have time to plan through all the possibilities. You've got a few

hundred milliseconds to decide whether or not to swing. And so there's a second system, we call it the procedural system, that basically has learned over time to categorize the world very quickly, and then decide what's the right action to take. And this is expertise. So a sports star, a musician, a firefighter, for example, deciding, you know, is that building safe or not? So those are kind of two of the four. The third one is kind of interesting because we call it the Pavlovian system because this is what Pavlov's famous dogs were doing.

And what it is, is it's a species specific behavior, a behavior that you have evolved for your species, that you learn the right situation to release. So for example, Pavlov's dogs learned that when the bell rang, they would get food, so they salivated. But it turns out that this is used for lots, but it turns out that this is used for lots not only of survival circuits uh running away from a lion but also social interactions particularly among social creatures like humans so all of those behaviors that those dogs those wolves were talking about anger jealousy kindness um shame all of these internal you know these social interactions turn out to be part of that third system. And very interesting that we can talk about it. It turns out that actually a

lot of human morality comes from that third system, which is absolutely fascinating to me. The fourth system we have to include for completeness is reflexes. What reflexes have done is learned over a very long evolutionary time. They've learned at this moment, you've got to react quickly. You've got to do this. It's the stimulus and the response are all already essentially built in. And we include them because then we can talk about conflicts, like preventing a reflex is a deliberative system in conflict with your reflex system. Yeah, you say there are irrationality tends to come when these different systems are in conflict with each other.

I think we have to be careful with the word irrationality. I think that the word irrationality suggests that we know what the right answer is in lots of these cases. answer is in lots of these cases. A lot of what we see is, what I would say is that each of these systems is kind of really good for certain situations, right? If you're hitting a baseball, you want your procedural system, but if you're deciding between colleges, you want your deliberative system. And that means that in situations, these different systems can come up with different answers. And so you can find them into conflict in very interesting ways. And so let's go back to the Pavlovian system a little bit. Can you give me an example of how

that does affect social interaction? Yeah, my favorite example is the ultimatum game, and I probably should explain it for the listeners. So the ultimatum game is, think of it as an experimental morality game. You have two players. The first player is given some amount of money, say $20, and this first player decides how to split the money between the two players. So player A keeps $10 and player B gets $10. Nice fair split. Or player A gets $19 and player B only gets $1. And then in the game, player B gets to decide whether they take the deal or not. And if they take the deal, they walk away with that money. If player A says, I get 19 and player B gets one, then they walk away with $19 and $1. But if player B says, no, I don't like that deal, nobody gets anything. And what's interesting about this is that from a simple, how do you make more money situation, player B should take anything, right? Player A says,

I get 19, you get one. Player B is a dollar richer than player B was before. But most people don't react that way. Most people react with anger. They react with what we call the forget you response. And they basically throw the money back in player A's face if player A hasn't given them a decent deal. And in practice, people end up being about 60-40. And that's the Pavlovian system. That's that emotional system coming back and saying, this is not a situation that I'm going to accept. So that decision to accept or not accept that is the way that the Pavlovian system works. Is that intrinsically built into me or is that something that I learn over time how I react in that situation? So, for example, could I could I be trained to think about it very differently?

And then yet it come from that level of the decision making system. It depends on the one you feed. Absolutely. It depends on, you can be trained. And in fact, you can learn to be, you know, to take any deal. You can learn what the social culture is, right? That you're within. And you very much learn when is it appropriate to make a pass at somebody, for example, right? So an emotional statement of that's an attractive person, you know, I'm going to make a pass at that person.

structure. In fact, how a person makes that pass is very, I won't say completely built in, but if you were to watch, you know, people making passes at other people, they're pretty similar across many cultures. But when that's appropriate or not is something that we definitely learn. Absolutely. And these are cultural definitions that we learn in exactly the same way that we learn the right situations for those responses. One of the things that you talk about in the book, and there's more and more studies seem, you know, I just keep kind of stumbling upon them, which is that a lot of the conscious decisions or what we think are conscious decisions are actually rationalizations after the fact. Yes, that's very true. But I want to be careful with that because a lot of people take that to mean that they are somehow not making the decision. And I think that's a mistake. I think that the fact that we recognize consciously when that decision occurs does not mean that it wasn't us who made that decision. You talk about an analogy in the book that is an analogy I've always really liked, which is

Jonathan Haidt's analogy of the rider and the elephant. And you said that you don't completely agree with that analogy because it makes it sound like there are these different selves, where in reality, all these different decision making systems compromise who we are. And so we might be exercising one or the other of them, but that's still us. Exactly. I mean, I wouldn't want to say that some, you know, sports star or musician who's practiced 10,000 hours in order to get to that skill level, you know, that's part of who they are, being able to make those decisions. And, you know, when I fall in love, you know, that's part of who they are, being able to make those decisions. And, you know, when I fall in love, you know, that's me falling in love. And likewise,

when you fall in love, that's you falling in love. It's not some horse that you're riding. And actually, the Jonathan Haidt book actually ends by saying, actually, you are both the rider and the horse. And my problem is that it ends there instead of beginning there. Yep. Well, I think what gets tricky there is we think of ourselves as, or we are conscious, right? There's the, there's the, you know, the, the deliberative system that you talked about, or the consciousness that's aware that we're conscious. And yet all these other things are happening at a level that feels unconscious. And so even though those are part of us, it feels very difficult to have any access to those parts or to change or to

affect how those parts work, at least with the conscious brain. I'm not sure that they're unconscious. It's harder to describe that consciousness, but I think it's there. So, you know, I keep coming back to the sports star, a sports star or a musician who's, you know, in the zone, you know, a jazz musician will often talk about kind of coming into themselves at the moment when they're playing a, you know, an improv and it's working and everything's kind of working. That's not them. They don't feel out of body. They feel in their body. Right. And so I think that that is a form of working. That's not them. They don't feel out of body. They feel in their body. Right. And so I think that that is a form of consciousness. You know, the it's not it's just that it's hard to

linguistically describe it. But it's still very much, you know, part of who we are and how we we can learn to control those things. You know, we do control those things. We practice, for example. Right. Well, I think they're hard to linguistically name. They're also hard to summon on demand, seems to me. Not so sure. They're hard for the deliberative system to summon on demand. Yes, exactly. And I guess I think so.

What I'm sort of saying is that maybe, or maybe the other way of saying is that I am viewing all that from the lens of the deliberative system. Yes. And I think that's a common perspective, but it's one I actually am trying to argue against with the book. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does tom cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you have any means or methods that you think is helpful to access those other systems or to switch between those systems? So, for example, you could say, well, you know, this person's always stuck in their head. They're always in the deliberative. Everything is deliberative. And you might say with another person, well, it seems like they're, you know, they're very Pavlovian. They're driven by all these other things.

Is there ways to switch between these different systems to make our decision-making better? Because you kind of argue that that is one way to make better decisions, is to make sure you're applying the right system to the right situation. That's a great question. And unfortunately, the answer seems to be, we don't know yet. One of my favorite new science books is a book called Ignorance by Stuart Feierstein. And he argues in it that the goal of science is to open questions you didn't know were questions until you did the science. And we're kind of at that right now, now that we know

that there are these multiple decision systems, that these multiple decision systems are kind of individualized, right? That your Pavlovian system is a little different from mine, in part because of your experiences. And that means that we have, that is us, but how do we switch between them? And we don't actually know that right now. This is, I mean, this is one of the things I love about this field right now, is that we can, in the course of a 20-minute conversation, come to the limits of our current knowledge. This is where the science is right now. We know that there's a number of possibilities about how this could work, and people are doing experiments and looking at these questions right now, but we don't actually know what mediates these decisions, how these different systems mediate each other right now. That's actually

just not known. Right. Because on the show lately, we've had a bunch of conversations, a little bit between, and it's sort of a simplification, but with that idea of the thinking fast and slow brain, right? You've got your conscious brain that is a lot slower, but it's very deliberative. It can think logically and rationally. And then you've got, again, that faster, more instinctive, and you sort of break that apart into different categories. I think it's very important to break that apart into the different categories, because the categories, there's an old theory, I mean, it goes all the way back to Augustine and Plato, that, um, you know, that you have this, this,

this rational brain that is this, this deliberative, which isn't really rational, we have to be careful with that word. But and then you have this kind of animal brain instead, that underneath it, I think that that's a misnomer i think that i'd like to try to to undercut that um that theory with this more specific one that looks at these multiple systems because the the fast component there's a big difference between a fast component that you've practiced for 10 000 hours and now you are an expert in commanding a tank or commanding a group of firemen deciding what to do with the building, right? That you have to make these fast decisions that you've practiced on.

And that's very, very different from the emotional statement of, oh, that person's cute. I want to go, I'm attracted to that person, right? Those are very different systems that work very differently. And we've got to be careful not to mix them up. And so what you're saying is we tend to lump both those things into this animal brain or faster brain concept. And really there's a bunch of different things going on under the covers there. That's right. And I think that it's dangerous and oversimple to lump them into that one fast brain, because they are very, very different. And in fact, I think part of the issue is controlling them requires very different processes. So I like the example. Actually, I love that parable that you bring up at the beginning about you feeding the wolf, right? A lot of the way one interacts with

this Pavlovian system is by feeding it, right? Do you allow yourself to become angry? Sometimes that's important. Do you allow yourself to encompass joy? That's important, right? But that's a very different control of how do you get yourself into the mindset for the big football game where you don't want to be thinking, you know, with your deliberative system, but you also really don't want to be thinking with that Pavlovian system because people are yelling at you and taunting you and you have to be under very tight control. So one of the things that you talk about is you say that the decision making in our brain arises from physical processes that occur in the brain because our brain is a physical thing. And so it has vulnerabilities, what we might call a failure mode in the engineering

world. And that's where when we have, for lack of a better word, breakdowns in the engineering world. And that's where, when we have, you know, for lack of a better word, breakdowns in the system, it's, it's understanding that these are physical processes that that have the ability to fail or break down. Can you expound on that? Um, sure. So I think the first thing that we have to start with is this, this point about the physical brain, and that the fact that we are a physical brain doesn't mean we're not, we the not, it's not denying the mind, the mind exists, it's just instantiated in a physical brain, that's kind of, that's the medium in which it exists. bridge or a car or, you know, a computer, it has, or a brain, which is different from all three of those things. It has ways, it has weak links in the chain. And I always, I really kind of go back and forth between these various modes, you know, words, you know, vulnerabilities or failure modes. The engineers call them failure modes, but I don't want to say this means you're a failure if you have one of these things. It's kind of really a statement of how does the system break down?

And that's really the kind of the issue here. And it turns out that a lot of the it's a new perspective on kind of issues like psychiatry and a lot of psychology. And what is this breakdown? What is going down? what is this breakdown? What is going down? How is this breakdown happening? And what's interesting is that a lot of these breakdowns can separate very, very different psychiatric phenomena. And it's likely that, in fact, if we could get the right treatment to the right breakdown,

then we can actually fix things better. Will you talk about addiction as, so I'll just, I'll jump to that. Addiction is being a symptom of a breakdown in the system. And it could be, those different systems could be failing in different ways that it's not this, you know, to call it addiction is a bit of a too broad of a term. And you're saying that if you can find out where the failure in the system is or which system is failing, you can try and address that more directly. Can you maybe give a couple examples of that in relation to addiction? Sure. I mean, so, for example, we know that what would be a good kind of example?

Well, you could imagine a case where you have practiced a habit too much, right? So you've smoked that cigarette just too many times. And what happens is your habit system is now kind of hooked on that. It's built in that habit into its procedural components. So on the other hand, you could have a system which has recognized that if you were to take this drug, you feel extreme pleasure. And so now you want to get to that pleasure again by thinking about it. So you could actually have a deliberative mode that says, I want to go and find that thing. Or you can say, oh, I'm just kind of picking up my habit. And in fact, if you say, does this make you take, you know, I don't say make you, does'm just kind of picking up my habit. And in fact, if you say, does this make you take, you know, I don't say make you, does this, does this explain why you take drugs? Let's phrase it that way. Does this explain why you take drugs? That both of those explain why, and they have, they have very different reasons, and they would require very different treatments.

Well, what I find interesting about that is I think that actually that's absolutely true, that there are different breakdowns. But I think often, at least in my experience, and I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict and I know a lot of people, is that you have those breakdowns across multiple systems. It's kind of all those things you describe. It can be all of those things kind of layered on top of each other. The other one that you talk about that I think is really interesting is you talk about the concept of value, which you define is how much one is willing to pay, trade or work, you know, for a reward or to avoid punishment. not intrinsic to any object, but we have to recalculate it every time. And one of the things about addiction clearly is, at least for me, in my experience at different points is that valuing

these different parts of our lives, the different things in our lives gets way out of whack. Um, in, in how you assign value to say a, uh, uh, drink versus a family, you know, your, your family, those kinds of things that happen. Um, But I thought that was really interesting in that, that value, we have to calculate every time with an object. And that that changes over time. And I just thought that was a really interesting idea. So one of the things that's very interesting about value is each of these decision making systems, in a sense, has its own way of calculating value right so the deliberative system is imagining if i were to go do this how good would it be whereas the um procedural or habit system has record learned i'm in this situation in this situation the best thing is to do this

and you can actually construct and and you can find that they can go into conflict because one value could in fact say, oh, I'm in a situation where I'm going to do this. And another, like you go to the bar, you're going to drink, right? Whereas, so what you find is you can actually find cases where you can say, I'm not going to go to the bar because if I went to the bar, I would drink. And so it's called pre-commitment. And it's in some sense, a conflict between you and yourself. Right. Right. So you have the, the, you at sitting at home does not want to go drink because the you sitting at home knows that if you go drink, you'll have the drink, you'll embarrass or you'll hate yourself or whatever. Right. You don't want that. And yet, if you were to go to the bar, because your friend convinces you or whatever,

now the you at the bar has a different decision. And changes takes a different choice. Yep. I well, I think, you know, speaking from personal experience, I think that is one of the most painful parts of addiction is that that warring, you know, within your brain, those different, you know, like you said, you call it being in conflict with yourself, which is exactly what it feels like. I think one of the important points here is that we can use this, actually, if we know, aha, it's, you know, this situation or this aspect that is the problem, we could use that by trying to push you into using one of the other systems.

So, for example, can we force you to always deliberate over your choices? Or could we, for example, make it easy for you to sidestep that choice? I think that there's a lot of processes by a number of things where, you know, this, for example, is where a suicide hotline really works. Or, you know, my high school friends actually had kind of very specific kind of setups for these kinds of things where you can call

somebody anytime, any day, right? And it becomes, it's very easy. And in fact, you can convince yourself, I'll call them and then I'll go do whatever I'm going to do, right? Knowing full well that that call is going to cut off the action plan that you don't want to do but do want to do. Right. Right. So I think if we know where these vulnerability, these breakdowns, these failure modes are happening in a given individual, we can guide the treatment to that individual to essentially use the other systems to help it and to help kind of correct for it.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed jason bobblehead it's called really no really and you can find it on the iheart radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Use the term contingency management in the book. What does that mean? Contingency management is a fascinating treatment for a number of things, including addiction,

where basically you're paying people not to take drugs. And at this point, it's not 100% known why contingency management works. It works surprisingly well. We have been working in my lab right now on a theory, and we're kind of working through what we would call the theoretical neuroscience of this, that what contingency management does is shifts you into this deliberative mode because it forces you into a choice of not should I take drugs or not, but should I take drugs or not or get this prize or this money or this, even this, you know, good job from my, you know, from the treatment person, from the person providing the treatment. Now, I want to emphasize, this is still, we don't know why contingency management works. We're still, we're working on this.

This is the current theory that we're working on. But that's a very, if we're right about why it works, that's a very interesting example where providing these very small rewards can allow somebody to actually reject very expensive things. Certainly you say it could be that it switches you into the deliberative mode. What I think is interesting is that I think for a lot of addicts or alcoholics, there's a lot of deliberation going on, but it's between good and bad. And what, what you're positing there is between, um, every reason not to do it is always framed as a negative. And what you're sort of doing is changing it and framing the reason, uh, not to do it is for a positive reason, or you're,

you're substituting some other reward in there. And I just think that's, you're right, it's interesting to see why that would work the way it does. It's also much more concrete. So one of the things that we've seen in, you know, one of the things about this is each of these systems has its own, you know, mechanism. And the deliberative mechanism entails imagining the actual future. And that means that the more concrete that future is, the easier it is to imagine. And in fact, you can make people more likely to pick a future by making that future more

concrete to them, saying, imagine this specific example. So one possibility is that part of what contingency management is doing is making the don't be an addict, the don't take drugs future into a more concrete future. Because a lot of the take drugs or not situation is, well, I know exactly what that drug is going to feel like, but not doing it, what am I going to do? I'm going to wander around the house. I'm going to, you know, if I find this alternative concrete thing to, in some sense, mentally grab a hold of, it becomes easier to pick that choice.

Yeah, exactly, because those consequences, because if you're approaching it from a consequence perspective, I'm not going to do this because of potential future consequences. The further off those consequences are, the far harder it gets, at least in my experience, to connect those two things together. Right. And I think it's important to think about in terms of also it's very abstract, that not consequence. Right. When that not consequence becomes less abstract, and more concrete of, you know, my wife's really going to leave me now. That's when people go for treatment. Yeah, it's those kind of those moments when those things, the alternative becomes so concrete that

they have to they kind of it helps force them to respond. Do you have any data on whether contingency management continues to work over time? Because the other classic addiction problem, right, is, well, you know, my feet are on the fire. I do. I go get treatment. I get better. And then as time goes on, the remembrance of what that pain was like, the remembrance of the trouble fades, and it's easy to drift back into that previous circumstance. We do not have that data. I believe that data exists and I don't really, I'm not qualified at this point to state what it would be.

But of course, it's certainly possible to continue doing things like contingency management, you know, and continue to provide rewards for such things. You know, and then actually the cost of those rewards is much, much cheaper than the cost of the addiction to society. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm not, as I should point out, I'm a PhD, not an MD, and I don't actually do clinical practice. My main research is in the laboratory. And I don't know what the current status is on continuity management specific success long term. Okay. Well, I think we are near the end of our time. But I guess I would just ask you, is there any one thing that you would, you know, if we wanted to give to the listeners, one thing that could help them make better decisions in their life?

Is there anything you could boil it down to a point or two that would be easy to take away? Wow. Not to put you on the spot with anything difficult. I guess I haven't really thought of it that way, but I think that you could, you know, if I were to try to boil it down to kind of one point, it's to realize that all of these systems are you, right? And that the fact that there is, you know, an angry wolf and a kind wolf inside of you, and that the things you have practiced long term that have made you who you are, those are all part of what makes a person a person. And it does not diminish them in any sense to say that those are of all of these systems and trying not to just say, oh, I'm this thin shell of deliberation or this thin shell of linguistic explanation sitting on top of everything else. I think that you have to kind of accept the whole and be the whole person.

That would be, if I could, I would say that would be closest to a single point that I could try to make. As you say in the book, the Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. Yes. Are some of those systems more a default for some of us than others that we rely on them more or less? Are they really situationally called upon? I'm sure that they are certainly more for some people than others. Some people are certainly going to be more deliberative or more, you know, Pavlovian or better at, you know, learning procedural systems. I mean, this is personality. We all have personalities. But I think we also all have these systems. It's

not that, you know, there is, you know, person A is deliberative and person B is procedural. It's that person A tends to use the deliberative system a little more when they're in a conflict situation. Right. Well, David, thanks so much for little more when they're in a conflict situation. Right. Well, David, thanks so much for taking the time. It's a fascinating book. And as you said, the whole field right now of decision-making theory is just, there's so many different aspects of it that are really interesting. Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. Okay. Take care. Thank you. Bye.

Bye. Bye. You can learn more about David Reddish and this podcast at one you feed.net slash Reddish. That's R E D I S H.