Decisions, decisions…How We Decide/The Decisive Moment by Jonah Lehrer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Canongate:

2009. 320 pp./304 pp. $25/£16.99

“I was flying a Boeing 737 into Tokyo when the left engine caught on fire,” begins Jonah Lehrer in his captivating book on decision-making. What should a pilot do? The right decision will make the difference between life and death. Luckily, Lehrer was piloting a simulator and could replay his decisions. But how do you decide when you don’t get another chance? How We Decide uses the lessons of decision-making research to help us make better choices.

Lehrer asks if good decisions are always reached by extensive rational deliberations, or if we should sometimes rely on our automatic, emotional reactions. When is it best to use our gut instincts and when should we stop and reason? He organizes his answer around vivid anecdotes, each highlighting key concepts from psychology and behavioural economics. Lehrer is an expert storyteller, often using dramatic examples from aviation to highlight how rapid gut reactions averted one crash, whereas emo-tional control and reasoned, outside-the-box thinking by pilots let them survive in others.

Sometimes it is best to stop thinking al together. When trying to make optimal choices based on a large number of attributes, such as picking a car or a house, people are less accurate when left to ponder for a few minutes than when they are distracted for a similar period. One interpretation is that conscious thought is at a disadvantage when processing many attributes in parallel, owing to limitations in capacity. Such examples remind us of the limits of ourdeliberative decision-making processes.

Lehrer considers any decision that is not exe-cuted according to the rules of logic to be “irra-tional”. But in many cases these only show the limitations of laboratory studies. The book fails to note relevant perspectives from behavioural economics and game theory, according to which many emotions are rational evolutionary adap-tations that have essential roles in co operative behaviours and social interaction. More prob-lematic is Lehrer’s insistence on attributing deci-sions to either an emotional brain or a rational one. There is no evidence that the brain has distinct and opposing emotional and rational regions. A case in point is the dopamine sys-tem. Although described in the book as emo-tional, our current understanding is that it is rational: dopamine neurons signal a simple and computationally well-defined variable — the reward prediction error — and broadcast it

throughout the brain. This simplification of the complex function of the dopamine system is a major success story of neuroscience. As it turns out, the process by which these neurons signal errors may be suboptimal, but that does not make it irrational or emotional.

Lehrer has a tendency to present a carica-ture view of brain processing. For example, the nucleus accumbens “might want the George Foreman grill, but the insula knows that you can’t afford it, or the prefrontal cortex realizes that it’s a bad deal. The amygdala might like Hillary Clinton’s tough talk on foreign policy, but the ventral striatum is excited by Obama’s uplifting rhetoric.”

Such neurobabble has unfortunately become commonplace in science journalism. Lehrer is following a well-established lingo — and some blame lies with the scientific community for tolerating, if not encouraging, this trend. Until

recently we could not study a functioning human brain. All we had were the accidental lesions of patients whose tragic stories illuminated the functions of their missing brain regions. Recent advances in neuroscience dramatically changed this situation — but in this book the visual appeal of neuroimaging studies is often used as a substitute for the lessons learned. It is exciting to observe the nucleus accumbens ‘lighting up’ in a brain scan when a reward is provided, but this is not an explanation for ‘wanting’ and misses the subtler yet more enlightening findings about reward processing in the brain.

Lehrer aims high by applying lessons from the neuroscience of decision-making to everyday choices. He provides valuable — if obvious — advice, such as relying on gut instinct for unim-portant decisions but on reason when faced with new problems. But we were promised insights from neuroscience, not age-old wisdom.

Neuroscientists must grapple with how to communicate subtle conclusions in a world of headline-news reporting. Popular books such as this one could serve this goal of translat-ing science for the public. But by smoothing out the rough edges of our knowledge, Lehrer leads the reader astray. Among his well-told dramatic stories the science often gets lost. Yet he is a gifted writer, so I hope for his next project he will dig deeper, embrace complexity and make it his job to report from the cutting-edge of scientific knowledge. ■

Adam Kepecs is assistant professor of

neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,

New York 11724, USA.

e-mail: kepecs@cshl.edu

A fast-thinking pilot saved lives by landing his plane on the Hudson River in New York.

Songs on the brain

Swapping his microscope for a microphone, New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (pictured, right) took to the stage of the Highline Ballroom, a Manhattan music club. Leading his folk rock band, LeDoux articulated each line of his science-inspired songs with conviction, accompanied by electric guitar. His group, The Amygdaloids, featured heavily at Rock-It Science, a concert held last month to raise funds for research into sensory-processing disorders.

The charity concert, the brainchild of LeDoux and co-organized with psychologist Jennifer Jo Brout of the Sensation and Emotion Network in New York, mixed scientists with

professional musicians, and was headlined by singer–songwriter Rufus Wainwright.

LeDoux, who studies the biological mecha-nisms underlying emotional memory, sees rock ’n’ roll as a perfect vehicle for inspiring interest in neuroscience. “All our songs have a mind–brain angle. We believe we can interest someone in tough concepts through music.”

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Flashes of cosmic brillianceTim Otto Roth’s minimalist art installation reflects the complexity of cosmic radiation, explains Martin Kemp.

Daylight is fading over a grass-covered field. Looking like extra-large bee hives, 252 white cabins on short stilts are reg-ularly distributed across its vast expanse of 44,000 square metres. A larger ‘house’ occupies the space of the central 4 units. At the centre of each square block of16 cabins is set a two-tier, highly reflec-tive, cylindrical device.

As darkness envelops the array, short-lived flashes of light erupt unpredictably from the 16 devices. Sometimes one launches alone. At other times they evoke straight lines, or neat clusters. Or just flicker here and there. The flashes are so rapid and apparently random that our eyes search in vain for a repeated pattern. Logic appears to be defied. What are we witness-ing? A high-tech scientific experiment? Some sci-fi setting for a war of the worlds? An evoca-tion of a night-time bombing raid?

We are, in fact, watching a minimalist-style art installation by German artist Tim Otto Roth. His Cosmic Revelation (see http://tinyurl.com/cosrev) presents a sensory experience of the cosmic radiation detected by the KASCADE project at the Centre for Elementary Parti-cle and Astroparticle Physics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Roth’s installation is both an artwork and an act of science communication. And it interacts in an unexpected and compelling way with the systematic recording of cosmic phenomena.

The cabins contain detectors for the ele-mentary particles that move at speeds close to that of light and crash incessantly into our atmosphere. These multiple collisions initi-ate cascades of millions of new particles, and KASCADE measures those that have energies

of around 1014–1017 electronvolts (eV; one eV is equivalent to the energy acquired by an electron falling through a difference in potential of one volt). Together with other detector units distrib-uted across the research centre, the KASCADE-Grande experiment can detect energies as high as 1018 eV. The results are recorded in a central laboratory by neat grids of LEDs. KASCADE’s scientists can view the topographical display of

data received by all 252 cabins live on the Internet.

Roth’s 16 strobe-light units are in themselves pieces of high-tech sculp-ture that come into their own as beau-tiful objects during daylight hours. A 1,500-watt linear flash tube in each unit is protected from the weather

by the upper disc. A convex mirror is set into the lower disc so as to project the pulses of light radially from the cylinder’s open sides.

These ‘cosmic mirrors’ carry the visual out-puts of the laboratory apparatus back into the field of the outdoor detectors, transforming the energies of the unseen into wavelengths accessible to human sight. Thus transformed,

the particles’ energies are transmitted back into the space through which they have cascaded.

When Roth categorizes his work as minimalist, he is referring to the reductive mode in art and music that arose in the late 1960s. It relies on the stripping down of a composition into basic units, often regularly repeated and frequently mathematical in form. From the repetition and regularity, paradoxical variousness and complex-ity emerge when the viewer moves or the lighting changes. Reflective sur-faces are particularly favoured.

The generation of complexity from simplicity parallels those physical phenomena that fall under the embrace of chaos theory, and mirrors the reverse processes of measurement, as when the unpredictable complexity of the particle showers are first trapped in the grids of detectors and then registered in the LED arrays in the lab. The chaos of the flashes in Roth’s apparatus is placed in a subtle dialogue with both the phenomenon itself and the manner of its recording.

The ancient followers of Pythagoras char-acterized the harmonics of cosmic energy as the “music of the spheres”. The mathematical foundations lay in the proportional system of the musical scale and in the perfections of Euclidean geometry. Here, by contrast, we stand as witnesses to the chaotic drumbeats of cosmic radiation. The new music is that of quantum mechanics and complexity — proba-bilistic rather than deterministic. A new art is encoding a new science. ■

Martin Kemp is emeritus professor in history of

art at the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

See also page 847 and www.nature.com/astro09.

The Amygdaloids performed tunes from their new album, Brainstorm, some of which explore how love can disrupt normal thought process-ing. In Crime of Passion, a jealous lover’s rage momentarily overwhelms his rational thinking: “Sentenced to death for a crime I did commit/I couldn’t stop/I did it in a fit/of anger and pain.”

Cognitive psychologist, vocalist and guitarist Daniel Levitin of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, sang a scientific homage to the 1989 hit Wicked Game in which Chris Isaak croons “No, I don’t want to fall in love.” Levitin’s version,

I Don’t Want My Brain Cut In Two, refers to a drastic procedure once used to treat epilepsy.

Levitin says his experiences in the recording industry now inform his work in the lab. “I was always astonished by how long it takes to make a three-minute song, and how many times you have to record to get it right.” He explains that he has to be similarly patient when repeating experiments or redrafting a research paper.

Other scientist performers included neuroscientist and classical guitarist David Sulzer, known on stage as Dave Soldier, and

geneticist Pardis Sabeti, of Boston-based band Thousand Days. Among the professional musicians was guitarist Lenny Kaye, who has recorded with punk singer Patti Smith, and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider.

Wainwright held nothing back in his set. He professed he “failed every science course [he] ever took”, but supported the charity gig because “scientists have become the new oppressed peo-ple, and I’m always there for the oppressed.” ■

Roxanne Khamsi is news editor at Nature

Medicine in New York.

Cosmic-ray showers trigger a light display at the KASCADE array.

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