The first section of my book talked about how decisions are a result of our emotions. People that have serious problems with their emotions have a very hard time making simple everyday decisions. Our emotions create opinions that we are accustomed to relying on. Picking up where I left off though, changes the perspective a bit and states how people can’t always coast on those emotions. “Dopamine neurons need to be continually trained and retrained, or else their predictive accuracy declines. Trusting one’s emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice” (Lehrer).
Bill Robertie is one of the only people in the world who’s a world-class expert in three different games, chess, poker, and backgammon. At first glance, chess, backgammon, and poker seem to rely on very different cognitive skills; so how did Robertie get so good at the three games? His response to this was, “I know how to practice. I know how to make myself better” (Lehrer). He knew he needed to critique and analyze every decision he made for every game, figuring out the ideal outcomes of each. Robertie identified that the most effective way to get better, is to focus on your mistakes. “In other words, you need to consciously consider the errors being internalized by your dopamine neurons” (Lehrer). Robertie would always carefully review each game afterwards, insisting on finding errors even after winning. “He knows that self-criticism is the secret to self-improvement; negative feedback is the best kind” (Lehrer).
We tend to think of experts, like Bill Robertie, as having intelligence dependent on a vast amount of explicit knowledge, but experts are extremely intuitive. “When an expert evaluates a situation, he doesn’t systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information” (Lehrer). Experts instead naturally depend on their emotions generated by his dopamine neurons. Like Robertie, they take their prediction errors and make it useful knowledge, giving him accurate feelings he wouldn’t even be able to explain.
Emotions aren’t perfect. We have to remember this even after finding out how helpful they can be in each of our decision-making processes. “They are a crucial cognitive tool, but even the most useful tools can’t solve every problem” (Lehrer). As we remember from the previous reading, dopamine neurons get excited by predictable rewards. What we weren’t already told is that they get even more excited by surprising ones. This is why 52 year-old Ann Klinestiver became an addicted gambler after put on medication for his Parkinson’s disease. The drug she was put on, Requip, imitates the activity of dopamine in the brain, increasing it. This drug was first like a miracle, fixing all her movement problems, but eventually ruined her life as she gambled away all of her life savings, her car, her belongings, and her husband leaving her for that. This is because of the reaction of our dopamine neurons to the surprising rewards. Most of the time, the brain will get over its astonishment, and will figure out which events predict the reward and the dopamine neurons will stop releasing so much of the neurotransmitter. Slot machines though, are unpredictable. The dopamine neurons try to make sense of the rewards, but they keep getting surprised. “Instead of getting bored by the haphazard payouts, the dopamine neurons become obsessed” (Lehrer). Luckily, after taking Ann off the medication, she lost her obsession for gambling. This just shows though, how emotional occurrences can also be very misleading when it comes to some decisions. “When emotions get out of control – and there are certain things that reliably make this happen – the results can be just as devastating as not having any emotions at all” (Lehrer).
No comments:
Post a Comment