Mind Games - Questions for Jonah Lehrer

A nice fluff piece Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, a writer for Seed Magazine, The Boston Globe, and his own blog, The Frontal Cortex. He is always entertaining and insightful. As an aside, damn he's young.

Questions for Jonah Lehrer

Mind Games

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: December 12, 2008

Your forthcoming book, “How We Decide,” is the latest entry in a growing field that might be called the science of decision-making. How do you explain the fascination with decisions?
For the first time, neuroscience can be applied to everyday life. The research on the neurotransmitter dopamine, for instance, can teach us why we play slot machines and overuse our credit cards.

Michael Prince for The New York Times

Are you a decisive person?
No, I’m pathologically indecisive. I wrote the book because I would spend 10 minutes in the cereal aisle choosing between Honey Nut Cheerios and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios.

Maybe indecisiveness is the price of being an intelligent human being who understands that actions have consequences.
That would be a little too self-congratulatory for me. Indecisiveness means you’re not listening carefully enough to your emotions, which know what you really want and could be whispering, “Go for the Honey Nut Cheerios.”

How is that idea any different from the gut decision-making that Malcolm Gladwelldescribes in “Blink”?
Fast-blink decisions are not always useful. The brain is full of different tools, and you don’t want to use a hammer if the problem requires more than a blunt hit.

Right now, as a consumer society in meltdown mode, aren’t we suffering from a surfeit of fast, unreflective decisions, i.e. spending?
I think retail stores and mortgage brokers have become a little too adept at tickling our dopamine neurons, and credit cards don’t help.

Can we incentivize saving?
Economists are setting up programs that help correct this irrational bias. For instance, instead of opting into a 401(k), you can be automatically enrolled unless you opt out.

Which Obama favors.
Yes.

How would you describe the Obama brain?
I think Obama’s real talent is metacognition, which is the ability to think about thinking. I imagine that if you took a scan of his brain, you would see lots of activity in the prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t mean thathe doesn’t experience the primal emotions that come from the amygdala.

For all his rationality, he seems drawn to people with overactive amygdalas, like Rahm Emanuel.
I think he is aware that the brain has a tendency to suppress dissonant ideas and fall into the certainty trap, and he wants to surround himself with people with strong opinions and set up an atmosphere that actively discourages groupthink.

Do you think cats and dogs are capable of rational thought?
Rationality is generally located in the prefrontal cortex, and while that brain area is really big in humans, it’s a pretty small part of the dog brain. This is why dogs don’t play chess — they chase Frisbees.

My dog strikes me as basically rational, except when she barks at garbage bags.
Your poor dog is like a 4-year-old, because 4-years-olds still don’t have a fully formed prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of the brain to develop.

After you graduated from Columbia, you were a Rhodes scholar. Is there a downside to that?
When I told my mom that I’d won the scholarship, the first thing she said was, “Don’t forget, you still haven’t done anything yet.” I think there’s a danger of forgetting that.

How old are you now?
I’m 27.

How nice. You have your whole life ahead of you. I hope you use it to make good decisions.
Me too. Hopefully, my prefrontal cortex is solidified by now.

Tags: Mind Games, Questions, Jonah Lehrer, Psychology, brain, Science, neuroscience, New York Times