Making Big Decisions Easier

'Sleeping on it' best for complex decisions
February 16, 2006 New Scientist (vol 311, p 1005)

“Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes. The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result with which people remain happy than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem.”

“Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with.”

Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands says “We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions – ones that they remained happy with – if they consciously deliberated over the information.”

“But once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions.”

Expectation counts
The unconscious mind appears to need some instruction. “It was only when people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach a decision that they were able to come up with the right one.” If they were told that none of what they had been shown was important before being given the puzzles, they failed to make satisfactory choices.

“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,” Dijksterhuis says.

Interruptions Lower IQs

From an article in New Scientist magazine, April, 30 2005:

The next time your boss complains you are not focused enough, blame it on email and phone calls. Even smoking dope has less effect on your ability to concentrate on the task in hand.

At least that's what Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist King's College London, found when he and his team asked 80 volunteers to carry out problem-solving tasks, first in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with emails and phone calls.

Despite being told to ignore the interruptions, the average IQ of the volunteers dropped by about 10 points. Not everyone was equally affected - men were twice as distracted as women. Studies have also shown that IQs of people high on pot drop by only 5 points.

"If left unchecked, 'infomania' will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness," says Wilson. "This is a very real and widespread phenomenon." Information overload can reduce a person's ability to focus as much as losing a night's sleep can, he adds.

Giving Your Brain a Boost

According to an article in the Big News Network, this endless year of campaigning could have a silver lining. Election-year politics could give your brain a boost: "the fever pitch of the season can," says Neuro-pharmacologist John D. Roache of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio inspire us in many ways. "The brain has hard-wired systems that control attention and learning in processes that motivate us, including hunger, sex drive and social involvement." An interest in politics can perhaps stimulate these systems in the brain!

We should be so lucky!

"As we listen to the candidates and think about what is being said, the brain processes the information, which grows neural connections and increases the neurochemical signaling that is associated with learning and memory," says Roache. Actively participating in the election campaigns may be even more beneficial than merely following them.

"If we become emotionally engaged and even become politically active by going to a rally or actively campaigning for a candidate, then the greater levels of emotion or commitment further enhance the brain processes and connect them all the more with the emotion and physical activity involved," he said. ...Here's hoping!

Thinking in an Age of Complexity

How to Think: Managing Brain Resources in an Age of Complexity by Ed Boyden in Technology Review is brilliant article, excerpted herer

"When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules...

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read...

2. Learn how to learn, rapidly... Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works.

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there...

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day...

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things...

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly... Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on...

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols... Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world..

10. Keep it simple... If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler,
do it...