Antonio Damasio: INET Keynote Address entitled Human Decisions

Antonio Damasio has written the book the George Soros gave me three copies of over many different times in many different months I think he probably lent them all to me but three different times he gave me a copy of Descartes Serra with great enthusiasm and I read it with great enthusiasm and we're very very excited that dr. DiMaggio could join us tonight to introduce dr. DiMaggio his eye nets own psychotherapist David Tucket who's written a book called the mind of the market and after my speech today I was thinking you have to do the sequel called the mind of society to broaden the perspective but what David who even before I had started when we met has been a tremendous tremendous creative influence and really follows his own voice and we say the different drummer in his head Pete Townsend's music which I introduced with is called is it in my head and David is one of these clever men who pretends to be my tennis coach when he's actually I net psychotherapist so at any rate David please take the stage we look forward to your thoughts and after tomorrow's presentation this is very exciting thank you very much indeed Rob that introduction I'm going to start by introducing Antonia and then he will speak and then we will invite you to ask questions and try to have some bit of a discussion Antonio Damasio is a university professor David don't--if professor of neuroscience and director of the brain and Kriya to Institute at the University of Southern California he is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla California he is also an adjunct professor sorry demacia has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how the brain processes memory language emotions and decisions and has described his discoveries in best-selling books Descartes era as Robert said the feeling of what happens and looking for Spinoza and these have been translated and taught in universities worldwide he's the author of numerous scientific articles and his research has received continuous federal funding for 25 years he's recipient of many awards including the Honda Prize 2010 the Asturias Prize in science and technology and the senior a prize which he shared with his wife Hannah DiMaggio who's here this evening demacia is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the bavarian academy of sciences and the european academy of sciences and arts he has been named highly cited researcher by the institute for scientific information and also holds honorary doctorates from several universities his most recent book self comes to mind has just appeared in paperback and we look forward I'll I do very much to his talk which will be called human decisions thank you very much for your kind introduction David and thank you very much George for inviting me and Robert as well we're enjoying this meeting tremendously Hannah and I and I realize now that I've been hiding in neuroscience meetings and economic meetings are much more fun now now that you know that I'm a neurologist and neuroscientists I know that you are not expecting me to solve the problems of sovereign that or the euro and I can just talk a little bit about something that I may know a little bit about and that is how the brain in one's own mind makes decisions especially good decisions and let me start because we don't have much time with the first slide which talks about the fact that our departure point on this problem was really to be very puzzled about what one would call the traditional view of advantageous decision-making which tends to glorify intellectual processes as if they were in fact quite effective and capable and basically given a particular problem conscious knowledge of facts and logic analysis would be not only sufficient to decide well but would also knock out the negative influence of emotions and this is a very important part of this rationalist tradition is that not only is it perfectly capable provided we have enough information in logical instruments but also it is use that it will block out the nefarious effects of of emotion now there's some problem with the rationalist view in by the way the path to optimizing decisions would simply be to acquire increasingly detailed knowledge and to improve deployment of those logical instrument now the rationalists perspective overlooks important facts for example that rational thinking is rife with hidden biases and prone to all manner of illusions and I'm sure that everyone in the audience is familiar with the kind of biases that it was Twersky and Daniel Kahneman talked about and that certainly violates the idea that you know this rational approach is so perfect not only that and this is a quite important animals complex animals as well as simple have engaged in largely successful decision-making regarding the management of their lives individually and socially throughout a large span of biological evolution and yet they're conscious knowledge effects is limited in the ability to apply logical analysis to facts is implied rather than overt and this is something that obviously needs to be considered so our approach to this problem came from three things one the neurological observation that I will describe to you very briefly second hypotheses that was prompted by the observation and third a hypothesis driven program of neuroscience research so let me start with the observation and the observation was that certain patients who had sustained damage to a specific sector of the frontal lobe but who were entirely normal deciders until the time of brain damage were now after the damage reaching counterproductive personally disadvantageous decisions in spite of the fact that they mastered the facts of the situation and could think through the facts logically now what is very important to note here is not that they are doing better or worse decisions on some scale of quality of decisions but the fact that the decisions were not bad but against themselves but also quite different from the decisions that they took before they had the disease and they had damaged their brains and just to give you very brief examples the areas of decision-making that were most problematic had to do with their own person so for example they would decide not advantageous lis in personal issues such as for example who were their friends what happened to their family what happened to their relatives things that had been very well considered up to the point of disease were now no longer considered well and in fact their behavior was quite irresponsible from that point of view and obviously not very good for their for the continuation of their lives the other actually had to do with the financial decisions that they make and this may be of interest to you in the audience is that these people became extremely prone to all sorts of harebrained stratagems that would be phi stood upon them and they were extremely careless with the way they ran their pensions the way they ran their money the purchases they made and there was again of course lots of people behaved that way to begin with but here there was a very remarkable difference between between what had gone on before the illness in what was now present in these individuals so just to give you an idea of what was wrong with them I'm showing you a normal brain this is a brain of course the human this is not post mortem this is a reconstruction of the brain in three dimensions done in Hollis laboratory using modern neuroimaging techniques and you see entirely normal several cortex and what I'm going to show you now is the image the reconstruction of the image of the brain of actually the very first patient who gave us the idea that something quite different from the usual was happening and you can see that there is damage in this brain in an area of the frontal lobe that I'm trying to point - which is difficult at this distance and the damage is bilaterals on both the left in the right side the damage is in the frontal lobe but not all over the frontal lobe it's a very specific sector which is known as the ventromedial sector and this is a sector that 15 to 20 years ago we were not actually quite as knowledgeable as we are today and now we know that it's actually a much older area file dramatically and it really serves as a crossroads between a variety of ancestral emotional systems and modern systems that are more related to intellectual processes and over the years we have been able to find numerous other cases that fit this pattern and where the damage is in fact systematically located in this particular sector now because the only other formal symptom in this patients pertain to a defect in the deployment of emotions we hypothesized that the decision failures were due to the lack of an emotional signal and that's actually what we put together the idea that everything else was so intact and intellectually they were so fine and their IQs were maintained and yet there was this pervasive emotional defect that literally turned them into some kind of sociopaths all of a sudden when they had not been there when they had not been like that before and because emotions are deeply related to the governance of life within the body the soma I call this the somatic marker hypothesis and in a variety of papers the first which was actually publishing the Proceedings of the Royal Society and another one in science in the mid 90s we call this the somatic marker hypothesis and that's how it has been known since then now I want to alert you to the fact that the term emotion here is code for homeostatic regulation is really code for systems in our biology that regulate life and that literally regulate life for us before we start regulating life as modern human beings do and that the term emotion hides a variety of layers of homeostatic regulation which includes drives motivations and very importantly includes the levers of reward and Punishment so nothing of what I say makes any sense if you don't consider emotions well beyond those true and tried emotions everyone talks about such as fear anger joy happiness and sadness or social emotions such as compassion or contempt or pride there has to be a consideration that all of these systems operate in a setting of either rewards or punishments and that they sit atop a hierarchy of controls that include drives and motivations and I was very happy to hear then slower this afternoon talk about drives and motivations and about this machine of regulation because it is in fact quite critical so how did we go about testing this idea that emotions in this very broad sense could be really the cause and could be behind the defects of decision-making of these patients and we started with a very very simple task which has become known as the gambling task and for you that are familiar with very complex economic and financial instruments this will sound to you extremely comical and simple but actually it's a proof to be quite good and effective and I'm going to give you the version the original version of the gambling task which of course these days is given in computerized form but which when we began we thought we should give in relatively realistic terms so we actually had patients as well as normal individuals play a game of cards and the game of cards had in front of them four decks and we actually labeled them with letters such as a b c and d there was money on the table and we gave the following information to the subjects first they had to turn one card at a time second for every turn there would be a reward and they were told that there will be a reward perhaps but they were also told that on occasion there would be a penalty and we were told that they had they were told that they had to make as much money as possible now let me tell you what they did not know and what we hid from them is that first the X a and B were the decks where the rewards appeared and the rewards were always at the level of $100 when the card would be turned decks C and D only gave $50 of reward but then there were penalties and the penalties were like this index a and B which were the high paying tax the penalty could go up to $1,200 on deck C and D it never what went beyond $300 the playtime was 100 turns and they did not know that either and it's quite clear that if they would prefer decks C and D they would would end up winning and if they would prefer decks a and B they would end up losing their shirts but they did not know that so what we thought of doing here is the following we had a basic task in which we could analyze behavior of normal as well as patients normal individuals in patients that had damage to the frontal lobe and patients their damage elsewhere in the brain second we could monitor their their reports of the experience they had and we could also monitor objective effects of emotions such as for example measuring heart rate and skin conductance responses and then we could correlate all this with what happened in their brains either with structural brain imaging with functional brain imaging for example using fMRI or positron emission tomography so we had the basic situation for conducting experiments in which hypothesis could be tested and so I'm going to show you at first this is actually from one of our very first studies in which we were looking at normal controls and we were looking at skin conductance responses so we are going to appear we're going to see appearing the mean anticipatory skin conductance responses measured in micro Siemens and then you have the position of the cart that it is given below and what happened is that if you have normal individuals and they were playing from decks a and B the very high-paying decks but also the ones that gave the high penalties you could see a rising emotional response via the proxy which is skin conductance response and the responses became more and more intense and at a certain point they stopped playing if there were normal individuals okay if you interrupted the game at that point and asked them about what was going on it is quite common that before cart 20 or even 30 the subjects did not know what was going on they thought that they were exploring the situation and yet the skin conductance responses that were being generated non-consciously we're already giving them a signal that something was very very wrong with decks a and B on the other hand if you looked at the X C and D you realize that their skin conductance responses were far flatter now take a look at what happened with frontal lobe patients and what happened is that if you go to decks C and D allegedly the good decks the responses were very similar actually to the ones you obtained in normal individuals but when you went to decks a and B the bad decks the responses were equally flat so in fact the patients were not making a discrimination consciously or non consciously of the difference between the good decks and the bad decks and that was obviously quite interesting for us and there were numerous other experiments I'm just going to talk about one that may be of interest to you in which patients as well as normal individuals as well as subjects that had brain damage but not in the frontal lobe were asked to go through investment rounds and they were not told but in fact as they continued investing they would keep losing their money until finally they had none they were not told about this so this is a situation in which through several rounds of investment they went they went gradually into busts without ever having a bubble so and here what you see what happens is that the control patients and the normal participants actually started quite gradually avoiding to play where is the target patients continues playing blissfully until they lost all the money now let me show you just one more image of the brain and that has to do with a different kind of technical approach this has to do with fMRI functional magnetic resonance and what I'm going to show you actually is not patients at all but two subjects out of a very large group of subjects that we studied and that we had divided between those that had very good performance on the gambling tasks and those that did not do so well and by the way in case you're interesting these were actually older subjects because we were very intrigued with the idea that sort of of necessity as you get older you would get somewhat more relaxed about how you make your decisions and the decisions would be impoverished that's definitely not the case what happens is that there is a subgroup of people that as they get older in this task tend to do less well but you remain with the majority of individuals performing at very high and so what you're going to see is two subjects one on the left subject a and one on the right subject B and the one on the left is a good performer and the one on the right is a bad performer and you're going to see a sequence of slices that are going to be cutting from left to from right to left and you see the direction in which the slices are going to appear and I'm now going to slide them very rapidly and I have to give you a warning because this is very fast and what you're going to see is the degree of activity that appears in the frontal lobe or does not and that is signaled by the colors orange and red so here we go pay attention good performance poor performance and there you go and we now stopped at the midline just to show you that the subject who is a good performer actually has very high levels of activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and it literally this subject has activity where the patients that don't perform well have damage and this is now normal brain operating normally and curiously the subject that is not a good performer never succeeds in having the activity coalesce in the region of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex on the contrary there's activity that is much more scattered and now we're going to go from the midline and continue and you will see that again on the left side there was quite a lot of organization the ventromedial prefrontal cortex but not so on the right so to summarize as far as somatic marker hypothesis goes you could say that emotion plays a role in decisions given these data consciously in the form of a gut feeling or non consciously via a biasing of the decision-making process you could also say that the marker what I like to call the mark in the somatic market hypothesis is a memory trace recorded in ventromedial prefrontal cortex we're not talking about centers of decision-making this is not it I can show you lots of other decisions that would not require this particular system but what the marker signals in our interpretation is the conjunction of certain categories of situation and decision outcome with the accompanying emotional responses so over time you go through a process of learning in which you pair the existence of certain kinds of situation and certain strategies to solve the problem and decide with the kind of emotion positive or negative that accompanied that decision and so you have the possibility of generating a relatively fast system of honing in on what is likely to be more advantageous more rapidly now keep in mind that if you're learning the wrong pair you will of course not produce good decisions and this is possible if you're ignorant or if you're not very smart or if you're dealing with problems that obviously cannot be captured by this very simple by this very simple task and third the way we think this operates in normal situations is that upon the representation of a given situation we're going to have a reactivation of the marker which in turn replicates the respective emotional state and weighs in on the decision process consciously or not so what we're asking here is not for emotion and other aspects of biological control to do anything magic we're simply asking that this trace this rather dumb trace that exists in neural tissue and could be captured by a certain group of neurons that have been wired together upon learning to have that come back to revive for example in the form of an as if in and as if feeling the situation that was originally paired with that particular emotional response and that of course would be accompanied also by a larger by a larger evocation of the data that went with that situation and I would say in closing this particular part of the story that lack of emotion in this broad sense of the term is certainly a problem for decision making but I'm not suggesting to you that the dead reputation that emotions got in as disturbers of proper reasoning is completely unearned because in fact we know that excessive emotion can produce errors of decision-making there's no question about that I'm just submitting to you that having no emotion at all is even worse and I'm also not going to tell you that in certain kinds of miss function of emotions such as for example when there are addictive behaviors that in fact the addictive behaviors which are of course very emotional in of themselves cannot hijack the system and render the entire reasoning operations inoperative of course they do it's just that there is a very big difference between emotions being disruptive and emotions being disruptive all the time they are not in fact I think that most of the time they are not disruptive so let me turn then to a question which I think is an important one so why should emotions play a role in decision-making at all why does this make any sense in case it does and here's my answer to that I think the answer is that from simple species with no brain at all but with control systems that are equivalent to brains such as for example you have in an amoeba or Paramecium up to complex fish is such as hours with brains minds and a complex life an emotional machinery has been constructed over evolutionary time to cope with the management of life and that's of course what we call homeostasis now this is not a small problem that is a problem that is very often forgotten by anyone who is trying to be extremely objective about modeling human behavior now this is these systems of decision are extremely old and extremely efficient otherwise we would not be here the fact that we and many other species before us have triumph and are still on the face of the earth whether we're talking about ants or lizards or birds or mammals is because we have this incredibly sophisticated system of largely automatic decision-making that is devoted to a very incredible problem which is the problem of life ok so this I think is the main reason why we have to factor in emotion now when I talk about management of life I'm talking about control of operations I'm talking about choices I'm talking about decisions regarding for example when an organism engages or refrains from certain actions and the other thing is that when I talk about control choice or decision I'm not implying that a conscious agent is in charge of the process the concept simply mean and simply describe the fact that control devices in the organism regulate its operations relative to the critical goals it has to achieve and I'm going to give you the list of the goals for you to realize that this is not trivial first maintain life it's not easy second secure the integrity of the soma third continue the species and fourth manage the social environment and again if you just think of social environments as human environments I don't think that that's correct because even bacteria forming colonies are actually quite complex social behaviors in terms of how they a grenade in hand in terms of how they come together in our almost ace you social or separate and a lot of that has to do with the resources that are available in the environment and there's no brain there's no political agent there's no economic theory that is guiding their behavior that behavior is coming from the ground up now next the the point that is in fact the most important is that emotions have been built on a background of drives such as appetites and motivations such as play exploration care and attachment now why is this important you know think of drives they're all associated with emotions they're all associated with rewards and punishments but what they do in the basic drives is to ensure that we ingest food that we ingest drink that we engage in sexual behavior or we simply will not have any of those fundamental goals such as preserving the soma and continuing a species and then you have this very complex area of motivations and again then it's nowhere mentioned motivations this afternoon such as play exploration care attachment now these are motivations that you can find in a variety of lowly species this is not by any stretch of the imagination a human trait these are present of course they're present in spades in in mammals and in birds and in fact even in reptiles and fish but there they are and there's the sense of play there's the sense of exploration of the environment there's the fact that there's a care of the other and the care very often aimed at the progeny but not necessarily in certain conditions it manifests itself you socially and there is attachment which is also a very important part of the of the equation so our drives motivations and emotions can be experienced as feelings and here where we go up a little bit in the scale because when we think about feelings I happen to be convinced that in fact most species that we can study in biology have feelings and have some form of sentience but it could be disputed certainly in humans we do have feelings and survey that nobody is going to doubt that mammals have feelings and what feelings are is mental purchases of what is going on in the regulation of the organism at a given point and what feelings are doing is the mapping of the state of the body at a given point and allowing you once the brain is complex enough to have an experience but the point remains that in humans as well as not drives motivations emotions and feelings if they're present simply provide different levels and ranges of control in the process of life management we're still talking about life management through and through and finally on this point the prodigious expansion of memory symbol manipulation and consciousness that of course we have has allowed humans to create instruments of social and political organization economy and finance as well as moral systems law medicine arts science and technology and this is something that I very firmly happen to believe is that we make a very terrible mistake when we take instruments of culture instruments by which we run our lives today and which are of course very much a part of what we discussed throughout the day as if those systems appear de novo once brains were large enough without any connection to what came before now my contention would be that all of these systems are nothing but projections of our biological system into of course a very complex brain capable of enormous feats of mind and so there is an umbilical cord that links what one could call socio-cultural evolution to the biological evolution that came before and the two things are tied now in what way is this of any consequence I think for anybody who is interested in the future is that for example the kind of story that we heard this morning from George Soros and which I resonate which resonates with me quite strongly is the idea that when you talk about failed ability and when you talk about reflexivity you're really dealing with problems that come out of the fact that we have this sort of relatively new there's only a few hundred thousand years as opposed to billions of years there has appeared and that is full of imperfections and so not only do we deal with a problem that we cannot we cannot predict the future even if we know quite a lot but we also have a system that we tend to believe is perfect that the system if you treat it with the attitude of a natural scientist who is looking at the past and you can find facts and discuss them and test them in formal experiments we convince ourselves that these systems have a perfection and the capacity then in fact I doubt very much they have and when we complain about the parallels of uncertainty and the perils of ambiguity we're simply showing very clearly that even with all the smarts in the world with very high computation with incredible gathering effects we don't know the future and we have a big problem in running a system that will satisfy all the complexities that we're facing and there are increasing all the time and so before I interfere with your soon I'm going to stop right here and if you would like to ask questions I'd be delighted to answer thank you very much well thank you very much indeed and I'm sure you will have produced a great deal of food for thought on top of the food people have already had and just before we start I want to make a few short remarks because I think the crucial question for economic thinking in a way is so what in other words does it matter to economic theory and does it matter to the development of new economic theory that we know or not this interesting and convincing information about the way the mind works and here I think I would like to pick up from the contributions already made from George Soros from for example Denis Noah from get bigger Enza from Ronald Roman Friedman earlier where the essence of all those contributions start with the issue of uncertainty the distinction that has long been known in economics and made by night and so on between risk and uncertainty because what we're talking about here when you're talking about how does life go forward is clearly in a situation which is inherently uncertain or has been for large amounts of the time so that the starting point is as Antonio put it that we don't know the future and so the decision-making that we need to understand in economics it seems to me depends on the extent at which we feel what we're trying to do is to understand situations in economics where the future is unknown now there are different e I'm avoiding here because it seems clearer if one said the future is unknown is much more difficult to get round that particular problem by other other sorts of devices now my own way of thinking about that is is linked to the idea that the essential problem economic actors have particularly in financial markets but also entrepreneurs is how to support action and the issue here is not that they contemplate and do all this maximization and optimization but it actually they have to act and as they act they have subjective experience which i think is described immediately by the kind of emotions that that we're talking about here my particular take on this which is not the only one is that the that action is supported both by the heuristics you heard about from GERD gigerenzer but also by narrative that is to say the way in which facts and emotions are organized together to provide a sense that it one can do whatever it is once planning to do my own view further is that in finance the narrative also always has to do two things it has basically to manage enough excitement that is feeling of excitement about the possible gain from the action and minimize the amount of anxiety about gain which relates to these fundamental systems that Antonia is talking about and that what the narratives do for people when they support action is there has to be a balance of excitement over anxiety fear of loss now you think the problem is that in taking that action if you get what Jorge kindly referred to as the fantastic object that is the idea of the object which really will give you profits without really so much risk as you as we had leading up to the financial crisis then it very easily stimulates a state of mind where the the possibility of loss although known is not paid any attention to and this then through the processes of reflexivity and so on can lead to a situation where an idealized fantastic object is pursued as if this is a perfectly possible thing based I believe on biological processes to do with essentially falling in love and attachment that idealization is a very essential if you think about getting married or something like that in it you know the reality of the situation is their ups and downs so it has to be propelled by something for it to work and what happens in a financial crisis what I think has happened with the Euro is that once the fantastic object starts not to be not to be experienced as so fantastic then there is a huge amount of anxiety and disappointment and many other consequences and the problem then is how to get back to treating the object which usually is always a good idea somewhere as an ordinary object and ordinary objects like ordinary people both please you and displease you satisfied and dissatisfied as there you hope the balance is is on the positive positive side but that requires a process of which psychoanalyst we call mourning or grieving to get back and so the underlying problem if you follow George's and our analysis of the euro is how do we get through the process of accepting loss of accepting less than perfection and then get back to to the project so with these few remarks I'd like to throw the discussion open to the floor for questions to Professor demacia so who would like to ask a question over here sorry I can you give your name because I see Adam wins so this is a really open-ended question and I hope it won't be considered unfair but you talked and I hope again this terminology isn't unfair from of what I might call it a upward causation from motivations appetites up through feelings to decisions within sort of socio-cultural context if we could talk the other way of what maybe would be a downward causation what are the implications of it for these sort of more ancient and fundamental levels that is we have cultural organizations of emotion ways of narrative narrative izing them and incorporating them into recognizable social relationships as well as canons of logic and procedures of reasoning and inference enabled by all this memory and consciousness and symbolic manipulation that we have how does all this extra stuff interact with these other more fundamental levels of emotion appetite motivation cautiously sometime I'm not joking so I think your question is very interesting so you you really have to negotiate and what what I think is facing us is this discrepancy between a system which is the basic homeostatic regulation that is true and tried and has been honed very carefully of a biological evolution carefully in metaphorical sense and does operate well within certain parameters and can operate without the interference for example of consciousness and quite a lot of knowledge the knowledge is in the system itself and now you have this new on many layers of knowledge that we have put on top of it and we have a trial and error as we discover systems that can operate but sometimes the system work very well sometimes there's a conflict and I think that if you would look at the the history of political history for example it's it's a series of negotiations that basically have to take into account certain new ideas about solutions to problems and the kind of solutions that organisms living organisms lamely humans are giving for those powers but there is there is a potential conflict and there is the need for negotiation and it's certainly not going to be in our lifetime that socio-cultural instruments attain anything like the perfection that biological systems obviously have okay now we've got quite a few questions so if it's okay really well we'll take three questions and then as many as you wish okay so the lady here and then yep ladies first rejection um if I were to simplify what you were saying and it's forgive me this is a bit unfair because I've heard another context the emotional brain described as the older brain the limbic brain and that we have so newer predict more advanced species have a cerebral you know cerebral cortex and that that it's basically not terribly well integrated with the old emotional brain now when we look in and you know we the people here you know economics social scientists are very preoccupied with the operation of the more rational parts the brains you correctly point out at the end and we didn't get a chance to get into that very much but the we now tend to dignify the operation to the emotional the rational brains you indicated and yet there are sort of even within the intellectual brain we've got your sort of chart indicated that the people sort of were starting to recognize that game was work if they play the a and B they were getting feedback emotionally that wasn't working if they hadn't processed it intellectually and there's sort of a level of recognition between cognition versus pattern recognition that there's sort of pattern recognition and you see this with this is something about the Gladwell wrote about musical blink that that and it may not have been well discussed in other context of people there's a level of pattern recognition that curators other experts have and I'm concerned that in the Lexx bird the relevant the realm of expert discourse and for example the financial crisis that people use heuristics often well and yet badly that we select professionals we select you know who we trust because we can't evaluate them and we rely on proxies and then and then we tend not emotionally to reject those people who present the right signals or present the right arguments even when even when they've been very discredited I mean have you done any work that gets in that intermediate level between the you know when you start getting into rational processes you've talked about the emotional level what about the different levels of rationality where we've got sort of the simple levels of rationality we may not be able to we make do ex post facto logical justifications when it's really not logical but thank you very much but yes you that and then over here you know I have a study here by people at Duke University brain imaging and neurology department in which they said the title of the papers Dirac neural signatures of economic preferences for risk and uncertainty in which they claim by doing MRI studies of people who range they found out that if you prevent presented them with all and probabilities that the part of the brain that was active by dopamine neurons was the posterior purrito cortex and if you gave them uncertainties that is alternative and told them there was no probabilities associated how do you pick that they said there was another part of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex what does that mean so you won't be thank guys ter and then we'll have it down here okay so in relation to that let me say that people very often in their attempt to understand very complicated issues of brain function they resort to what we call the phrenological approach in which they talk about centers that do this or do that and sometimes they even try to relate that to neurotransmitter systems I think it's very risky to do that because we still know very little and the kind of things that I was telling you at least have the advantage that they have been tried and they're consistent over the years I'm not making interpretations about whether for example there's a neurotransmitter like dopamine that is producing the results that we are talking about in all likelihood there in fact cocktails of neurotransmitters that have enormous amounts of interaction and that can lead to different treatments of probability but the point that that research and I don't know which particular work you're referring to but it doesn't make any difference the the point that that research is making is that there are certain neurotransmitters that clearly have a role in emotional systems and in reward and Punishment systems that are differently engaged by different situations so the fact that you have an intellectual problem and this actually also addresses part of the previous comment if you have an intellectual problem that you need to solve of necessity you will engage unless you're not normal you will engage certain amounts of emotional response that have to do with your basic system of operation for life regulation and with your prior experience of that particular category of problem and once that happens the emotional responses will be interfering either positively or negatively with what is going on in your intellectual analysis the point that I want to leave very clear is that I do not believe for a minute that it is possible to go through life taking decisions every day in all the realms in which we do whether they have to do with our personal future or with the future of an institution in politics or say as an academic leader I don't think we can make those decisions purely with rational mechanisms quote unquote it's not just about facts and the accumulation of facts is not just about the logical analysis of a necessity if the system is integral there is an engagement of those support systems and in the previous question now I connect to the previous one this it's true that there is an idea that some of the systems are older there's no question that organisms have been making very fast and effective decisions using not consciousness not detailed knowledge but rather in there not logic that they know of but rather emotional systems that embody certain responses that are very effective and that maintain life and there have been conserved in evolution have been concerned in the genomes precisely because they're effective or they would just die out so the fact that there is an older quote-unquote brain and the more modern brain is a fact of life there's no question that these structures that I talked about have very different phylogenetic ages and some are very old in some are very recent of course when I talk about very recent I'm still talking about hundreds of thousands and millions of years not about a hundred years or 200 years idea can we have the microphone over here Adair Turner chairman of the UK Financial Services Authority first of all can I thank you professor former CEO for a really fascinating talk which i think is extremely important for economists to think about the implications of I wanted to ask you about a methodological issue listening to you this evening and on everything that I've ever tried to understand about neuroscience and the the understanding of the brain what I what I've been struck by is that you often focus on the distinction between the behavior of relatively small minorities you know people who have suffered brain damage in one particular area and the vast majority look in the control group and draw inferences to that what is it methodologically that enables you to draw general inferences about the operation of the brain from the observation of what strike me as relatively extreme circumstances and I think that was as I understand what's going on today when you were showing us those two different groups you were describing people who had suffered some category of damage to bits of the brain right how do you methodologically work through that problem at what you can infer generally from the distinction between the extreme event and the generality of the population excellent question thank you very much so two things first I did not show you only studies based on lesions of the brain and damage but also I showed you actually a functional imaging study done in normal individuals the majority of the studies that we do today are in fact carried out in normal individuals what we call controlled subjects I was telling you about these patients with damaged because they are the beginning of the story now why are they important because they serve they provide us with a probe into the system for example if we never had seen a patient with damage in one specific area and been able to first of all describe what was wrong in what was right about that patient and realize that patients with damage in a variety of other areas did not have the same problem we would never have tumbled to the fact that the problem existed in the first place nor would we have had an opening in to discovering what the function of this particular system might be so think of damage in the brain as a probe into the system a way of opening into the system and trying to understand its logic and of course you then need to bring into that study and into the logic lots of knowledge about Anatomy about physiology and you need to confirm that in a very large number of subjects so for example this this association between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in these disruptions of advantageous decision-making have now been confirmed in countless studies by group after group in different countries in different languages in many many subjects so you have to start very often with one case sometimes or half a dozen cases and then go and study larger samples and find out if it works or it doesn't it's quite interesting to think that the majority of the fundamental knowledge that we have about the human brain to date is still based on single case studies for example it was the study of a patient with damage in the lateral the site part of the frontal lobe in the 19th century that had Broca's aphasia and another patient that had damaged a little further back in the left hemisphere called Verna keys aphasia described by Paul toca in Paris and by Carl Wernicke here in Germany it was out of those two cases that the entire edifice of language and brain function were built guess what they're still correct they're still true and there's been nothing over thousands of cases studied since that violated what those two scientists imagined was the case but of course it was only time that tested it and so I think we have to these are enormous opportunities that they give us because until relatively recently we did not know what was going on we had to go from single cases so to give you another example most of what we know in the fact that we seized on the possibility that a structure called the hippocampus is fundamental for learning or factual memories came out of an observation made by a Canadian scientist called Brenda Milner and it was actually done in the United States but she then moved to Montreal and she made this observation in one single patient which was a complete fluke it turned out that the patient had this condition made by a neurosurgical intervention that went wrong and that should never have been done as a result of this we had the first description of factual amnesia and out of that came a whole edifice of knowledge and so it's it's very odd the way we start but you need to start somewhere and these are of course very good probes but keep in mind that the majority of what is being done today is in entirely normal individuals of course with all the variations that humans have from being very smart to being very dumb okay now we have lots of hands here Carla this there's one one everyone Eric bear glove down there thank you for this presentation which is going to be a fantastic object in my mind I learned a lot about how you think about emotions I think I can use it rather immediately for my economic work I would like you to expand a bit more aggression allottee and they want to say why I am asking that question in economics there is a shared understanding of what we mean by rationality I should say that I'm not very convinced by it but it's there it's canonical the point is it's not sufficient to use some kind of logic to qualify as being rational in the sense of economics on the other hand the economic axiomatic definition of rationality works with very different logics you can drop the law of excluded middle still be rational you can keep it still be rational I think these are important differences with that background I'm simply asking but you can just say a bit more about how you think about rationality a very interesting question I would have to say that I think about it in very plain human terms and I'm definitely not thinking about it in terms of economic theory of which I know very little probably the best to say nothing so I'm thinking about what people traditionally regard as rational behavior versus irrational behavior so for example in relation to that patient the first patient that I told you about in the kind of patient we're talking about we regard as non rational and sometimes downright irrational behaviors that all of a sudden break with the past history of that individual in that go against the best interests of that individual that's the way in which we so it's very much related to the reality of decision life decision-making of these patients and what is interesting is that these patients both in the personal realm how they ran their lives there in terms of their family their social relations and how they ran their finances and there were those are the two things that were blatant were extremely deficient but they had not been before basically we tumbled on to this by the fact that these people were supposedly more or members of their social group and very efficient in what they did and suddenly they were really behaving in a rather psychopathic way and by the way it's quite interesting you may be interested in knowing there's something that we discovered subsequently and is now a very important aspect of ongoing studies is that in these individuals you generally have a break which I did not talk about between what they do their actions their actual decision making and what they think of the actions after so if you ask them in retrospect do you think you did the right thing they would say no I didn't I should not have done that so there's something that for example in relation to a moral action you can describe as remorse or regretting buying something that they should not have bought and that they didn't have money for if you sustained exactly the same kind of damage in the perinatal period within the very first months and probably years of life but not very late still in childhood it turns out that these patients when they grow up not only make all these mistakes but have absolutely no sense of what they violated and when you when you query them you realize that they never learn the rules they never learned what is moral and what is not what is going to be against them or what is not and these people are very smart and they are behaving rather blissfully in a world where they actually can be described as psychopaths and so there's the difference between having learned the system but then failing to make the decisions correctly and not having learned the system at all and we think that by losing part of this system you really become rather less in terms of your learning forward thank you very nice question yep young I am I think there's a fascinating talk but I would like to remind relate their severe to the topic of new economic thinking and maybe that's rather on new thinking and relating to some people in history which have contributed a lot to economic and social thought toppled and for - Hayek on future urban systems and as long a freedman is books about the pretension of knowledge with Hayek what what came to my mind was the high relative doctoral thesis on in the German title was Zen zoic that is he was a brain research before he turned to humanities or social sciences just a hypothetical question what would have happened if he would state in his profession and not turned to social science of course it not easy to answer it but what don't we make out of this that a lot of what we heard from you and from other people contributions today are based or related at least to thoughts and ideas of people who contributed these ideas about ATU almost hundred years ago but I would have to know more about their contributions to tell you how the you know icons I can see from what I know of Karl Popper where the relation would be I think that the there's still a difference in thinking about an idea and defending that idea in finding some kind of evidence in real systems as far as the human brain is concerned for the operations that we're talking about so the certainly not the first person to think of the idea that emotions are important in decision-making you know if you think about Spinoza Spinoza actually has one of the most profound thoughts that I think have ever been put forward relative to emotion and that is basically that you can only let's assume that you have an emotion that is not a good he's not giving you good advice in terms of a decision and that could lead you astray into a very bad decision Spinoza's idea was that you could only counter their emotion not with a very rational idea they would say don't do that but rather with another emotion that would be more powerful than the basic emotion and I find this very beautiful and it it tells us a little bit about the wisdom of Spinoza in this regard and about the enormous value that he put on the emotional system which of course he described in the language of the 17th century not exactly the most perfect from our terms and rather gross but he was on the right track in the idea that you can only counter the emotion that is negative with an emotion that is even more powerful I find rather very attractive one and it's interesting because when you when you think about what happens they take addiction I think addiction is a very good example of a biological condition in which the appetite system runs amok so whether you are addicted to drugs or sex or rock-and-roll it doesn't make any difference what you have is that the appetite system gets connected in something that is excessive it becomes uncontrollable by the way there are beautiful animal models of this so you can find situations in which for example a rat or other species experiment will enjoy so much the reward that comes from these hedonic systems which by the way can be related those quite legitimately to certain neurotransmitters such as opioids for example there is a part of our brain in the striatum that generates opioids so you don't need to take opioids from the outside they're being generated from the inside and they are the main providers of reward so when you're learning and you're rewarded you are actually if you permit my term spritzing opioids into a variety of networks of your system once you have that you have a system that can very rapidly go downward and in the search of that fast and very powerful reward stop working all together in any kind of rational intelligence sense so you can describe this as a hijacking of the system so it's not a question of thinking fast or thinking slow is thinking not at all so you actually stop thinking and you are prey to the emotional system that is guiding you so if you do like mrs. Reagan who recommend you to drug addicts just don't do it you know it doesn't look like it works and but it might work if there would be a way of introducing an emotion that will be more powerful than that which has these people under their sway so there we go again Prospero's so I've gone a little bit further back get key grants emmaus long Institute for human development thank you for your talk I have a remark and a question start with the remark I think you put cardamoms rest on the wrong side so you wrote that rational thinking leads to biases knows that I didn't know I said that rational thinking includes biases that were not from their position the position is intuitive thinking includes biases rational thinking logical theories always trying to condemn meaning at the middle and the opposite side where you think they are including most of the rest of behavioral economics for then emotions can only hurt or harm and not on your side just the remark ok question is a deep I try to understand the somatic market hypothesis what I understand is that you're saying that emotions are necessary for good decisions yeah my question is this is about all emotions no any emotion no no and I think that that there are many situations where we better not should think for instance if I decide whether I should play the casino I just kick out of it absolutely and that's that says I hope resize the relationship between in the kind of tasks but I think for example the idea that all decisions that we make whether you're running a hedge fund or you know deciding whether a conflict whether an accused is guilty or not guilty if you are in a jury or the decision of whom to marry or whom to befriend or what kind of insurance you ought to buy I think are very different kinds of decision in terms of the amount of knowledge that they require in the amount of pre training that they require in order for you to be considered an advantageous decider advantageous in relation to the problem so I think these problems are very different and I'm not saying that you cannot have good decisions without emotions but in many decisions that you require in day to day life the absence of emotion is a problem in many facilities so but what I'm what I'm not not saying at all is that emotion is always the best counselor to you in fact I think I said that in many conditions emotions can actually be disrupted especially if they are excessive the other thing is that I think you'll probably and I said it but it may not have been sufficiently clear I said I use the term emotion as code for a variety of other processes and I said several times that emotion can appear as a signal that is manifest and quite overt and that's the kind of thing that we all experience when you have or when people talk about having a gut feeling that leads them to reject or endorse certain possibility but very often you don't have such a gut feeling very often you end up producing a certain result a certain decision and that decision in many situations is going to be influenced by a covert signal of the kind for example that you can I defy with something like a skin conductance response even if you once you are inquired about the situation you do not have knowledge of the situation factual conscious knowledge of why you're doing something so for example when we take the example of the gambling task when we interrupted the gambling task say it card 15 in people who were already playing less times from that deck and were then very rapidly going to endorse the other decks they did not know why they were making that choice so that something else was influencing their decision that even if they knew it they did not know it consciously of course they knew it in the sense that there was information in the system such as the penalty and the punishment that they got when they lost say a thousand dollars that was telling them not to go there because that's dangerous and that's of course no different from the kind of thing that we will do once you intuitively sense that a certain path the certain Street will not going to be good for you to walk in and that you're picking up from a variety of clues and you're leading your behavior in the direction and you don't quite know why you did it I think this happens in everyday life all the time ok now there are quite a few people towards the bank could you each ask a brief question and just pass the microphone and then residue massive announcer tomorrow's Coffman and this is Cambridge this is actually follow-up serendipitously a Gerdes question which is watching the functional MRIs there's a sense in which there might be a good performer bad performer but what I took away from that is someone who's taking this task very seriously this morning perhaps on taking this test seriously at all and the person with the prefrontal lobe injury may be someone who can't take the test seriously because of the nature of the injury it need to be access and anxiety or fear or what have you and I guess what I was wondering in terms of connecting your research the question of an under investment in the object versus professor talk it's notion of an over investment in the object is there a happy medium or is there something else going on in terms of the extent to which emotional investment may or may not be desirable in decision-making right I think that emotional investment there will play in terms of let's say the quantity event so if you have an emotional investment and if you have excessive emotional reactions as I suggested during the talk you can actually make rather wrong decisions and my suggestion is that that's where the bad reputation of emotions comes from in other words it the idea that once you are emotional you are disrupted in your possibility to analyze the facts coherently but the people that I was focusing on and there of course the many other situations in which there are emotional effects that are quite demonstrable but the people that I'm referring to our people that are rather not in not invested at the moment in what they are doing which by the way does not mean that they are not attentive to the task on the contrary they're extremely attentive and they're trying to perform well but that doesn't mean that they do and the the best the explanation that fits the best is that in fact that like it's as if they're playing field has become level there's nothing that sort of quote unquote fields particularly good or particularly bad either consciously or in the non conscious version of the feeling process which ought to be there but in this case appears not to be okay I'm a Julie Nelson UMass Boston I wanted to ask if you experienced a maybe even early on in this research any kind of resistance or blowback within the community of neuroscientists about breaking an emotion as part of good decision-making I say that as an economist because it seems to me that when I want to talk about emotion or interpersonal relationships or ethical judgments things that are definitely part of human experience and human economic life in economics those are referred to as thought of its soft and somehow decreasing the scientific nature of the discipline so a very interesting question let me answer it first the the research on emotion was obviously not a central theme in neuroscience until probably around 1990 and I remember when the first symposium on neuroscience of emotion was held at the Society for Neuroscience was exactly in 1995 the first time I talked at the Society for Neuroscience on emotion and this is at a time in which all of our best research had been on systems of memory and language there was a very good friend and colleague of mine that was sitting in the first row and it just shook his head saying the poor man is completely gone wild and this and then he actually told me you're just going to destroy your career I said well too bad we'll try and the contrary is actually happened is that emotion in that first meeting that we organized with myself and a man by the name of Joseph LeDoux who is at NYU and studies animals and studies actually fear and we organized this first meeting and emotion became quite popular in fact as far as I'm concerned is a little bit too popular and there are people doing research on emotion that they want to apply in every possible field neuroethics neuro economics and by the way I never use the term you reckon because I think that's just absurd to give the impression that we as neuroscientists can understand something like economics from the perspective of the brain we can say a few things that might be interesting for you or not as we're seeing from the discussion but not not try to solve your problems that would be completely ridiculous but I think that these days the evaluation is completely different this is not only a legitimate field but actually a very highly cultivated field and it's extremely popular for better or worse and the instruments of research have evolved rapidly and today we can even talk about for example you know one of the bad things about research of emotion in the past is that emotion was confused with feeling but today we have very good ways of operationalizing these concepts when we talk about emotion and drives and motivations we're actually talking about actions actually concerts of action that are taken either consciously or unconsciously and have been taken forever in the in the path of evolution whereas when we talk about feelings we talk about something very specific which is the readout of what happens when an organism is engaged in MOT when an organism in is engaged in having emotions and therefore blocks of actions that have a very particular purpose and even that we now have a very good purchase on because we know that feeling systems are based on the ability that our brain has in the space of monitoring and mapping what is happening to our own body so when poets refer to emotions by describing for example the heart's palpitating or the gut or what-have-you they are in fact there were in fact doing neuroscience before their time so they were describing the contents of the feeling state which is based on and mapping in actually beautifully laid out maps is really like cartography you bring in signals from the periphery of the body and especially from the viscera and you plot them in coordinates in regions of the brain stem and the cortex that are designed to represent states of the body and why do we have that it's not because people want to have feelings to write poetry or be artists we have that because that is the highest level of monitoring that we can have of the control systems that are involved in drives motivations and emotions and without those control systems we can initiate a corrective response but we cannot initiate the canceling of the response you need to have a way of signifying at brain level that some there for example a corrective response that has to do with correcting your blood glucose has been achieved its goal and is now ready to be stopped and unless you have that feedback corrective mechanism you just cannot do it so these things are now taking part seriously and there's no problem nobody would now shake their head about the idea that you are studying emotions fortunately well I'm afraid we're we're out of time and I've been asked to bring it to an end but there are at least 10 or 12 people were wanting to ask questions and I'm apologized for not calling you why don't you give a question to Eric Berg laughs who is there since the beginning that is eric is trying to ask a question I can't find what you Thank You Antonio ibid I was struck by some image to show it when you know for these you compare these two individuals and the ones that had a damaged part or or less function was functioning part for emotions other parts the brain seemed to be activated so to what extent can either part the brain compensate for this and to what extent can you train people or do we need to screen people for for for these kind of decisions yeah that's a very good question and the answer is that we don't know for example people who have one of the important topics of current research is the issue of recovery and plasticity we know that the brain is far more capable of reorganizing itself after damage and this is not a small problem because as you probably know lots of people have for example strokes or have head injury which leads to damage of the brain and in the past the idea was that well once you have damaged nothing will happen I mean you can you you're happy if you survive but you have no way of recovery and that's simply not true what we do not know yet and that's one of the jobs for the future is under which circumstances recovery takes place what are the factors about age is one obviously it's likely that you're going to recover more if you're young that if you're very old but it's not true all the time we have seen recovery occur in elderly individuals what else gender is related to it maybe in some cases and then there's a whole slew of possibilities that have to do with how you could try to coax recovery from a brain in terms of retraining and in terms of emphasizing certain tests of others but that's basically an unanswered question and I wouldn't give up you know yet thank you okay so I think that the number of questions and the warmth of interest in it is a great testimony base to the how you've presented yourself and to interest among economists in a more interdisciplinary approach so thank you very much for coming in I since Omega I I gave you talk at lunch where I talked about not falsely resolving uncertainty and I have to tell you as I sat listen tonight I thought about when I left the hedge fund industry and I went to the music business and I left a business where I was trading 250 to 500 million dollars at a clip just on you know I agree with you you agree with me that's all done and in my first month in the music business I went to a club called Kingston mines in Chicago and a famous blues musician was playing and I had to sign him to the contract for a master recording I owned but I didn't have the contract to the clarity I wanted so I walked up to him between sets and he said sit down on the stage son and I said well here's the contract and I will pay you $3,000 and a royalty of so much etc is worth you know roughly twelve thousand dollars over time and he looked at me and he said do you know where there's an ATM machine and I said yeah he said go get me $300 and you can have the contract so I'm looking at this guy and I'm thinking after reading Damacio I want to get a brain scan done on this guy's from a loan and after I stayed the music business for about five years and had left the lucrative hedge fund this I'm going to do a brain scan on me or maybe on the hedge fund industry for their addictive tendencies but as I I looked at what you described and what you say in our little logo and notion of paradigm lost I can feel how much we don't understand and so the only thing I'm going to recommend to y'all is that you come back tomorrow and listen to Paul Martin and Joe Stiglitz and Adair Turner and Erik Berg loft and get some of those opiates he describes so that we can all feel less anxious about our uncertainty and I thank you very much for being thank you

Channel: New Economic Thinking

Views: 24,911

Rating: 4.8734179 out of 5

Keywords: INET, Paradigm Lost, Keynote, Human Decisions, Damasio

Id: elwLz8ypckI

Length: 89min 6sec (5346 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2012