How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Human decision-making runs on primate hardware

  Platt, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent his career comparing humans with rhesus macaques. He argues that the circuits for attention, valuation and social decisions look 'almost exactly the same' in both species. What we notice depends on what we are looking for and on what grabs our ancestral priorities: brightness, motion, novelty and especially other faces.

• 02

  Attention is foraging

  Platt argues that attention follows the same rules animals use to search for food. Eric Charnov's 1976 marginal value theorem says to leave a 'patch' when what you're getting from it drops below the average for the environment. About 50 years of observation suggest every animal behaves this way. Computer scientists later found that people leave websites the moment their information intake falls below the average across sites.

• 03

  A rich environment makes you a flitting forager

  With one apple tree for 10 miles, you strip it bare. In an orchard, you grab the easy apples and move on. Slow dial-up internet made people read whole pages. Twelve open tabs, several screens and a phone make us flick between sources in seconds, which is exactly what this circuitry is designed to do. Platt's fix is to make the environment poorer: remove or degrade the alternatives.

• 04

  An urgency signal builds as rewards fall off

  In Platt's foraging studies, activity in the anterior cingulate cortex rises as returns from the current option deplete, signaling that it's time to switch. He suspects this is the itch to flip your phone over. Much of it runs below awareness, so we multitask even when we think we aren't.

• 05

  Where you sit on the focus–explore continuum varies

  People range from hyperfocused, near the obsessive end, to over-exploring. Most of us are in the middle, and we tend to drift toward focus with age. Creativity tracks the exploratory end. Platt thinks practice can move your 'dial' a couple of notches, such as from 3 to 5, but not from 3 to 10, which matters when matching people to careers.

• 06

  Oxytocin calms monkeys and flattens hierarchy

  Human nasal-spray studies are inconsistent, partly because people dose themselves unreliably. So Platt's lab gave macaques oxytocin through a nebulizer. The monkeys became less vigilant to threats. Dominant males became 'super chill' and subordinates bolder, with more eye contact and more giving of juice to other monkeys. Oxytocin and vasopressin seem to increase behavioral synchrony. Platt cites work suggesting that oxytocin contributes little to MDMA's empathogenic effects.

• 07

  Isolation is a serious health risk

  Platt notes that research ranks social isolation as worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with risk scaling roughly with how few social contacts you have per week. Huberman compares it to chimpanzees left ungroomed after being ostracized. Platt links this to rising despair, mental illness and physical disease.

• 08

  Decide in advance whether you need to be fast or accurate

  The brain accumulates noisy evidence over time, so going faster means more errors. Sleep deprivation and fatigue push you toward speed. Platt's mantra: before an important decision, decide whether accuracy or speed matters, and if it's accuracy, slow down and gather more information. High arousal also makes people mistake noise for signal.

• 09

  Loss aversion follows where you look

  Using eye tracking and modeling, Platt's group found that most people look at what they might lose in a 50/50 gamble. The longer they look at it, the more loss-averse they become, and this is stronger in anxious or depressed people. More broadly, what you attend to gets 'turned up' in the brain, so attending to small positive surprises may amplify them.

• 10

  Testosterone tilts decisions toward risk

  Platt agrees that studies of traders show higher testosterone, natural or taken, tracks more aggressive, impulsive and risk-taking decisions. He worries about this in markets as testosterone therapy spreads. Huberman adds that exogenous testosterone mainly buffers the dips that come from poor sleep and stress.