7 October 2009
Successful Intentions Newsletter
Hi ,
Are you being honest with yourself?
We're all good at finding a way to rationalize our decisions, but are we simply telling ourselves rational lies?
Neuroscience is discovering how the mind works in decision making and it's not what you think. In fact, it may be more about how you feel! It turns out that sometimes, rationality can lead us astray, just as intuition can often be wrong.
For example, University of California at Berkley psychologist Philip Tetlock picked 284 eminent people who made their living as political or economic commentators and asked them to make predictions about future events. He then checked their predictions against actual world events a few years later and found they tended to perform worse than random chance.
Even experts tell rational lies!
When you overthink at the wrong time, you cut yourself off from the wisdom of your emotions, which are much better at assessing actual preferences. The trick is to use the conscious brain to acquire information and solve the simple everyday problems. Complex problems require the processing powers of the emotional brain, the supercomputer of the mind.
Always listen to your feelings. They know more than you do!
Here are some guidelines from neuroscience to help you make better decisions:
- Simple problems require reason: Ask yourself if the decision can be accurately summarized in numerical terms. There are lots of everyday decisions that could benefit from a little more conscious deliberation.
- Novel problems also require reason: Before trusting your instincts, ask yourself how your past experience might help you solve this particular problem. Are your feelings based on experience, or are they just haphazard impulses?
- Embrace uncertainty: Hard problems rarely have easy solutions. Always entertain competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to look at the facts through another lens you might discover your beliefs rest on shaky ground. Continually remind yourself of what you don't know.
- You know more than you know: Emotions have a logic of their own. Different emotional areas of the brain evaluate different aspects of the world, accumulating the wisdom of experience through processing millions of bits of data in parallel. Sometimes feelings can be too sensitive to patterns, but you should always consider your emotions. Think about why you're feeling and what you're feeling.
- Think about thinking: Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you're making and the kind of thought process it requires. This will help you avoid stupid errors.
The mind can tell rational lies, but they can be outsmarted. The most astonishing thing about your brain , is that it can always improve itself. So, tomorrow, you can make better decisions!
Find out why the President of Hungary wants to save the Great Barrier Reef on my "Wisdom Circle" blog for musings, research, and applications of practical wisdom!
Keep your intentions clear,
Peter Webb
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