Cognitive processes in choice and decision behavior Book

I did a small amount of research on Read Montague - he’s a professional neuroscientist with many years of experience. I am not a neuroscientist. This book is packed full of research and evidence and knowledge, and there’s no way I understand everything he’s writing about. So why did I read it? And what within is interesting enough to recommend to others who also aren’t neuroscientists?

The book explains how the human brain works, and how it came to be this way through natural selection. The brains that humans have are efficient choice-making machines, and Montague spends eight chapters detailing how the brain handles choices. Each chapter builds upon the previous chapters, and by the end his two themes are illustrated - the brain was shaped over time by value and efficiency. So how did he get there?

Chapter 1 - The brain has a computational process - I envision it like grooves in a vinyl record. The wrinkles in the brain record data, and it’s stored and retrieved when needed. But we’re not just memory banks, so there has to be a measure of meaning as well. Humans have the ability to measure the value of each computation it makes and compare it to a goal. Does one thing get you closer to a goal than another? If yes, then choose that.

Chapter 2 - The brain is able to contemplate its own costs. The brain is slow, because it takes energy and needs to refrain from draining all the body’s energy completely. It’s inexact, because the brain has limited storage, so it records memories imprecisely. And there’s limited bandwidth, so not every part fires at the same time. It’s an efficient organ, making tradeoffs of speed and certainty.

Chapter 3 - It’s computational and aware of its own limitations - this allows for flexibility, or the need to run the same algorithm in different ways. If there’s a problem, it’s best to try to find multiple solutions to better ensure at least one solution will work. And oftentimes the problem is another brain, so it’s best to have a function that emulates that other brain to attempt to predict the other brain’s actions. So we can envision options, and evaluate them.

Chapter 4 - Evaluation functions lead to rewards, for when we choose the best option to solve the problem, we are rewarded. A funny wrinkle here is that oftentimes the reward comes before the solution, like Pavlov's dogs. They were salivating over the food, which was the reward, but the bell slowly wired the dog’s brain to anticipate the reward, so the bell eventually activated the reward system. This happens to people also - we can get a dopamine rush from buying something, but then there’s no dopamine rush from using the thing we just bought.

Chapter 5 - This leads to the reward itself being somewhat useless, as just having a goal or imagining yourself achieving the goal can bring the dopamine hit, in lieu of actually achieving the goal.

Chapter 6 - So if an idea can be the goal, and you don’t have to achieve it but can instead get the dopamine reward just by imagining it, then the brain is able to treat a counterfactual experience the same as a real experience. And here’s where Montague gets to the Superpower - which only humans have - which is the ability to act against your own best interest because the idea in your head is more important than the protection/maintenance of your physical body.

Chapter 7 - What does this have to do with Pepsi? The Pepsi challenge was a huge success in the 1980s in getting people to choose in a blind taste-test. But did it help Pepsi overtake Coke? No, because of brand loyalty, which is the triumph of the idea over the physical. People like the things they’re already familiar with, and can ignore the taste of the new thing they like in favor of the entrenched idea of the old thing they like.

And finally, chapter 8, where he brings it all together: Efficiency, plus the flexibility of imagination, plus dopamine rewards for ideas, plus the brain liking things it already knows. What’s the result? HUMANS DON’T HAVE FREE WILL. On page 239, he writes “The brain wants to turn deliberate control into habitual automatic control.” In other words, the hyper-efficient brain wants to put known things on autopilot to focus on upcoming potentially unknown things. It’s why new evidence is so often unconvincing - the idea already in your head has been locked by the brain, and it’s efficient to consider the case closed rather than spending resources to revisit.

He does later say that, yes, there can be free will. Sometimes a person can change a long-held deep-seated belief due to the knowledge that you have a choice. It’s not easy and not common, but it’s possible.

I don’t know about you, but reading this rocked me. Humans don’t have free will? I don’t have free will? Is every decision I make predetermined? Wow.

So, going back to my introductory paragraph - why read this book? What is contained within that I think others would find interesting? It made me want to really examine all my beliefs. It’s a book that changed how I see myself.