Changing How We Choose with David Redish

Episode Transcript:

Chris Forbes

Thanks for joining us back on the show after many years, is David Redish, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. His laboratory studies learning, memory and how animals, including humans, make decisions. David has worked extensively on the consequences of understanding those decision processes in the world we live in, including consequences for psychiatry, sociology, economics and morality. Today, David and Eric discuss his new book, changing how we choose the new science of morality. 

Eric Zimmer  2:59  

Hi, David. Welcome back to the show.

David Redish  3:01  

Thank you for having me. It’s good to be back.

Eric Zimmer  3:03  

Yeah. I mean, we had you on a long time ago. When was it 2015

David Redish  3:08  

Yeah, I looked it up recently. It was 2015 Wow.

Eric Zimmer  3:11  

Okay, well, that would have been in our second year, and we’re creeping up on our 10th year. So yeah, thank you. Thank you. You’ve got a new book out called changing how we choose the new science of morality, and we’re going to discuss that in a moment, but we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. And they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

David Redish  3:59  

It’s a great parable. I have to admit that the first time I heard it was on the show in 2015 and I see it everywhere now it became very interesting to me. I think the parable is really about the kind of person you want to be, and importantly, how the kind of person you want to be changes the decisions you make, which is really interesting to me, because one of the things that we now know is a lot of the decisions we make, a lot of the actions we take, are done very quickly. That is that in the moment, there isn’t a lot of processing going on. And what that means is, what really matters is, how did you build up the learning to that moment? And one of the things that’s very interesting, and I think is under appreciated by many people, is that when we talk about learning. Thing that leads to decision making. It’s not just learning like the facts of the world, but you learn your own motivations, and you learn your own goals. And you know, we can talk about learning for ourselves what to do in this moment. And I think a lot of that parable is really about changing the information process that’s going to happen in that moment, so that you take the action for the kind of person you want to be. And I think it’s a wonderful parable for really understanding that kind of complexity. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  5:41  

I think that’s a great way of phrasing it. And I’m really interested in getting into these questions about, How do we decide? And like you said, What is the accumulation of things that have brought me to this point where that’s the decision? You know, in Buddhism, we would call it conditioning, and we are all the result of countless causes and conditions. Yeah, right, absolutely. And so trying to figure out what I, you know, I’m putting, I’m doing air quotes. What I want is a very complicated thing is we’re going to get into some of your work that’s going to show us. So in order to get where I want to get, we’re going to have to go through a couple of slightly technical areas here, so listeners just hang in there, because I think where we’re headed is a big payoff. But we’re going to be talking some theory here for a minute. And so I think that the first thing we need to do is lay out,

David Redish  6:34  

can I respond to one thing you said that actually, I think is, yeah, really interesting is the eye point that you made with the air quotes, because one of the things that’s really come to the fore, honestly, since 2015 which is interesting, is that a lot of current theories of consciousness are based on your observation of yourself. So humans are social creatures. It’s one of the things that makes humans particularly unique is just how social we are. I mean, other animals are social, but they’re social in other ways, and we evolved ways to understand each other in terms of this kind of complexity and agency. And then we observe ourselves taking actions, some of which may or may not always be the obvious one we thought we wanted. And current theories of consciousness are that we have applied that social understanding of others to an observation of ourselves. And so there’s a really interesting, oh, I’m the one that did that is part of our definition of who we are. I think that’s a very interesting perspective on that idea, right?

Eric Zimmer  7:48  

And I think the other thing that more modern ideas of consciousness seem to be positing, and they’re talked about in different ways and referenced in different styles, is that there’s really not a coherent me that’s in here. It’s not one thing, right? We’re gonna talk about the three ways that you believe decisions get made. So that points to there’s these three different deciding systems. You know? There’s a psychology internal family systems, which posits that we have all these different parts, and that there is one part that is sort of the core self. But there’s lots of different theories of this that strike to the heart of what Buddhism has been saying for a long, long time, which is that if you really look closely, you can’t find you as a discrete thing. What you find is lots of different processes running and happening, and competing priorities and goals and different feelings, and just a lot going on in there. And yet, there is some thing that appears to be observing that, right? So it’s interesting to me, because I think the modern psychology neuroscience is coming together and echoing some of those more ancient ideas about what’s going on inside of us. So maybe we should head from here into talking about how people make decisions, and you talk about three, possibly a fourth way that humans decide. So before we go into that, give me an example of the type of decision we might be talking about here.

David Redish  9:26  

So for me, and I think for neuroscience in general, the question of what is a decision becomes such a ugly, philosophical, you know, rabbit hole that I want to punt on the whole question of what is a decision, and I’m going to simply say, if you’ve taken an action, then I’m going to call that a decision. Okay, any action? Okay? So that could be lifting your arm, that could be hitting a baseball, that could be diving into the river to save a drowning child, you know? And. Any action

Eric Zimmer  10:01  

is going solitary versus writing your book, that kind of thing, absolutely,

David Redish  10:05  

and I didn’t know anything big actions, right? Big actions like, where did you go to college? It includes emotional actions like falling in love, right? And the key is that if we re ask the question in terms of, why did you take that action? How did you take that action? It actually becomes a very measurable scientific question that almost unasks All that decision making stuff. Okay, so what we find is that there are at least three, I guess four, if you include reflexes, there’s some evidence. There may be some, some other ones that are more complicated, but three big ones that really speak to most of humanity. And those three are, first of all, what we call deliberative or planning systems. And these are literally imagining the future and then evaluating it. It’s like running a little war game in your head, or simulation, right? If you don’t want to do it, war game, we can do simulation right, a little oh, what would it be like if I went to this college? What would my life be like? What if I took this job, right? And you run that simulation, you imagine yourself into that future, a mentally time travel. The term is actually called mental time travel into that future, and then you run that simulation. So

Eric Zimmer  11:32  

say, I’m trying to make a decision, I would create a pro and con list. Would that be the deliberative system at work? Exactly? Okay, exactly.

David Redish  11:39  

And people often think it’s logical. I don’t want to suggest it’s logical, because a lot of what it is is actually emotional, of, oh, that sounds like a lot of fun, or, Oh, that sounds really boring, right? I mean, yes, pro and con lists are definitely part of that deliberative system. But the key is that it’s an actual imagined future. It is, of course, therefore, very slow, but it’s very flexible, right? I can imagine, you know, doing something stupid and then not do it, right? I don’t have to actually take the action to imagine it, yeah. The problem with that is it’s very slow. If you’re going to do something that’s quick, like hitting a baseball or responding in the moment to a, you know, playing a jazz concert, right? If you’re doing, you know, back and forth with somebody else in trading fours or something, you know, you don’t have time to go and think through that imagined scenario, right? You say, Okay, if I put my arm in just this way and I swing just this way, you struck out. You know, you just, you literally don’t have the time. So that’s a second system, that system we call procedural. People I’ve talked to like to say you should think of it as muscle memory. I’m not so fond of that term because it’s not in the muscles, it’s a different part of the brain, but I think colloquially, it captures some of what people think of that it can be quite complicated, like driving to work, if you drive to work the same way every day, then you’re using that memory system, that decision system, that procedural system. So

Eric Zimmer  13:09  

that procedural system isn’t necessarily just incredibly fast things, it’s also once something becomes what we would think of as a true habit, meaning we do it without thinking about it

David Redish  13:21  

exactly. And in fact, sports stars often talk about being, quote, in the zone, right? And what that means is that their procedural system is running really smoothly. So what the procedural system is doing is recognizing situations in the world and then responding to them with well practiced actions. So this is, very importantly, a completely different set of neural circuits. So if we use something like the functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is a technology that can look inside your brain and see which parts of your brain are active, a completely different set of circuits will be active if you’re doing something procedural than if you’re doing something deliberative.

Eric Zimmer  14:01  

Can I ask you a question about fMRI? Because I hear criticisms of fMRI from time to time saying, like, it’s not really telling you anything, and the criticism is often leveled at spiritual teachers who are trying to talk about something they don’t understand. I’m guilty of that from time to time. But as somebody who’s actually in the science like works you know, in this world, how accurate a picture do you think fMRI is giving us of what’s going on? So

David Redish  14:28  

you have to think of fMRI as a tool and as a tool. It’s an excellent and very powerful tool, but it’s not a magic item, and part of the problem is that it gets oversold what fMRI is actually measuring is how active how much work that part of the brain is doing. So when your brain is doing certain amounts of work, and different parts of your brain work for different things, right? You have a visual cortex in the back of your head. So if you’re looking at something that’s changing very quickly. Body, your visual cortex in the back your head is going to do a lot of work, whereas your auditory cortex, as we’re talking to each other, is also doing a lot of work right now. But honestly, your somatosensory your touch cortices are not doing that much work right now. They would be if you were, say, you know, reading braille or something. If you were, you know, feeling something, trying to understand a certain texture, right? So what happens with fMRI is you can measure that and so you can say, Ah, this part of the brain is active, is doing a lot of work. Now, it turns out, particularly in cortical areas, that that level of work can get pretty fine tuned. It’s different in different brains, but the kind of reading mind stuff is real to a limited extent. So for example, I can tell if you’re thinking about faces or houses because your visualization of faces and your visualization of houses happens to be in pretty different parts of your brain. Yeah, right. It would be like, think about it this way. You’re measuring the electricity going to a building. And if one building in, you know, New York City is made of jets fans, and another building is made of, you know, Giants fans, right? And the giants are playing that day, the building that is almost all Giants fans will have a lot more electricity, yeah, right, because all their TVs will be on, they’ll all be watching the game. I’m on the fly, so I don’t know how good analogy this is works. What fMRI is measuring is the amount of electricity that’s going through. In this case, blood. Yeah, right. In the use case, actually, it’s not blood. It’s technically the parts of the brain. When it works harder, it asks for more blood, and so more blood goes to that part of the brain, but it doesn’t need any more oxygen. The parts that it needs from the blood is something else. Honestly, it’s not my field. I don’t actually know what it is. I don’t even know if it’s known, but what it means is, you get more blood, but it uses less oxygen, so there’s more oxygen in the blood, and that’s what’s detectable by fMRI got it. So think of it as like, there’s more something being supplied to that part of the brain, yeah. And what that means, though, is that I can ask somebody to do something procedurally or deliberatively, and what I find is different parts of the brain are working at different times. And

Eric Zimmer  17:24  

when you say different parts of the brain, you use the word circuits earlier. And I’ve heard people start to talk about networks, meaning it may not be just one part of the brain. It may be parts of the brain that are linking together in a certain way, or it’s a little bit more than just like this teensy little part of your brain is the one that’s doing everything. Is that an accurate way to think of absolutely,

David Redish  17:45  

the way I like to say it is, if I took that piece of your brain out and put it in a little dish, it wouldn’t do anything. Yeah, right? Yeah. It’s like taking the steering wheel out of the car and putting it in the street. Got it right? It’s not gonna steer. That doesn’t mean that the steering wheel is the same as the tires. Yep.

Eric Zimmer  18:04  

Okay, we had gotten through, I believe, the deliberative and the procedural and, you know, basically different parts of the brain are working depending on what what’s going on there. So what’s the next type?

David Redish  18:18  

There’s a third system, and it’s really important, because a lot of the old psychology theories will talk about two processes, and there’s actually three. It’s really important because the third one is as different from either the other two as they are from each other. And this third one I like to call instinctual now, but is within the field called Pavlovian, because it’s what Pavlov’s dogs were doing. The problem is that it confuses everybody when they think about it, because we all have this psychology, 101, we heard about Pavlov and stuff, and so I’m going to call it instinctual to separate it from that. Again, colloquially, people talk about it as like going with the gut, but again, it’s not your gut. It’s a different part of the brain, and it is a third circuit in the brain that is completely different from the other two. And what this one is, which turns out to be much more important than people used to think. This third one is a set of species important behaviors, some of them very complicated, that are available immediately, but you learn when to release so classically, fight or flight, right? But also going out to help somebody diving into the river to save a drowning child, turns out to be this instinctual system, running away from a fire, right, running away from the lion, right? But it turns out it’s also complicated things like posture and submit, right? If you have two people, one kind of, you know, yelling at the other. I always love that scene in the Black Panther movie, the first one, where they’re in this big battle and. The guy looks over and sees that his girlfriend and all the women are fighting with all the guys, and there he’s like, this is horrible. And he throws his sword down and kneels in front of her, and there’s this absolute iconic moment of her with her spear. And you know, in that instant, the complete relationship that’s completely instinctual systems, and the reason we can recognize that is because those two behaviors are instinctual human behaviors that we are learning when to release. And in fact, the whole mating dance, if you look at two people going back and forth in a bar, right, that is also part of this instinctual system. So this

Eric Zimmer  20:39  

instinctual system might I have instinctual responses that you don’t have? Yeah. Okay, so when we say species specific, we mean they are human, right? But we don’t all have them in the same way into the same degree. And to what degree are those? Back to the term we used earlier, learned or conditioned. So

David Redish  20:59  

it’s complicated, and to be honest, it’s still a lot of science work being done here. Some of the simpler ones are pretty straightforward, like run away or throw a punch or laughing with your friends, for example. These seem to be pretty universal. I personally am convinced that cursing is this system as compared to a conversation which is not. And what’s interesting about cursing is, of course, we all curse in our own language, right? Yeah, that the actual curse, right? The bad word we say we learn, right? In fact, one of my kids at one point when, you know we’re trying to get him not to curse, he started saying Sicily as his angry word,

Eric Zimmer  21:48  

yeah, yeah. There’s lots of people say freaking, you know. So, yeah, exactly. So there’s some process in which we train that system then, right?

David Redish  21:57  

But usually the the output is relatively consistent, like I can tell a smile on any person, yeah and yes, a European smile is slightly different from an American smile. Americans tend to really smile with their mouths, and Europeans think we’re crazy. You know, a European will often smile primarily with their eyes. It’s a cultural difference, particularly in parts of Europe, but the basic idea of laughing or smiling or whatever will be consistent, right? The real learning that happens in this system, and this is kind of where, honestly, the one you feed, turns out to be really important, is what is the condition under which you’re going to release that behavior, right? So I like to joke swinging a bat in a baseball game and in a bar are very different, right? Or in a situation, right? If you hear a crying child next door to you, right? Do you react by saying, Oh no, what’s wrong? Or do you react with, shut that thing up, right? Those are both Pavlovian reactions. Those are both instinctual reactions. But which one you release at that moment, right? Emotionally is going to depend on the learning you’ve done over time. That’s a

Eric Zimmer  23:20  

really interesting example of how you respond to a baby crying and that sound. And I think the other thing that’s interesting about that is that it seems to me that the way I respond to that sound has something to do with my physiological and emotional state at the time. Absolutely, when I’m well slept and feeling pretty good and not hungry, I might be like, I wonder what’s wrong with that baby? Somebody should give it a bottle. And if I got two hours of sleep and I haven’t eaten in several hours, I’m probably going to be more towards, shut that thing up, right? And so even that is going to be dependent on on factors within my physiology,

David Redish  23:57  

absolutely. But part of the situation you’re in depends not just on the physical surroundings, but your cultural moment. Are you hungry? Are you well fed? Are you comfortable? Are you at the end of your rope? Do you have a big exam the next day? You know? Are you anxious? All of these components feed into that situation, and the truth is that they feed into a lot of these other situations. These decision systems interact in complex ways, right? So playing sports, you want to be active, and I want to say aggressive without being aggressive, right, right? You want to be aggressive within the game without being aggressive in a violent you know interaction, right? You still want to be friends at the end of the game, you.

Eric Zimmer  25:08  

So let’s take jumping into the lake to save a drowning child. Sure, not everybody’s going to do that, but some people will. We would consider that a moral choice, like it’s good to do that, like you should do that, versus, if you don’t do that, maybe that’s bad. And again, maybe different people are going to have different moralities around that, but most of us would view something like that as a moral choice, right? So where I wanted to go is, you know, if you read about morality, and I’m interested in morality, I want to talk about that term before bunch of people just turn off their brain. You know, I’m interested in morality in the sense of, how do I think I should live my life? How do I decide what’s important and who’s the person I want to be? So for me, it becomes a very personal thing. I’m not very interested. Well, to say I’m not interested in others morality is not correct. But I just want to be clear, I’m not talking about, you know, the Moral Majority here or enforcing my morality on others, but that’s why I’m interested in it. Jonathan hate is the person that I most have read this from, but I’m sure he’s borrowed it from lots of different places. Is this idea that our morals are actually feelings, you know, you ask me a moral question, I respond that feeling is there. And then I’m gonna layer reasons on top of that. I’m gonna try and this is what I believe to be true. Now I’m believing that for reasons that are entirely emotional. Now I’m gonna try and construct an argument around that, instead of the other way around. This

David Redish  26:37  

is one of the things where I really disagree with Jonathan okay on these things, I think that he is, which is surprising given his, you know, Knowledge Base. He’s taking a very simple view of decision making. And so I would turn it around and say there’s a moral question of, what do we do in this situation? There are two questions that we want to separate. One is, what is the prescriptive goal that we, either as an individual or as a society, want to do? And I agree with you that I don’t want to talk about imposing moral codes on anybody. What I want to understand is, how do those moral codes interact with us. The other thing, though, is that there are many situations where each of those decision systems might be more appropriate and might be the thing to do. So, for example, in a lot of these moral questions, I can change which of these systems is taking control by changing how I phrase the question. An interesting story. This diving into the river is a very interesting thing. I was on a trip with I was at some conference, and they had a afternoon thing where we got to go fishing in streams in Colorado, which I was really quite wonderful. And was with this guide, who was this wonderful, talkative guide, who clearly was name dropping every five minutes of all the famous people he had, you know, guided, but he was a character. He was a wonderful, you know, really wonderful guy. But he told this story about he pointed out that these little streams actually run super fast, and you can be shockingly pulled under, and what looks like, you know, two feet of water, turns out it’s eight feet of water, and you’re underneath. And he described the story where he was driving by with somebody, and they saw somebody drawn underneath, and the two of them stopped the car. The two of them got out, and he told the other person, don’t go, don’t move, because he had been trained on how to go save somebody in this situation, and the other person who, of course, in this instinctual I’m going to go dive in the river and be the hero and save the person, would only have made things worse. So he had been trained procedurally how to respond in this moment, and the other person was responding instinctually, right? So, in fact, you could create, and I would argue that the discussion we are having right now about do you dive into the river to save the child, is actually a deliberative one, not an instinctual one. We’re having a deliberative conversation about it. And so I really disagree with Jonathan that these moral things start from feelings. If you ask the question in very specific ways, which is what he tends to do, he tends to create these very charged emotional moments in his examples, they will activate that instinctual system, whereas if you ask the question in a different way, right, then you get a different answer. The famous story is the trolley problem on this one.

Eric Zimmer  29:52  

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting and makes more sense to me, because while I do believe there is. Is a huge emotional component to what we think is right or wrong. We are capable of deliberating and changing that right. You know, if you’re open minded enough, your moral views can shift, and I would almost argue should shift if you’re actually a very thoughtful person. Oh, okay, say more. So

David Redish  30:21  

there are many, many cases where the instinctual is the right choice, and there are other cases where the deliberative is the right choice. A lot of the thing, I think, is kind of what I like to think of as, you know, the learning I’m trying to do, and I think people should try to do is figure out when is each of these systems best, right? Each of these systems is not that one is better than the other. They’ve each evolved for conditions and like, if you’re deciding who to fall in love with, making a list of pros and cons isn’t really great, right? You kind of want to let the chemistry happen and see what happens. Well, as

Eric Zimmer  31:03  

somebody who’s been led astray by his chemistry a few times, I’m not sure I agree. I get your point, yeah. And the truth is,

David Redish  31:14  

would you have been more led astray by your deliberative system?

Eric Zimmer  31:17  

Well, that’s a whole nother conversation. So you’ve talked about how we ask the question changes the result that we get. So part of what you and I talked about before this interview is I’m trying to take your work about moral systems as a whole, applied to societies and groups, and I’m trying to sort of extract that and take it down to how do I make decisions in my life about what matters to me and what’s important? So occasionally I’m sort of running aground in attempting to do that, but if I’m trying to make a decision, I’m trying to think of what’s a common moral type decision that a human being makes. Let me see

David Redish  31:58  

if I can bin a connection for you, please. So one of the things that Jonathan’s work, and in fact, all of the other science that’s tried to do a science of morality before they have essentially punted on the question of, what is the goal, right? What is your moral goal? So we said saving babies is good. I think we all generally agree on that. But where does that come from? Why is saving babies good, right? If we all accept what those moral rules are, then yes, we can talk about, how do we as an individual find the best one for ourselves, or maybe we say they’re all relative, and there are no rules, at which point you run into some really nastiness that, I’ll be honest, I’m not comfortable with. Yeah, and I think one of the things that makes that connection is what I argue in this book is that there is actually a moral rule, a very general one, that ends up having kind of consequences, and all the other things kind of fall from those consequences. And I’m kind of dancing in a circle. I’m not sure if I’m getting to the right spot. So if I wander too much, stop me and we can come back. But I wonder if some of that connection of these examples comes to recognizing what the individual large term goal is, which is to align our work together, to find ways to work together, to create so that what’s best for you is best for me, and what’s best for me is best for you. And I actually have been very intrigued, once I kind of see that, and we can talk kind of about, as you said, about the FMRI and that, about the actual science of it, that might be useful, but once I saw that, it changes how I interact in those decisions with other people, right? I mean, I’ll be explicit about I’ll say, oh, you know, look, I want you to understand I’m doing this, because if you succeed, I do better, yeah, I say this to my students, right? I’m a professor. A lot of my life is teaching students. And, you know, I was talking to, I just my class just ended this, you know, week ago, and I was really pleased this year I got a lot of positive feedback from the students, and I wonder how much of it is, because I started off by saying, my goal is for you to succeed. Because if you succeed and go do well and go say to everybody, wow, I learned all this in this class, right? That’s better for me, right? That our goals are aligned, yeah? Is maybe the way to say it. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  34:49  

because in the book, here’s what I think you’re saying, and you you can correct me. I think you’re saying that morality is a tool that humans use. Lose to move us from there’s lots of different ways to call it, but we might say a game where I might win and you might lose, to move us collectively to games where, when we cooperate, we both win bigger and better. And that that’s the purpose of a moral code is to get more of us to play that kind of game than more of a game in which selfishness is prioritized. Now I’ve oversimplified dramatically there, but is that close? I don’t

David Redish  35:32  

think you’ve oversimplified at all. I think that’s actually exactly it. People always talk of morality as do the right thing, even though we know you really want to cheat. And honestly, that’s not my lived experience, right? I don’t know about you, but my experience is, most of the time I do the moral thing because I want to do the moral thing, right. And what I realized is exactly that these moral codes are tools. They’re sociological and they’re personal tools. Actually an interesting thing is to think of them as personal tools. The one you feed is a great example of a personal tool that helps you achieve behaviors that are more likely to be in that connection. So I don’t think you’ve oversimplified at all. I think you’re exactly right.

Eric Zimmer  36:25  

So if I then take that idea and say, All right, I want to apply it to myself and how I decide, let’s talk about this idea that how I ask the question changes the answer. Can you give me an example that perhaps in our individual life. Yeah,

David Redish  36:41  

so is your goal as a student to learn, or is your goal as a student to get the most points right? And if your goal is to get the most points, then you’re going to do a whole set of behaviors right. And if your goal is I’m going to learn the most I can, then you’re going to do a different set of behaviors. Some people will argue, oh, in order to get into med school, you have to get an A, you have to do this, and you have to succeed, right? And the question is, are they correct? And when you talk to the people who actually know and the people who actually you know make those decisions, they’re often wrong, and it’s often the people who are helping the other people that are doing better, right? So a good example is convincing all my students that study groups getting the most points while everybody else gets less points. Means that, yes, on the ratio of point scales, you did better. But if you can create a study group where you all can work together, you can all get A’s, right? So they started doing study groups. So by changing the question of saying, Look, what’s my goal? Is my goal to get I want to get 100 points and everybody gets zero, or is my goal? I want everybody to get 100 points, because we’ve all then learned that changes. It, that goal,

Eric Zimmer  38:01  

though, the underlying goal itself, right? You asked two people. One of them might say, I’m here to get A’s because I’m here to then go on to grad school. And, you know, you can learn if you want. I don’t much care, not my thing. Someone else very much, saying, hey, look, you know, I really want to learn. I mean, I just had a conversation with a guy who is a book called The pathless path. He was like a very successful, I don’t know if he went to Harvard, it doesn’t matter. He went through the whole Ivy League track. Was working with the biggest, the best business consultancy group, McKinsey. He was on that track, and he used a phrase there called it was a world class hoop jumper, meaning his job was just to jump through these series of hoops, never thinking about why, except that it’s because that’s the next hoop to get through to get to this place over here. And we could say we’ve got a hoop jumper on one hand and we’ve got a person who wants to learn on the other hand. The question does become, where is that goal coming from? Right? Even the question I ask is informed by my moral approach or my values, that’s

David Redish  39:04  

right. One issue is, of course, what is the individual goal? Right? Yeah. But also there is, how do you achieve that kind of greatness? And by changing the question, you actually find that the people who are doing the most of those greatnesses are actually the people who are working together with groups and are not the people who’ve elbowed everybody out of the way. But there are other examples where we can talk about these decision systems, you know, concretely like so for example, oh, here’s a good one. If I’m asking you to pick a picture to put on your wall. I could ask you to say, find the one you like, or I could say, find the one you like, and then explain it to me. If I tell you to explain it to me, you end up coming up with a very different answer. And there’s a great experiment that did this with, you know, college kids as you know, psychology. Technology experiments used to do, we do less of that now. But, you know, classically, it was this great experiment of, you know, college kids. Some of them, they said, Pick a picture, take it home. And some of them, they said, Pick a picture and come back and explain to me why you picked this picture for your wall. And you know, they told each of them that they were measuring all these things. And of course, what they actually measured was who has their picture on the wall a week later, right? And the ones who explained it, none of them had their picture on the wall. The ones who just said, I like I like this and put it up, right? They used a different decision system to pick the picture by changing the question of, are we a team, right? Are we individuals? Are we, you know, are we a community? I was trying to think of, you know, community construction examples, things like barn building or block parties. Change the definition of who we think we are. I have a note where I started thinking about empathy as a technology that creating empathy with other people, which we can do through stories. And these are ways for us to understand and change our view of people. You think of, for example, the famous napalm picture and from the Vietnam War, right? Of the girl of Kim foo, the young girl who, you know, was very famously, got the picture of her, you know, running from her village, you know, with Nepal, you know, being burned changed everybody’s view. It changed the question. It was no longer a question of, are we, you know, stopping this, you know, communist menace of coming back and forth. It was, are we killing kids? It suddenly changes the question that technology of a photograph changes the empathy. There are all of these examples where we can shift these decision questions by changing the questions we ask. And I love this example of the one you feed is changing the questions you ask yourself. That’s the whole point of the parable, right? It changes the decisions you make by pulling up different answers in different crises.

Eric Zimmer  42:22  

You I’m a firm believer that one of the paths to a good life is to ask yourself questions very often about what am I doing and why, you know, what am I doing? Why? What do I want to be doing? What matters? I mean, these are not fun questions to ask necessarily, because we often find ourselves in, I don’t know, you know, or no, I’m not living the way I wanted. But the question itself is the important thing. You know, the question is, what, in and of itself, kind of what you’re saying, even asking the question, starts to nudge you in a certain direction. It’s sort of like if you start tracking calories, right, just the very act of tracking calories will shift how you eat. Absolutely, I’m not saying it will get you all the way where you need to go, but over and over again, we’ve seen studies that show just that action is gonna nudge you towards better eating, and so asking questions, I think, regularly, nudges us towards being the version of ourselves that we want to be. Yes,

David Redish  43:33  

but also tracking calories is a great example of, am I eating because I’m hungry? Am I eating because I’m social, right? Am I eating because I’m trying to get the right nutrition right? And partially, there’s asking questions of yourself, but partially, every moment in your life you are answering a question right, at every moment you are taking an action in response to some question in the world. And one of the points that I’m making is, what that question in the world is like, is this food or not? Is a different question from Should I throw these mashed potatoes or not in like, if you’re in a food fight, right? These are two very different questions, and they’re going to come up with very different answers. And the argument in the book is that because we have multiple decision systems, because these decision systems learn, because these decision systems interact with the world, if we change the world, we can change those decision systems. And so we can change our behavior by changing the world, not just by changing ourselves.

Eric Zimmer  44:42  

Let me pivot off there. I’m tempted to go big, and then I’m also tempted to go small. Here. I’m gonna go small for a second, then maybe we zoom back out and the small is this. Let’s say that. Well, let’s just stick with eating. And I decide that I want to. To Lose Weight. Okay? Now, I think what you’re saying is that a the very question we need to be asking ourselves is, why, right? Because that informs an awful lot, right? It’s because I want to look good in a bathing suit, or it’s because I want to keep my cholesterol low, because my dad died of a heart attack at 60, right? And I know for me, as I’ve reframed exercise and diet and all that in terms of well being, not even future well being, but current well being. That changed my relationship to those things dramatically. So I think that’s one example of the question, absolutely. But let’s say that I say my deliberative self. I’m assuming this would be my deliberative self says I want to lose weight and I want to do it because I want to be healthier. So there’s the deliberative self. It’s made its little decision, right? And then I just don’t do it again and again and again, right? This is common stuff. It seems to me, then that my Pavlovian and my procedural systems are overriding my deliberative system. Is that a way to think of it? It is,

David Redish  46:07  

and one of the languages, this is, of course, the language of the previous book that we talked about in 2015 which was called the mind within the brain, is one of my view is that it’s not that you are succumbing to your Pavlovian and procedural self, it’s that all three of those are yourself and you have a conflict within yourself, yes, and that seeing that conflict within yourself as a conflict within yourself allows you to talk about controlling it. So one is you could try to change your Pavlovian system or your procedural system, you could learn new things. So for example, you could learn to cook differently. This actually happened to be my doctor said I need to change my diet, and so I started buying different foods, and I learned a whole bunch of new recipes because I like to cook, and so I’m cooking very differently for myself. And it’s not that I’m like at every moment saying, Oh, am I eating too much sugar? Am I eating too much of this? It’s more, oh, that sounds like a good dinner. I’m going to make this dinner tonight. Yeah, right. And what I’ve done is I’ve changed my procedural process of cooking, and yes, I’ve had to learn those new recipes to retrain my Pavlovian sense of, like, Ooh, that smells tasty. You know, I like that flavor combination, or I don’t, right. I’ve had a few that I was like, I’m not making that one again. You know, by thinking of this as, how do I change my world that interacts with all of these systems? Yeah, I don’t have to be white knuckling it through saying I’m gonna do this, even though I keep finding myself not right. And so by thinking about changing my environment, that allows me to change those actions, basically, so that the systems come into alignment, rather than that they’re always in conflict.

Eric Zimmer  47:57  

I really like this sort of discussion, because I think you’re right. Recognizing the internal conflicts is really important, because until you find some way of sort of resolving those, it’s one step forward, one step back, right? I mean, it’s just, you just, you’re just kind of stuck in stasis, right, right? You know, the question, almost in many cases, I think, becomes, how do I change what I want, or, How do I change what parts of me want? Or

David Redish  48:23  

how do I change the environment so that those parts of me make the right choices? Yes,

Eric Zimmer  48:30  

let me say something about that, and then let’s go a different level. So retraining or changing the procedural system seems pretty straightforward, right? In that, like you said, I’ve got a habitual way of cooking and habitual things that I buy, and habitual, you know, reach for the cookies in the cabinet, all these habitual procedural systems. And so I’m going to change those. I’m going to learn new procedures that are going to move me in that direction. It seems like the Pavlovian one is the harder one to work with to change. But it does seem possible, because once upon a time, I had an extraordinarily Pavlovian response to drugs and alcohol, you know, in that like it felt instinctual. And now I don’t, I don’t at all. And so it is possible to do that. It wasn’t as simple as like, I just decided one day, with my deliberative system, drugs are bad. I know I’m no in the beginning, that was part of it, and there was some white knuckling, but over time, some of it was environmental changes, but some of it feels deeper than that. Yeah, in this example, what are ways that we can if we’ve got a sort of a conflict between our deliberative system and our Pavlovian system, and we’ve decided that our deliberative system is the one we want to go with, what are ways of sort of retraining that Pavlovian system, or even if we don’t want to use that word, teaching it some new dance steps, absolutely.

David Redish  49:58  

And I think. It’s really important, because although we call it instinctual, we call it Pavlovian, it is highly learning. It is a learning system, and it absolutely learns. It learns whether you could release the friendly dog or the angry dog, right? You can release the I’m gonna binge ice cream or I’m going to have, you know, a bowl of blueberries. And part of it is creating situations where that instinctual system recognizes the approach to in we’re talking about approach to food, but approach to food that is good for you rather than bad, right? So you get to the point where, you know, I’ve found combinations of foods that I find really enjoyable, that actually, I’ll be honest, I like better than some of those super sweet things. I had a thing with the lab where I bought donuts. There was an extra donut, and I ate the extra donut afterwards, and I was like, I didn’t really that didn’t, that wasn’t so good, right? And I realized that I have shifted my Pavlovian drive to like, there’s only so much of this high sugar that I really want. I mean, I like the first donut. It was the second one that was too

Eric Zimmer  51:16  

much. Yes, of course, always the second donut is a mysterious but you can

David Redish  51:20  

teach your Pavlovian system, and you can think of it, you know, yeah, you’re talking about changing the foods. Also. You can change what’s available, right? You can pre commit by saying, I mean, people, you know, people who have alcohol problems, pour the alcohol down the drain. Right? Yep,

Eric Zimmer  51:36  

door. Dash has been a disaster for this, by the way, because you used to be like, Well, I just don’t keep it in the house and and now, you know, DoorDash, there’s even alcohol delivery services. It’s like, you don’t even, I mean, I’m just happy to be where I am in life and not fighting some of those battles today. Because I’m like, Oh my goodness. It’s just like, Yeah, you know, those pre commitment devices aren’t as effective.

David Redish  51:58  

Well, you need different ones. Yeah. And one of the things that you can do is you can create other pre commitment devices, right? One of my favorites is suicide hotlines and alcohol sponsors. And the line is, you can go drinking after you’ve called your sponsor, right? And so I knew people who had alcohol problems, what they taught themselves to say is, and they would literally say this. They’d say, I’m going to the bar. I’m going to call my sponsor and tell them I’m going to the bar. Now, to be honest, at the moment, did they really believe that the sponsor would, you know, deliberatively, maybe they knew the sponsor would stop them. Maybe instinctually, they didn’t think they could talk the sponsor out of it, right, but a line that I have to be honest I never would have believed was okay. But again, I’m not a clinician. I want to be real clear on this. I’m a I’m a computer Jack who does basic neuroscience, fundamental science questions and you know, but I’ve been hanging out with a lot of clinicians recently, and my understanding is sometimes the right line is call the suicide hotline. After you talk to them, you can kill yourself. Yeah, and, I mean, I would not have imagined that was the thing worth saying. But it turns out that can get people to call the hotline, right, that can get people over that line, whereas saying, oh my god, you really do not kill yourself, because you know, then you get the fight back. Yeah, right, yeah. So there are these other procedures, and sometimes the answer is the procedural system. Sometimes what you want to do is give yourself one of these other systems and let your procedural system beat your deliberative system, right? So this is why I don’t like the old like, oh, deliberative is in control of everything, right? Because sometimes the best answer is to create a situation, a process, where other things happen. I heard a thing where it turns out that blister packs are less dangerous than screw top bottles of pills, because by the time some people have popped out enough bubbles to be dangerous. You’re like, This is dumb. What am I doing?

Eric Zimmer  54:14  

Yeah, I mean, delay is a tremendously effective strategy. There’s a rule in behavioralism, fairly simple one, which very much procedural to some degree, but it’s, you know, if you want to do something, make it as easy as possible to do it right. And if you don’t want to do something, make it as hard as possible to do it exactly. Give yourself that time for your deliberative system to sort of get its wits about it and go Hold on a second here,

David Redish  54:40  

and to recognize that the instinctual system is a very in the moment, immediate system, yes, so if you can move things away from it, yeah, you can make it harder for that system, you know, if you’re fighting your instinctual system about, you know, highly sugared foods, yep, put the sugar foods under, you know. Key, Yep,

Eric Zimmer  55:00  

yeah. You know. The other thing that’s interesting about this is there are some theories out there around alcohol and around addiction in general. And one of the theories is that it’s a learning disorder, meaning that for most of us, you know, if you were to drink like I used to drink, you would have some amount of consequence, that your Pavlovian system would very quickly be like, wait a second, this doesn’t make sense. Like, yeah, that was nice, but holy mackerel, This really feels terrible and and that in addicts, for some reason, that mechanism isn’t working. Well meaning the Pavlovian system is not getting the message that this is a bad deal, right? Somehow it’s just simply not internalizing, Oh, this isn’t good anymore, until it’s so far past the point. You know, the deliberative system can be very clear. It’s like you’re killing yourself. This is insane, but your Pavlovian system still thinks this is a good thing. Actually,

David Redish  55:53  

I’ve done a lot of work on addiction. Is actually how I got started on this whole process. Was actually looking at addiction from new theoretical perspectives, and it turns out that addiction is a symptom, not a disease, that it’s more like fever. There are many, many things that will lead you to addiction, and yes, your description of a Pavlovian system that gets over associated and connected is one of those, but there are other ones. For example, it turns out for a lot of people, smoking is a procedural mistake, and it is that the nicotine turns out to activate procedural systems even when they’re unpleasant, and that just has to do with the neurophysiology of human brains and other ones can occur through relief of anxiety questions or one of my favorites was the deliberative idea that if I did this, I would be cool, and therefore, you know, I would do well, right? In fact, I’ve been doing a lot of work with anorexia, which is kind of different from an addiction. Again, I’m not a clinician, but I’ve been working with a lot of clinicians on this, and it looks like a lot of that problem is actually a deliberative problem of knowing exactly what you want and being wrong about your goals. And so people who think that if they are particularly thin, they will be more socially popular, or they will, you know, be able to avoid something, and then they do these really deliberative, dangerous plans that they stick to. And the problem isn’t that the deliberative system is weak or is too strong. It’s that their understanding of the goal, of the structure of the world, it turns out, actually being thin doesn’t affect the popularity at all in this situation. You know, many of them, if you actually look at the data, right, that they just misunderstanding. You know, I always think of the, you know, smoking was cool when I was a kid, and it doesn’t make you cool anymore, no, which has actually been a very nice change, because now people don’t try to be cool by starting to take up cigarettes.

Eric Zimmer  58:08  

It is a very good change. Well, David, we are at the end of our time. Thank you so much for coming back on the show and for a really interesting conversation about how we decide and how we choose how to act in the world.

David Redish  58:23  

Thank you for having me. It’s been a tremendous fun. It’s great to be back. I really love these conversations. You