>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Kim
Ricketts, and I manage along with Kirsten Wiley the Microsoft Research visiting
speaker series. Today we welcome Dr. Greg Berns to Microsoft Research. He's
going to begin with an introduction to neuroeconomics and we're going to end up
talking about iconoclast, which is the book that he's here to discuss today.
We thought it might be fun for us to take a tour through the wonderful and
fascinating neuroeconomics field. And in the end we'll have lots of Q and A as
we always do.
Dr. Berns graduated from Princeton University with a degree in physics, received
a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from UC Davis and an MD from the University
of California, San Diego. He completed his psychiatry residency at Western
Psychiatric Institute and is currently the distinguished chair of neuroeconomics at
Emory University where he's also a professor in the departments of psychiatry,
economics, and the business school.
Much of his current research is in human motivation and decision making. And
we're thrilled to have him here at Microsoft Research
>> Gregory Berns: Thanks, Kim.
[applause].
>> Gregory Berns: Well, it's great to be back. This is actually my second time
here. The first time in this building. I'm trying to look out, see if I recognize any
people from the last time, which was about three years ago. So at the last
minute I decided to give a different talk for you guys, more or less just based on
past experience coming here. The iconoclast talk is I think a little too lay, shall
we say, and this is really -- this talk, the introduction to neuroeconomics is like
the subtitle says is really kind after prelude to the book I wrote. Because I started
thinking about iconoclast as the field of neuroeconomics was evolving and I
checked with Kim to make sure that you all haven't had a talk in neuroeconomics
before and so hopefully this will be interesting and at the end, you know, we can
talk a little bit about iconoclasts and what the implications from neuroeconomics
are and kind of how we go to talking about innovation specifically.
So I always start with this slide, introducing neuroeconomics. So
neuroeconomics is a new field. It's roughly I would say about, oh, five or six
years old, really kind of started going, get -- got going around 2003 when a group
of about 10 neuroscientists and I was in the neuroscientist camp at that point, got
together with a group of about 10 economists and Dan Arieli [phonetic], for
example, was one of the folks on the economist side and we got together for a
weekend to discuss the possibility that in fact we're talking about the same thing,
which is human decision making. And it was a very interesting and frustrating
weekend, as I recall. What happened was the neuroscientist got up and they
started talking about things like dopamine and wee regard and the economist got
up and started thinking about things like value and utility and nobody knew what
anyone was talking about. It was literally a clash of cultures. And one of the
economists, a guy name Al Deristocini [phonetic] got up, I remember he's Italian,
he's very kind of emotional and he said I don't know what you guys are talking
about, I don't even know that this is worth doing anymore.
And I recall actually in the previous year giving a talk at Princeton, which was
even kind of predating neuroeconomics by about a year. Danny Conomon
[phonetic] was in the audience and this was just about six months before he won
the Nobel Prize and he was sitting there, and he was hearing all these
neuroscientists talk and he too was skeptical, and he said I don't know that this is
going to help us understand human decision making.
He has since I think changed his mind about that. So long story short, what
happened was it was created out of a need to understand how people make
decisions, recognizing that economics has a very limited tool set which frankly
has substantial weaknesses to it in explaining human behavior. And the idea is
by peering inside the brain maybe we begin to understand decision making from
a much deeper level.
It also turned out that it works top down as well, not to disparage economics
completely. The thing that economics brought to the table in terms of
neuroscience, which neuroscience is completely lacking in are theoretical
models. So neuroscience, you know, pretty much like all of biology until recently
has been fundamentally a descriptive science. Lots of data, very short on
theories. In fact, really the only theory that anyone agrees on is Darwin's theory,
the theory of evolution, and beyond that, you know, it falls away very quickly. So
the appeal to neuroscientists like myself was the economics actually brought
some quantitative theories. The fact that you could start talking about decision
making and write down equations that describe decision making and then go into
the brain and start looking for corelets of parameters in those equations is
extremely powerful. It gives us tools to start interpreting this wealth of data we
collect.
And the field is still evolving, but what has emerged is a common language at
least now that we all understand.
Now, the slide simply illustrates the fact that you can talk about decision making
at many different levels. Most of the time we talk about individual decision
making fairly trivial decisions, you know, like I'm going to buy this or buy that or I
prefer red over white wine, and neuroeconomics kind of lives in this realm here.
It talks about what systems underlie these decisions.
Now, it's also extending kind of into group behavior which is very interesting in
this is actually kind of where iconoclasts came from and got me thinking about
this which is, you know, how do we -- how to we begin to understand how people
behave together in groups or in pairs and what is the specifically the biological
link between these types of decisions?
The fundamental argument that I make in iconoclast is that as social creatures
we have depending on whatever figure you believe we have 10,000 to 100,000
years of evolution, recent evolution in the human brain and all of that evolution
was in the context of social groups. It still is. And you know, if you think back
10,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago, a human or a proto human, if he didn't
belong in a -- if he wasn't part of a group, if he wasn't part of a community, pretty
much he was dead. Certainly he didn't reproduce. And so what our brains, the
brains that we have today reflect that, it reflects the fact that our brains very
readily incorporate the opinions of the group and it will sometimes do so to the
point of discarding its own processing of what it's seeing. And this presents a
challenge obviously, you know, if you want to do something truly innovative and
truly iconoclastic, it's extremely difficult.
And so much of what I became interested in was just simply reflecting the very
practical pragmatic problem as a scientist I like you all, you know, struggle with
the fact that you want to do something or you need to do something innovative
discovering something new, but you still have to bridge the gap between
discovering something and then actually convincing other people of the merits of
that idea. And somewhere in there many things get lost and probably, you know,
99 percent of ideas and discoveries get lost.
So all of this had its origins really in neuroeconomics. And I just point out the fact
that this is really a closed loop. We can talk about genes in terms of behavior but
frankly, there's too many levels I think to make a lot of sense out of that. Genes
don't code for behavior despite what people will publish. Genes code for proteins
and proteins make cells. So there's many levels to spam here.
But it is a closed loop because the decisions that we make in groups govern
reproductive choice and then guide evolution. Okay. So on to neuroeconomics.
What are these folks doing?
>>: [Inaudible].
>> Gregory Berns: Well, yeah, they're buying stuff, but, yeah, but the
convenience store, the crowd, the expressions of expectation should be to get
the dead give away actually.
>>: Lottery tickets.
>> Gregory Berns: Lottery tickets. So lottery tickets, lotteries in general are
great. This is kind of the standard paradigm of economic microeconomic
decision making. And the fundamental question which every economist has
really tried, every microeconomist has tried to grapple with is why do people buy
lottery tickets, right? You can flip the ticket over and see what the odds are, and
generally speaking, you know, if the odds are say one in 100 million of winning
and it costs a dollar to buy the ticket, it's irrational, at least from an objective point
of view to buy the ticket unless the jackpot is worth more than 100 million dollars,
right? The expected value of the ticket has to at least be greater than the cost of
ticket. Yes?
>>: I don't know if it's irrational, because even if I average [inaudible] it's a life
changing event, so playing Keno might be irrational, but playing like the big ticket
lot to might not.
>> Gregory Berns: Right. So let's -- so let me breeze through kind of usual
explanations for this. I will point out, however, that there is a dramatic advertise
connect between expectation and reality. This is Andrew Whitaker. I believe he
still holds the record for the single largest payout in US history, 315 million.
What's really interesting to me about this picture is his expression. If you
contrast that with the laid why I's expression in the previous slide. This is his
wife. This is his granddaughter. She died a year later of a drug overdose. His
life has pretty much been miserable since winning this lottery. He's been in the
news a lot about it. I believe they're divorced now.
The moral of the story is that things are not always what you expect. Now, the
reason I tell this is because economic decision making, in fact any decision
making is really based on what you expect. Its relationship to reality and
outcomes, whether you actually get what you want are not is after the fact.
That's more an issue of learning. And what you do with that information.
But as far as actual decision making goes, the only thing that really matters is
your subjective perception of what you're seeing and how you process that
information. And it could be completely rooted in fantasy that governs your
decision making. But that is what matters. So this kind of gets to the heart of
why people buy lottery tickets.
So neuroeconomics is based primarily methodlogically on neuroscience methods
primarily brain scanning functional MRI, a little bit in the way of animal models,
but I'm not going to talk about that. Its focused typically on what's called
microeconomic behavior, which simply means decision making of typically one
person, and then within that there are several kind of subgenres of decision
making that become very important, and that is how do people value things, you
know, what metrics of valuation do they have, how do they use that to make
decisions? And then the interesting area of games. Game theory. How do
people make decisions when there's at least one other person involved and the
outcomes depend jointly on what more than one person does.
Macro economic behavior is becoming increasingly relevant although
neuroscience is just beginning I think to get into this area. And I will talk
specifically about conformity behavior because this is what the seed was for me
writing this book. This has clear implications, especially with current events in
terms of market behavior as well as politics.
Okay. I just put this up. I put it up in part because I feel an obligation to but then
I disparage it. I don't believe in it. But Freud did say this was his idea of how
people make decisions based on the pleasure principle. He said that the id
pursues pleasure and is the source of all internal conflict, that you have the id,
then you have the ego and the superego and these parts of the psyche clash
with each other. I think it's cute but not particularly helpful. I'm actually more
intrigued with what this guy said, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham is known as one of
the utilitarian philosophers. He was a weird guy, frankly. He founded the
university college London and you notice down here, can you see this? That's
his head. What he did, I'll tell you scientifically what he did, but I like the story
because it illustrates his peculiarity, after he founded the university, he put in his
will that he wanted his head preserved and the reason he wanted it preserved
was so that he could be brought out to the annual faculty meetings in perpetuity.
And for a long time, in fact, after his death, the college did bring it out and he was
recorded as being present but not voting. I'm told now, though, that the head is
safe away in storage. I think it had an unfortunate tendency to disappear which
was usually distributed to the undergrads. So but this is -- that's Bentham. What
he said, this actually predates Freud, it's actually very similar to what Freud said.
It was Bentham who talked about utility, and this is key to all economic theory.
He says the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or
disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency which it
appears to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in
question.
So in modern English what he says is that we have in our heads this idea of
utility which equate -- roughly equate it with happiness and that whatever we do,
all the decisions that we make are geared to getting more utility, more happiness
or to at least diminish the opposite of it. What's interesting about it, and this was
discovered by Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician even before Bentham
wrote it down was that the idea of utility or value has diminishing returns. And
this -- he formalized this in something called the St. Petersburg paradox.
What that basically means is that if you're talking about money you get less bang
for the buck the more money you have, right? So I think we kind of subjectively
know this, that if you have absolutely no money, you know, simply handing
someone $10 means a great deal to them, whereas if you have $100, you know,
$10 doesn't mean as much to you. Even though, and this is the paradox, that
objectively $10 is $10 and buys exactly the same amount of goods and services.
But people don't have that as a subjective response. And this is often invoked to
explain the fact that people have -- that they do not behave, quote, rationally or at
least objectively rational when it comes to money because this type of curve
means that the more you have, the less you stand to benefit by gaining. And
another way of phrasing it is if you're out here and you stand to lose, say, $50 or
50 whatever, there's more to lose then you stand to gain in the opposite direction.
And that's the usual explanation for why people are risk averse.
How do you measure this? Well, one way is you can ask the people how, how
they feel about things. That's called experiential utility. That's generally not
great. I mean, it gives you kind of an instantaneous measure. The way
economists like to talk about it is in terms of decision utility, so you actually kind
of infer how much utility people get by looking at what they buy and what they do.
You can give them force choices, you can set up experiments to the see how
much they're willing to pay for various things using differently mechanisms like
market price or auctions. And then neuroeconomics comes on, on the scene and
adds to the party neurobiological measures.
One thing, one more kind of theoretical thing to add about utility theory, after the
1900s or sorry, after the 1800s, these two guys, Morgan Stern and Von
Neumann extended the theory in a very fundamental way. They said that people
in fact do take account of the odds of things and what they do is, you know, if
you're given an array of chooses, each with different potential utilities, people
also factor in the odds that they will actually obtain those outcomes. The
probability times utility and they actually try to maximize this quantity.
And that's -- that is essentially the foundation of modern neuroeconomics. John
Nash modified the theory or extended this theory to account for how people
make decisions when the outcomes involve another person. One of the founders
of game theory. The final two key figures in this pictures are Danny Conomon,
Anama Staverski [phonetic], he won the noble prize for this, he would have had
he not died at a young age. And what these guys pointed out was that not only
do people kind of distort value in kind of this diminishing fashion but it's
asymmetric and that if you stand to lose something, this figures more prominently
for a given amount of money than winning. So they have this asymmetry here.
It's called loss aversion. Generally people are more afraid of losing an equivalent
amount than the potential benefit of gaining that.
He also pointed out that people tend to view gains and losses from kind of
whatever their status quo is, not in any kind of absolute sense. They also
pointed out this is a picture of how people distort probabilities that people behave
kind of very strangely when you give them odds, like a lottery tickets. In
particular, people tend to overestimate long shots here and underestimate
relatively sure shots. And they use this to explain why people buy lottery tickets
and then will turn around and also buy an insurance policy.
Okay. So that's all background. That's the econ background. But I want to talk
about dopamine and I want to talk first about the fable of dopamine because I'm
sure everyone has heard this fable. This is what the chemical structure looks
like. Dopamine is made in about roughly 40,000 neurons in the brain which
means that it comprises less than one percent of the total brain by weight or
volume. Just a couple of very small structures here that produce dopamine. And
they send projections widely throughout the brain. Despite being a relatively
small portion of the brain, I assure you without dopamine neurons you would not
be able to get out of bed, and in fact people with par kin son's disease have
exactly this problem. It's a deficit of dopamine and they cannot initiate action and
in the late stages cannot really initiative new types of thought or cognitive plans.
The popular story of dopamine is this. Dopamine feels good. Now, the reason I
think this is so common place in terms of kind of culture is the very -- is the early
experiments in the '50s and '60s found that if you stick a canula in a rat and
either infuse something like cocaine or you put an electrode in the parts of the
brain that release dopamine and you essentially either pharmacologically or
electrically release dopamine, the rat, and you give control of that to the rat, the
rat will push that bar to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. And most
scientists of the time assumed that that was because dopamine feels good.
Well, in which case it would become the pleasure chemical of the brain. The
modern story, which goes back now 15 years or so is far more interesting. So
this is a plot, this was done by a Swiss scientist, Wolfrum Schultz [phonetic], and
what he did was he had -- these are recorder for monkeys. Now, what you're
looking at, these are kind of raster plots where each dot represents a dopamine
neuron spiking and you sum up these, this is time going this way. So you get
kind of this running histogram that tells you what's happening as a function of
time.
What these monkeys are doing, this was basic just classical conditioning, in this
slide here what happens is at this time R stands for reward, the monkey gets a
squirt of juice on its tongue. And what happens the immediately after that the
dopamine neurons spike. Then they go through classical conditioning. So what
happens there is CS stands for condition stimulus. A light comes on and then a
couple seconds later the monkey gets the squirt of juice, okay, so the light comes
on here, then they get the juice. And what happens very quickly is the dopamine
neurons shift their firing from the time where they get the juice, shifts backward in
time to the light. Okay? It's a very important finding because it clearly points out
that dopamine cannot be signalling pleasure in the simplistic sense because if
that were the case, dopamine neurons would continue to fire when the monkey
got the juice unless you think that the light becomes pleasurable. But not in the
strictest sense of the word, it doesn't.
If you withhold the juice, no juice here, you flash the light, you actually see the
dopamine neurons have a depression in firing when they expected to get the
juice. So what came out of this is that dopamine now is clearly not simply a
chemical of pleasure, it's really a chemical that signals anticipation and
expectation, which is far more interesting and important for decision making
because I just said that the thing that governs decision making is not necessarily
what happens after the fact, the thing that matters for decision making is what a
person expects. And peoples expectations are governed by lots of things. It's
governed by, you know, things happening in the environment, it's governed by
their past experience and their memories. But fundamentally when something
happens or a thought process is triggered that rea leases dopamine, it puts the
person in a state of readiness to do something, either to acquire something or to
run away from it.
So the take away from that is dopamine does not equal pleasure, but it does
equal anticipation. All right. So neuroeconomics got very interested in this
relationship, so quick run through of brain imaging, what we do, there's two types
of brain images. There's anatomical and there's functional. The anatomical
views I'm sure everyone has seen, views like this typically we present them in
three views kind of either front on like this or cut sideways or cut horizontally like
that.
This is now this is a fairly old scanner but you get the idea that there's certain
constraints on doing these experiments. It's actually more emersive when you're
doing an experiment. What you don't see here is that we put a mirror above the
person's eyes and so they're typically looking out above their head and then we
put a screen at the other end of the magnet in which we can project images from
any kind of display you'd like. And we can give people various response devices,
too.
So when you're actually kind of in there looking up the mirror and then out the
screen, it's not very claustrophobic, at least I don't find it to be that way. And I
don't think most people do. You very quickly adapt to it and become emersed in
whatever it is that we have people doing.
In neuroeconomics there's been a lot of interest in some key structures. One is
called the ventral striatum right here, this kind of clam shaped structure, but
mainly right there. It's the densest, it's the part of the brain with the densest
concentration of dopamine receptors. The amygdala shown in these two views is
closely associated with arousal and fear responses.
Now, the way FMRI works is actually much older than MRI. This is a drawing
that dates to about 1850. It was done by a guy name Angela Mosso who
invented the blood pressure cuff. He's also responsible for the modern polygraph
which uses a blood pressure cuff. What Mosso was doing, he was
experimenting measuring blood pressure and he -- there was this guy here, his
name was Bertino [phonetic], he was a stone mason in the village that Mosso
lived in, and Bertino had suffered a skull fracture because one of the stones fell
on his head. He lived, but he had a defect in his skull. It was -- the skin was
over it, but there was a defect in the actual bony part. And so Mosso actually put
his blood pressure device on that part of his skull and measured the pulsations of
blood going through that part of the brain underneath that and then what he had
Bertino do was he went through various types of mental tasks doing arithmetic,
reading, saying operators, and what he found was it made a difference on what
Bertino was doing in terms of the magnitude of the pulsations. And this is the
fundamental property that we still used to. It's simply the observation that blood
flow increases to the parts of the brain that are being used, and it does so in a
very regionally specific way.
You add to that something discovered by Linus Pauling and that is that
oxygenated hemoglobin and deoxy hemoglobin have different magnetic
signatures. Deoxy hemoglobin is paramagnetic and distorts the magnetic field
and you can pick up, you can detect with MRI the relative concentration of these
two. And so you put these two observations together and that's really all
functional MRI is.
The pictures that you often see, you know, splattered in academic papers and
the popular press are summary figures and the way we make that, and I
apologize, but I thought you guys would want to know this, is nothing more than
really kind of an lab arbitrated statistical test, a tee test typically, where you
basically you know chop up the brain into a bunch of little cues a you get time
series usually captured about once every 10 -- or I'm sorry, once every two
seconds but you can sample faster and so you get these time series at roughly
about 20,000 points in the brain, and then you simply formulate statistical models
and the statistical models are based on what happened in the experiment, either
things that you varied as independent variables or responses that the person
themselves did. And you simply correlate these different effects with these time
series and you can start to advertise aggregate various types of effects and you
do statistical tests and the parts of the brain that are statistically significant are
typically color coded, hot, yellow.
So in neuroeconomics people have become very interested in how value and
utility are represented. And I'm just going to run through just a smattering of
studies. This was one done by Brian Knudsen at Stanford many years ago
where what he did was he had people doing a very simple kind of button pushing
task and varied how much money they earned on each trial. And then so the
statistical test just goes in and looks at which parts of the brain increase the
blood flow based on how much money was being offered on each trial.
And what you see here is this part here again this part of the brain, the striatum
heavy in dopamine, and what's interesting about it is again, it precedes the actual
outcome. It's like once you give the person a queue that they're going to win $5
versus one then you start seeing activity rise here and presumably that makes
them work harder. We've done experiments using different types of motivating
things besides money. We used -- we did an experiment where we offered
different outcomes of juice and water. Again, same part of the brain.
This is the study that Dan Arieli was involved in, having people rate faces based
on beauty and what they found again, this is an older study so the quality is less,
but basically the same part of the brain responds to beautiful faces more than
average faces.
All of this -- what all of this means and now there's about five years worth of
studies from, you know, literally hundreds of groups, is that it appears that there
is what we call a common neural currency if the brain that indeed the brain
converts to this circuit, this dopamine striatal circuit representations of value and
utility. So it isn't the anticipation expectation sense, but whether it's a monetary
award or whether it's food, something you eat or drink or whether it's beauty,
aesthetics or sex it doesn't appear to really matter but the same uses the same
circuit entry to calculate values. And so really it becomes a question of what's
the exchange rate between money and apples and oranges.
It's not that those are different parts of the brain. And this is extremely useful
because it means that we can then go in and start to look at the activity in here
and try to get a sense of how people are valuing things, even in the absence of
us asking them.
So game theory is interesting. I like this slide. Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove
was actually modelled on Von Neumann. I showed you his picture before. He
was in a wheelchair. He died fairly young of prostate cancer. But Von Neumann
set up what's known as the prisoner's dilemma when he was wording at Rand.
And the reason he created this experiment, this was a model essentially to model
nuclear conflict with Russia. And the question that they were trying to answer
was whether the US should preemptively nuke Russia or not.
And so they came up with this weird game. Has anyone heard of -- have people
heard of the prisoner's dilemma? So the basic game -- this is the financial
version of it. Two people play this, and the usual form you just do this once and
then you walk away. And the came is you can cooperate or defect against the
other person. And if you both cooperate, then you both get $2, you can but as
many zeros on here as you want, it doesn't really change anything. But if one
person cooperates and the other person defects against them, then the defector
gets all the money, $3, and the cooperator gets nothing. So it's incentive to
betray the other person.
The both people defect against each other, they get a nominal payout, which is
less than if they had cooperated. So what happens here? Well, if you're an
economist, you will quickly run through this. This is what John Nash D and came
to the conclusion that you should logically take the course of action that is least
bad. This is called the Nash equilibrium. And in which case -- and the reason for
that is because you have to assume that the other person knows everything that
you know and that they know you know. In which case the only conclusion of
this came is to defect and then both people defect. And it's suboptimal because
had both people cooperated, they both would have done better.
That's what economists -- if you give this to kind of graduate students in
economics they will do this. If you give this game to people who are not
economists, normal human beings, please people will cooperate, even if they
don't know the other person, they will kind of take a chance and assume the
other person will cooperate.
Well, we did a brain imaging experiment of this several years ago to ask the
question why. And the important finding is we observed activity in the same part
of the brain, the striatum, which is the dopamine rich region when people
cooperated with each other or at least even in anticipation of it. Even though that
was not the outcome with the most money, okay, so the activity here was
reflecting not only the monetary reward but apparently, at least we interpreted it
this way some kind of social signal as well, the socially rewarding signal that you
took a chance and the other person also took a chance and you were both
rewarded. And all this does is points out the fact that again we have very social
brains and that we value these social decisions as much, if not more so than
monetary ones.
I will -- in the interest of time, I'm going to skip the game of ultimatum, because I
do want to move on to social information because this is kind of where iconoclast
got started. And the experiment I'm going to describe to you has its original
motivation in trying to understand Nazi Germany and where you go with this is
kind of a matter of speculation. I'll go back in time and just mention Rousseau
who formulated something called the social contract, which is he said there is a
common good. Anybody who lives in a group has to acknowledge the fact that
there are individual benefits but there are also common benefits. He said that
systems are not always accurate in their judgment about what is the common
good and sense this is why we have elections. Rue so talked a lot about this.
It's like so if we're not always sure what's best in everyone's best interest, how do
you decide?
Well, the best way is to have a vote. And that's a very efficient way of
aggregating a group's opinion. And that's what his third point was. The social
contract is exactly that. That as members of a democratic society, you reap the
benefits of common good, but you also have the responsibility to contribute to it.
Okay.
This other guy, Condorcet, said something that chips away a little bit at
Rousseau's idea, and we don't generally talk about this, but I'm very interested in
this, because this says everything about iconoclasm. He formulates something
called the Condorcet's jury theorem and he said let's say you take a group of
people, let's call them a jury, and you say, okay, P is the probability that any
individual in this jury will reach the correct verdict. Okay. So then what is the
probability that more than half of the jury will reach the correct verdict? This is
not making any assumptions about unanimity. You could just have a majority
vote. The theorem says that -- this is the key point, if the votes of the members
are independent of each other, then the group, this P sub-N, will be greater than
P. And I'm not going to go through the proof of this, but it's also known as the
law of large numbers, that if you take independent objections of something, if you
average the results together, you're more likely to have a correct answer. This is
theory at least.
Okay. Now, but there's serious problem with it practically. Okay. So I say what
is the probability of this jury reaching the correct verdict? Well, according to
Condorcet, it's pretty good. It's much better than any individual. But here's the
problem. I lost the slide. Sorry about that. The problem is that for groups to
reach good decisions, the members of the group have to behave independently
of each other. That's the point of a group. You bring diverse opinions in, you
aggregate their opinions.
Once the members start talking to each other, they influence each other and the
independence immediately disappears. And if anyone's seen this movie, I
assume most people have, that the group can change from being a very efficient
aggregator of independent opinions to behaving like a mob. And the question is
what can you do about it, because I think that is group behavior in kind of its
worst possible form. So in comes Solomon Asch. So this is back to
understanding Nazi Germany. So he did this experiment to try to understand
exactly this phenomena, how -- how can essentially -- or why does a group
sometimes behave worse than any individual of the group would on their own?
So he did this very famous experiment. He would bring in people into a room
and say which of these three lines is the same length as this one? Okay?
Nothing difficult about it.
The thing that he did, though, that was very interesting, was in this room, let's say
there would be about 10 people, 9 of them were confederates. Everyone but one
person was an actor playing a part. And what Asch did was he would go around
the room and everyone but the real subject, you know, would give their answer
but they were all queued to give the wrong answer. So they would go around the
room an someone would say C. The next person would say C. And it would go
right down the line until it got to the real subject, the only subject in the
experiment and then Asch would measure how often that person would go along
with the group, even though the group was obviously wrong.
He did this experiment at and Ivy League college and so the thing that was
surprising because it was widely assumed that these students were going to be
future leaders, future politicians, future leaders of Wall Street banks. He found
roughly about a third of the subjects would go along with the group once or twice.
Even though they were clearly wrong. Experiment's been done so many times
nobody even does this anymore.
So we did it, my lab did this because I got very interested specifically actually a
patron came to my lab and wanted to support the research and, you know, he
came to me and he said, you know, I'm really interested in the stock market
because I've made a lot of money going against the market, and then he
proceeded to tell me what it feels like to lose his first 10 million dollars. He
wanted to know about this, specifically in the context of markets. I said, well, you
know, that's too complimented of a question. We don't even know what the
perception, how people perceive, you know, these tickers. How do people
perceive this Dow going up and down.
So let's take it back to what Asch did. So we did a slightly more elaborate
version of this. We did something called mental rotation and this is a screen shot
of what people saw on the scanner. We presented these objects, these pairs of
objects and their task was to decide whether you would rotate them, mentally
rotate them and decide if these are actually the same object or not. And so it
was a binary choice. You either say they're the same or different.
And just in case you're wondering, these actually are different. You can't rotate
them to be the same. Then we hired a group of actors. So these are our actors
here. I'm at Emory. We hired these from Georgia Tech across town so that they
wouldn't know our typical volunteer came from the drama club. And they were
queued to give the wrong answers on half of the trials. So that's what you're
seeing here. And then the subject actually waiting to respond here. And we
specifically mentioned what happens in the brain when the person both goes with
the group or against the group.
Now, we had two hypotheses, two competing hypotheses. Either when the
person goes along with the group, they do so knowing that they're doing that.
They essentially no what they see, but they choose to essentially squash that
representation and go on with the group for the social reward of belonging to the
group. The other possibility is that the group actually somehow changes what
you're looking at or what you think you're looking at, changes perception, and we
reason that those are two very dramatically different processes, and we could
use that from our eye to tell the difference.
So our test, our experiment was actually far more effective than Asch's because
the test was a little harder. These are error rates. At baseline if we don't have
the group there, it turns out people have error rates between 10 and 15 percent,
so they're about 85 to 90 percent accurate on their own. If we have a group
there and the group is giving the wrong answer, red, then the error rates jump up
to 40 percent. It was -- that's actually split roughly if you were a male you were
about 60 percent accurate and if you were a female about 50 percent accurate in
that condition. Keeping in mind it was a 50/50 chance to begin with that you
would get the right answer.
As a control condition we had a computer giving the same information and so the
key comparison is how do people process information coming from people
versus just misinformation coming from an inanimate source. Well, I have to tell
you something about the visual system. The eye transmits through the optic
nerve and the key parts of the visual system are in the -- actually in the back of
the head. Okay. So this -- so I'm supposed to say this is a movie that we're
queueing up. This is a representation -- it's a rotating brain, but the task is
actually mental rotation. The orange parts of the brain are representing the parts
of the brain that actually just do the mental rotation task without the group even
there. And it's buy and large visual areas in the back of the head here and then
coming up on top to an area called the parietal cortex. That's just the baseline
mental rotation circuit.
The blue areas that I've overlaid are the parts of the brain that changed activity
when the person went along with the group and the group was wrong. So this is
the conformity condition that we're interested in. And the thing to notice about it
is that it overlaps substantially with the baseline mental rotation circuit. It's not -it's not even in the frontal cortex here which is what we would have expected had
people just overridden their own perceptions.
What to suggest is actually that when people very hearing someone else's
opinion and they're looking at something, the group's opinion actually creates
what we call a virtual percept in the mind. And what we're measuring here is in
fact the competition between this imaginary percept and the one that's coming
from the person's eyes and in this case we're seeing the imaginary one win out.
So we're actually imaging a competition here.
The thing -- so you may wonder what happens when people go against the
group. And this is a cut away of you as it comes around you'll see kind of one
blue do the there. That's in the amygdala. The amygdala is really the seat of the
fear arousal response and it just underscores the fact that when people actually
stood up for their own opinions it was very likely causing substantial autonomic
arousal to do that, probably a little bit of fear in there as well. Something I think
most people know subjectively but won't generally admit.
This, like I said, this was all -- this experiment here is what actually got me thing
about writing this book iconoclast. And because I think this experiment captures
all the important features of what it means to do something really differently and
why it's so hard. You know, so I get up and I usually say that it is really hard to
do things differently, and the reason is because we have social brains on the one
hand. It has a bit to do with perception because I'm not -- I don't have a slide for
this, but it turns out that innovation and creativity have its roots in imagination. It
turns out there was an experiment done last year, an FMRI experiment where
they compared the different brain regions involved in perception, which is the
process of taking say visual information and creating a mental image versus
imagining something. An imagination like we're seeing here uses exactly the
same circuit entry, it's like running perception in reverse, which means that it's
subject to all of the same problems that perception is, it means that perception is
based on past experience, that we incorporate other peoples opinion into what
we see, and it means that our imaginations are as well, that we actual
incorporate other people's opinions very easily which makes it of course hard to
do things differently. And once you do, you still have to contend with this fear
response in the brain that, you know, seems to get triggered when you start to
stray off of what ever the norm is.
So just to summarize what I just talked about, and I want to leave time for
questions to talk about iconoclast, I talked about microeconomic behavior and a
little bit about macroeconomic behavior in conformity. I think these things are
beginning to have real implications and applications not only in markets but also
politics as well. Understanding, you know, how individuals process information is
critical to understanding what's going on in finance right now. As you know many
people will tell you, me included, what's happening in the markets is driven, you
know, not by necessarily by rational valuations of assets, it's being driven by
emotion, it's being driven a lot by fear and uncertainty, and it's also being driven
by, you know, frankly massive heard behavior of people who have large amounts
of money to move in and out of the market.
So, you know, understanding all this process I think is tremendously timely. But I
will, you know, kind of leave it more interactive in Q and A to talk about
specifically the book. And I know I'm here to plug the book. But you can buy the
book. I wanted to talk about this instead. Thank you.
[applause].
>> Gregory Berns: Stunned silence.
>>: Which is it, wisdom of crowds or the idiocy of crowds?
>> Gregory Berns: Well, okay, so the problem is the wisdom of the crowds is
usually right except when they're wrong. More often than not the crowd is right
compared to an individual. Except the problem is you don't -- you don't as an
individual know when it is that they're wrong, which I think is exactly the symptom
that we have right now in the finance markets. Even -- I mean everyone has had
the same information for a year about, you know, mortgage crisis, you know, the
real estate bubble, so on and so on. And in fact, you know, people were saying a
year ago this was coming. So there's not like there's anything new out there. It
was simply a matter of collective perception that delayed it this long and now
everyone's overreacting.
So was the crowd right? They were right for a long time. But then it's essentially
became a pyramid scheme. So the problem is again for the person who wants to
go against the crowd, there's a number of things going against that person. One
is kind of the statistical process that probably everyone else is right and I'm
wrong. I think that's -- I think that's still true. And then -- but then it becomes an
issue of risk. If you can estimate that and estimate, you know, what are the odds
that, you know, maybe I'm right and everyone else is wrong, if you can do that,
then you can start to gauge what the potential payoffs are, and that's, I think,
where the real challenge is. And most people shy away from that. I think it takes
a very special person who has the quality that can kind of keep that fear in check
and actually objectively look at, you know, these numbers and, you know, make
a decision.
The people who do, you know, are very successful, but it takes, you know, huge
amounts of courage. Yes?
>>: So you can't really say if someone made the correct decision based on what
the outcome was, just on what they knew at the time and whether they were
being rational. And can we really say that people today are irrational with respect
to the market? Or is the market really valued more than what it is reflected in the
goods price? I don't necessity if that's generally ->> Gregory Berns: Well, I don't know -- it's probably not useful to call things
rational or irrational. Probably -- I prefer the terminology optimal.
>>: Sure.
>> Gregory Berns: Because, you know, rationality is almost a subjective quality
based on one's, you know, risk attitude. Rationality is more about consistency.
>>: But isn't it optimal based on what happens?
>> Gregory Berns: Yeah. Well, you could say that, but would you say -- but you
can also do it prospectively. Would you say it's optimal to buy a lottery ticket, you
know, when the jackpot's $10 million dollars. I wouldn't.
>>: It depends. I think it's very, very difficult. I remember being a kid and having
$5 but I needed $10 to go on a date.
>> Gregory Berns: Yes.
>>: So I may be willing to risk $5 and very bad odds because the $5 to me is not
very interesting.
>> Gregory Berns: I agree. That's a very rational judgment. But I would still say
it's suboptimal.
>>: Yeah. I just think it's tricky. I don't know exactly what language is the right
language. Because I also think it's unknown and it's hard to know whether it can
ever been known. I mean, we don't know today where the market is going to go.
>> Gregory Berns: No.
>>: So we can't really say what's optimal, even if we ten -- even if we're wrong,
we can't really say if we made the wrong choice.
>> Gregory Berns: Well, you can make statements, we're talking about financial
risk taking, that what's called risk neutral is probably as close to optimal as you
can get on average, you know, so decision making where you don't distort the
odds an decision making where you don't distort the value of the outcomes and
you just treat everything objectively as the number that it is, and I think, I think
the really good money managers do this and the really bad ones, you know, are
making decisions completely based on, you know, what everyone else is doing.
>>: Or it could be -- I forget the producers's name where the producer said no
one knows anything. Maybe that's the case as well.
>> Gregory Berns: Yes?
>>: Is unpredictability in the stock market or in politics more a stock market
because [inaudible] is it because at the nexus of a -- or the meeting point of a
macro economic reality and a microeconomy reality that is unpredictability,
meaning might be a billion air to whom a billion dollars didn't mean anything, the
valuation from the microeconomic side. But the [inaudible] is saying go against
the trend or it's saying sell right now.
>> Gregory Berns: Right.
>>: But I have valued the risk in my own mind and I am saying no I can bet
against the trend because I don't lose anything as in my needs are still there, I
can really gain from this. Contrast that with the microeconomic reality of
someone who wants to go on that date and for them this is the only means of
doing it, now they're confirming with the herd or going against it because they
have nothing to lose, does that, that nexus create its unpredictability meaning
because different people are viewing this differently ->> Gregory Berns: Yeah. What you're talking about is often referred to as
strategic uncertainty. So the difference between the date example and the
market is in the date example, it's entirely an individual decision, and the only -and the outcome depends only on your personal valuations, you know, and how
you value risk and reward. There's no one else affects the outcome of that.
The market, though, like, you know, most kind of interesting transactions involves
an uncertainty that is not only the objective risk, you know, how much the
markets fluctuating, but what you think other people think of that. And so the
payoff then is not just the uncertainty of projecting, you know, extrapolating the
past, but you also have to account for what you think everyone else is going to
do, which makes -- which is essentially kind of a positive feedback loop and
probably is what gives rise to bubbles and crashes because you could argue that
it's rationale, you know, to keep buying into, you know, an inflated market, just
because everyone else does, and that will make money, that's true, and it will,
but the thing that's very hard is because of kind of the fragility of it, it's very
subject to crashes and unless you can time it, you know, it's dangerous because.
>>: [Inaudible] coined the phrase fertile fallacy, which is buy into the fallacy
because it's fertile and tend to gain you money but you recognize it's fallacy.
>> Gregory Berns: I don't know that everyone recognizes that. That's the
problem.
>>: [Inaudible].
>> Gregory Berns: Yeah.
>>: So my point was because differently people with different valuations of the
same thing are using the same system and using whatever macroeconomic
indicators they have to make their own personal microeconomic [inaudible] and
then valuation points are different.
>> Gregory Berns: Yes.
>>: That in itself creates the uncertainty. I mean, I'm hypothesizing here. I don't
know for sure that that's the case.
>> Gregory Berns: Well, it's not that it increases the uncertainty. I mean, it
points out the fact that markets can't even exist unless there's a discrepancy in
opinion, right, because if everyone could agree on the value of an asset, there
would be no market. There would be no buyers and sellers. The only reason
that there are buyers and sellers is because you can have two people looking at
the same object and have different opinions about it. That's when markets, that's
when markets work really well. That's what they're really good at.
The thing that they don't work well for is exactly the situation that we've been
seeing when everyone all of a sudden does come to the same opinion, it's like
oh, my God, I got to get rid of this. And that's when you get into the positive
feedback loop and everyone has the same opinion of the future that you have
bubbles and crashes.
Does that mean that there's anything wrong with the markets? Not necessarily
but it points to the fact that markets behave -- this is how markets have always
behaved. And either you accept the impact of that that that's, if you're going to
be in a market you accept that or you don't go in the market, or you regulate
market so that they don't happen. It's not clear to me that you can do that.
Because I think the history of markets has always shown that after every time
something like this happens new laws get made to prevent that specific thing
from happening again and then speculators go find some other bubble to create,
and it always repeats itself.
>>: [Inaudible] actually works?
>> Gregory Berns: It can. But I mean it's a risky strategy. And that's -- I mean,
that's the correspond problem. I mean, do you have the stomach for the risk? I
think people often underestimate the risk.
>>: If you look at your when where the [inaudible] which gave their own opinion
and you gave the example of Germany and then if we look at the recent market,
the number of people who were complying much higher someone like Lehman
Brothers, most of them have their 401 K in, their incentives are aline to do the
right thing.
>> Gregory Berns: Right.
>>: But the [inaudible] for the group seems to be much higher, maybe 90, 95
percent people do not move away from the situation. [Inaudible] people who
move away from the situation, what is it that -- how are they different?
>> Gregory Berns: Well, okay, so I think so that gets more into what I talk about,
you know, iconoclast. So I think it begins with perception, and I actually spent a
lot of time talking about perception today. And the stock market's actually a good
example of that, because you can have an asset and the fact that there are
buyers and sellers that have different price points means that they have different
perceptions of that asset that they had -- they have a different perception of the
future value. And so the question then you can't -- I mean obviously you can't tell
before hand who's right or not. That's impossible to forecast.
But the question is are an individual's perceptions truly their own, or are they
being mixed in with other people's opinion? That was kind of the whole point of
this Asch experiment. And I think the people who are really good at doing this,
the true iconoclasts and the true innovators have kind of this natural ability to put,
you know, to keep at least at bay, you know, what popular opinion is or what
other expert's opinion is. And somehow come to their own opinion about these
things and hold true.
And it is hard, I think. You know, some people just kind of wall themselves off.
And I don't know that that's necessarily the right way to do it. One thing that I
have observed and at least in certainly in artists and scientists and technology
where your task is really kind of more free form in coming up with new ideas, you
know, not simply trying to go against the crowd, put actually coming up with new
ideas is particularly the role of novelty. One way to kick the brain into seeing
things differently is to take it out of the usual circumstance, you know, so many of
the great discovers, many of the great artistic creations were created in
environments that were completely different for the person or the person was
interacting with people who had met, you know, essentially anything that
prevents the brain from relying on past categorizations is very helpful for creating
new ideas. This essentially my first book was all about this. And I wrote the
second book in part because I realized after I went around the first time with the
first talking about satisfaction and novelty that most people didn't agree with me.
A lot of the reactions I got were I don't like novelty, I don't like doing things
differently. And so I thought about that, and then I realized well, okay, so let's
just talk about people who do do things differently. And those are the
iconoclasts.
Go ahead.
>>: [Inaudible] iconoclasts do [inaudible] some great recognition and success in
society you mentioned that they need to somehow convince other people that
they're -- and you don't seem -- they need to integrate into [inaudible] situation
and opinions but what does [inaudible] inside of themselves because in order to
stand on their own they need to feel all this fear and being emotionally depressed
somehow but in order to be able to convince people, they need to be on the
same wave as them so sort of accept and being emotionally positive.
>> Gregory Berns: Exactly. So I mean, so you've identified sort of the great
paradox of innovation and iconoclasm that you can have an individual or maybe
a small group who comes up with this fantastic idea clearly novel or clearly
superior to, you know, something that's already out there, but then how do you
go and convince everyone that what you have is better because if you accept the
fact that I think most people find comfort in what they're used to, then you battle
this, right?
What I think it comes down to, and I actually start off the book with a story of a
guy named Howard Armstrong who invented FM radio. So Armstrong's story and
very briefly he invented most of the radio technologies that we used to. He
invented key technologies in AM. But he spent ten years developing FM radio
because he believed it was far superior to AM. And the story of Armstrong was
that he was friends at the time with David Sarnoff who was president of RCA at
the time, and this was in the 1930s. And RCA had put an en10 that on top of the
Empire State Building and was broadcasting AM all over New York. And they
were heavily invested in AM.
And Sarnoff hired groups of engineers at RCA to discredit Armstrong, even
though Armstrong and Sarnoff had been friends for a long time, hired
mathematicians to disprove him. But Armstrong stuck with it, because he was
convinced that FM was better, at least in terms of fidelity. And he spent ten
years on this, he built prototype, he did this amazing demonstration where he
transmitted from this little shack in New Jersey to a receiver on Long Island,
essentially skipping over Manhattan. And for the first time people were actually -they did this demonstration where they crumbled up paper in the studio and
people could actually hear this and they poured water in a glass. You can't do
this with AM. The fidelity's not there. And still it wasn't enough to convince RCA
to buy the technology.
And what happened was Armstrong became very depressed about it an
eventually committed suicide over this. So it's somewhat of a cautionary tail
because it points out that you can be absolute right, you can invent something
that's better but if you can't get other people to believe you then it might as well
not exist.
What this comes down to is social intelligence. And did Armstrong have it?
Probably not. I mean, probably wasn't that great, you know, with people. And so
the issue is can you learn to be socially intelligent? Maybe a little bit. There are
-- I talk a little bit about this in the book in terms of what we know about the
neuroscience of social intelligence. But, you know, really the easiest solution is
to pattern with somebody who is socially intelligent. That's by far the easier way.
The company here is a great example of that. The partnership between Bill
Gates and Steve Baumer. I mean, it's -- you've got, you know, kind of one
person who's had the great ideas and then initially the other person who was,
you know, fantastic at selling it and getting other people to buy into the idea.
Sometimes it does take a team and, you know, taking elements of these different
things. But I mean, it is a fundamental problem. We can talk a bit about kind of,
you know, when you target an idea who do you target the ideas to? I mean,
there's an extensive literature on diffusion of innovations that talk about this in
terms of who are the people who are what are called early adopters, you know,
who are the people who are more likely, you know, to accept in a new idea, and
who are people who come along later in the later waves?
I think early adopters are kind of an early subset of the population who have
probably higher levels of dopamine. You might be talking about younger groups,
younger demographics. And there's a lot to talk about there. But thanks. Did
you have a question in the back?
>>: I was just going to ask, so is conformity bad? Because -- and should we all
be iconoclasts?
>> Gregory Berns: So this is like the same question before, it's good until it's
bad. The problem is can you recognize when it's about to go bad? That's the
real challenge. I mean, if I would have to say on average, yeah, your odds are
better going along with the crowd. That's -- I think that's hard wired into our
brains because, you know, if you were this creature, you know, and you didn't
know where to forage for food and you saw a bunch of other animals going off
one way, well, odds are they probably know something you don't, and so you
follow them. And I think that's just -- that's a statistical fact and, you know, very
early on got built into the evolutionary process that animals that tended to follow
the herd probably on average did a little better. And that's in our brains. And so I
mean but the challenge is really, you know, how do you break out of that and
limit that. Not an easy answer.
>>: I'm interested in the neuroscience like early extreme cases of social
[inaudible] like we have the same [inaudible], right.
>> Gregory Berns: Yes.
>>: Which came from the Jamestown event where people were willing to
knowingly drink poison instead of not being part of a group. Are we so socially
hard wired that, I mean, we should kind of be afraid sometimes?
>> Gregory Berns: Yeah, yeah, you bet. I mean, the thing that's weird about it
every time stuff like that happens, I mean, you can sit here and say well I
wouldn't do that.
>>: It's clearly not rational. But these, not all of these people were -- I mean,
these were just people, right?
>> Gregory Berns: Yes. I mean, that's -- I mean that was what Asch -- that's
why Asch did the experiment because you know we can sit here kind of in a very
neutral setting and say, you know, well I wouldn't act that way, no way, I would
stand up for what I believe. But, you know, it's not clear to me that that is as
strong as we believe. And I don't think it is. I think that's why we did our brain
imaging experiment and if it were simply a matter of will power or courage, you
know, I could accept that and say, well, yeah, maybe I might be too afraid to
stand up and, you know, maybe -- certainly that was going on in the Kool-Aid
thing, too.
But, but if you accept the possibility that maybe it's not even that, maybe it's just
that, you know, when we see a large number of people doing something, it
actually does change how we see things. And I think that does operate, too.
You know. And kind of the pervasiveness now of kind of five star rating systems,
you know, everywhere you look. I mean, it colors how we -- how we value
things.
We have an experiment going on right now with teenagers and using clips from
my space and the effect of these five star ratings. Does it actually -- if you see
something five stars on Amazon or YouTube do you actually like it more because
it's five stars? Possibly. Yes?
>>: Yeah, you had mentioned that iconoclasts might need social intelligence to
have their ideas accepted, but it seems like the opposite is true, that society
might have iconoclast intelligence. It's like that I think that the ability to welcome
an invasion varies over time and then you know, you might have a culture where
innovators are sought out or rejected, depending. That was one thought. Does
that seem ->> Gregory Berns: That's a got point. Actually I hadn't had a thought of that.
>>: Because society is optimized as do individuals.
>> Gregory Berns: Yeah. Yeah.
>>: My other thought was with the, and this kind of relates to the first thought but
with the RCA example, with the guy who wasn't able to sell his idea to RCA, it
seems that if -- if there had been a healthy competition there, maybe there were
three or four or five station that is were doing the same thing, you could imagine
that his idea would have been welcome pretty quick.
>> Gregory Berns: Right.
>>: Maybe not at RCA, but maybe at a competitor.
>> Gregory Berns: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. That I mean the context of
innovation, I mean, depends kind of on the brown noise. And the context is ->>: It seems like healthy societies encourage basically our healthy because they
get rid of this blindness that you get when people act as -- I don't know, just a
thought.
>> Gregory Berns: I mean it's hard I think -- it's easy to say that kind of after the
fact. It's not so easy you know kind of when you're in the moment, not kind of
how you strike the balance. I mean, that's exactly the situation we have right
now with the finance markets. You know, the government's going to struggle
with and, you know, how much regulation to put down on it or not.
>> Kim Ricketts: One more question.
>> Gregory Berns: Okay. Yes?
>>: Yeah. I was wondering about your -- you mentioning how dopamine has
changed in -- our perception of it and Jeremy Bentham who's moral calculus that
we're trying to figure things out and makes moral sense or not for us to take this
cab or not, and I think the reason you change or discuss dopamine is so it
doesn't have as much an effect as a reward effect in the -- in this calculus. So if
it's a calculus you bring up Bentham because it is a calculus, are you trying to
change the nature of what we normally would think of dopamine is that role in
that calculus and therefore there's not a reward aspect to it there?
>> Gregory Berns: No. The reason I spent so much time on it is that the role of
dopamine clearly is related to value in the calculation of decisions. But my point
is that it's prospective. It reflects a person's belief about the future. It does not
kind of necessarily reflect kind of your instantaneous utility and reward, you
know, when you get it. It seems very clear is that the brain discounts the future
very quickly and efficiently. So if you make a decision to purchase a book, you
know, and you're anticipating the benefits of that, you get the dopamine spike at
the moment, you know, that you're trying to go through the calculation of whether
you buy it or not. You will undoubtedly kind of discount it so that when you
actually get the item it's somewhat -- it's not -- it may or may not meet your
expectations. If it meets your expectations exactly, you don't get any more
dopamine out of it. You've already had your dopamine kick.
>>: So then for the folks who were -- you know [inaudible] seems to be the part
of the brain along with arousal, so you know, is that -- that can also be one can
train one self to get a dopamine anticipation when you feel like, you know, you
might need a maverick?
>> Gregory Berns: Yeah.
>>: Is there a profile I guess in F scan profile of the maverick brain?
>> Gregory Berns: Well, I come back to novelty again for this. So by when
you're in a circumstance that you can't discount the future, meaning you can't
necessarily anticipate the future very well or your predictions are quite poor,
that's when you're releasing these neurotransmitters, everything is new, you
have to do this calculation and that's when you're getting most of the dopamine
release. You're also probably getting amygdala activation, too, at the same time.
It's kind of these circumstances that you know you say you're in a completely
new environment that's a little bit anxiety provoking, but it's also kind of highly
arousing. I mean, kind of physical logical arousal and stimulating.
>>: [Inaudible].
>> Gregory Berns: That you're kind of getting both the dopamine and the
amygdala, but those are exactly the circumstances that I think foster creature it.
The problem is is that if you're sitting in kind of a quiet state like this and you're
given the choice, do you want to go out and do something new, do you want to
go and do something completely different, maybe it won't work, maybe it will,
most people will be conservative and not take the chance because they have this
-- they exaggerate the downside more than they probably should.
>>: [Inaudible] the dialogues right the only way you really learn is to remember,
the only way you remember is to keep yourself in a state of euphoria which is
that confused I don't know where everything is and that [inaudible] actually learn
something.
>> Gregory Berns: Right. I agree.
[applause].
>> Gregory Berns: Thank you.