![]() ![]() They consciously divided the process into “divergent” and “convergent” stages – the divergent stage is brainstorming. I think that we tend to celebrate the results of good decisions, but not the decision process itself, which is the thing we can actually learn from. įirst, it’s a good reminder of what a structured decision process looks like in a functional administration. You also look at what we can learn about long-term decision-making from the killing of Osama bin Laden. It’s like the brain’s internal version of reading novels. Some people now think that the ability to imagine alternative futures is one of our signature traits as a species. ![]() What will happen next week if I go in and ask for that raise? I wonder if I should break up with that person – how would I feel? It uses up a huge amount of energy, literal energy in the brain, to do it. What people are doing then is spending a huge amount of time running simulations of future events based on the recent past. This became known as the “default network”, which is what lights up when people are daydreaming basically, mind-wandering. They discovered that when people were trying to think of nothing, certain regions of their brains were still active. ![]() To have a control group, they also asked people to think about nothing. ![]() There’s an incredible set of brain studies from the 1990s and early 2000s, in the early days of fMRIs and Pet scans, looking at what parts of the brain lit up when people did specific tasks, such as multiplication or remembering faces. Well, the other side of simulation, which is really interesting, is the mental simulations we do imagining future outcomes. I’m not sure people read novels in that way or, indeed, lead their emotional lives in sober deliberation… Diverse groups tend to make more nuanced and original decisions than homogeneous ones do It trains us to be better at making decisions. Experiencing these simulated lives is practice for our own. That’s why a lot of this book is about reading Middlemarch. You can see how people deliberated and whether they made the correct assessment.īut I also think there’s this really important process of storytelling, which is a kind of simulation, that’s part of those more personal decisions. The first is we do have some science looking at real-world decisions – for instance, there’s interesting research involving mock juries. There are a couple of different ways to answer that question. This book is not about how to be 100% right with your decisions – it’s just that you will get better outcomes if you take time to go through the process that I talk about.Īs there is no control group for this alternative “us”, how can we know that deliberation will produce better results? But personal decisions – whether you should get married, for example – are made from a position of ignorance on some level it’s unknowable. There are enough similarities between the techniques or mindset we need for making personal and global decisions that it is useful to examine both in the same book. Those two things together made me think that it would be interesting to write about complex decisions and how we make them.Īre the decisions that matter most personal or global ? Is there a difference in approach between the m? At the same time, I became obsessed with moving from New York to California. It’s the same technique most people learn to this day, which meant that on some level the science of decision-making has been stagnant for 170 years. Then I stumbled across Darwin’s notebooks in which he has this two-page pros and cons list, trying to decide whether to get married. I love those books but it did seem odd that I’d spent so much time looking at short-term decisions when the decisions that really end up shaping your life require deliberation and foresight and all of these properties that I felt were being unappreciated. There had been a lot of books about decisions, but they were almost all focused on short-term instinctive Blink-like decisions. I first started taking notes on it eight years ago. It had the longest incubation period of any of my books, which is maybe appropriate for a book that’s about long-term decision making. What made you decide to write about decision-making? It focuses on long-term and complex decision-making – both political and personal. Now 50, he divides his time between California and New York, the decision of where to live being at the heart of his latest book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. Steven Johnson is a popular science author of 11 books, including the bestseller Everything Bad Is Good for You. ![]()
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