decision-making is often complex and predictable beyond the paradox of mere selection
It seems so easy, most of the time. A simple choice or a moment of thought before taking what feels like a straightforward plunge. It might be a routine part of the day where picking your music, podcast or station, is a binary choice in terms of the usual or something quite different. Clearly, the range of options is secondary while moving from a zero-sumism of one or the other thing we like to call, none. Shall I or shan’t I? Will you or won’t you? The avenues are endless beyond a T-junction or maybe a crossroads or even a roundabout but then for some, the timing of choices can mean life or death or the latter, regardless.
In 2001, for example, a group of people faced an inconceivable dilemma in terms of certain death while facing an extraordinary fire or falling from a great height, near the rooftops of the Twin Towers. These were sobering seconds and minutes to witness whether on scene or through a television set and while all death is fundamentally tragic in its own way, there was a sadness to those moments that’s hard to accept. Maybe, it lies in the knowledge that loved ones might have been watching unwittingly or delayed transport or a day of sickness could have altered the path of a life. Equally, it’s all of the above and more as we consider that ultimately, the only sense of free-will available to those poor individuals was the manner in which they died. So, naturally, it scares us while forcing us to stare directly at vulnerability.
It also means that no story can be told in isolation, simply because nobody really lives in quarantine. That was true, of course, until recently, when in unprecedented terms the world was forced into various lockdowns. Most generations had never seen anything like it, and as the world watched the ever-rising death toll on terrifying news cycles, it proved overwhelming. From there, too, the shrouds of wilful ignorance we’d all enjoyed while pretending that our lives are locally contained, quickly disappeared.
‘I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy and creativity to name a few.’
Brené Brown
In fact, as it became perfectly obvious that certain types of interdependence are global, we perhaps struggled to accept an inherent truth laid out by Jean-Jaques Rousseau, in ‘The Social Contract’. In his 1762 treatise, he states: ‘Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains’. Well, this notion exists in various contexts but with respect to Covid, it exposed how our personal choices carried ramifications. We see this every day in so far as our driving, speaking and other decisions, dictate outcomes beyond us.
So, the great debate on freedom continues, but during the pandemic, feelings of helplessness grew as everyday boundaries felt ever more existential. It seemed insurmountable and although mesmerised by the sheer scale of what was happening: many of us stopped watching the news, altogether. Of course, unless you’d lived through World War Two and seen death steadily climb from dozens and hundreds to thousands and millions, it simply didn’t make sense. How could existing schemas cope with such hard truths? How, were we supposed to process it all?
It’s difficult, while atrocities and health emergencies affect not only high-level decision-making, they also leave a scar on the face of humanity and where everything that makes us what we are, whether good and bad or both, merely questions what we are. Fortunately, for many of us, we may not see the end coming whatever it might be and until that point, the daily grind of decisions, possibilities, options and preferences wears us down through a type of attrition. So much so that decision fatigue, while lacking comprehensive levels of research, appears to be a recognised problem.
‘[Decision fatigue is] the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse. The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult decisions can become.’
Lisa MacLean, MD; courtesy of Sara Berg, News Editor, American Medical Association
As with so many things, eroding energy is natural but where the impact can be enormous, it’s important to understand the mechanisms at play. So, parenting, obviously, is a critical area where a reduced capacity for good decisions while multi-tasking or in the heat of battle, can result in physical and psychological harm. Needless to say, other roles in demand of a resolute mind include air-traffic control; emergency medicine and the judiciary where death or incarceration depend on someone’s ability, to think straight.
‘What happens in the brain? Recent research has shown that decision fatigue isn’t just subjective tiredness – it’s tied to real changes in brain function. As your mind works harder to process a growing number of choices, different systems in the brain begin to respond in ways that can quietly erode your focus, reasoning and self-control.’
‘Neural energy and glucose use: Just as muscles need fuel, the brain relies heavily on glucose for energy, using approximately 20% of the body’s glucose supply. This process fuels various brain functions including thinking, memory and learning. However, excessive decision-making depletes these energy reserves, leaving the brain feeling sluggish.’
Ruka Nakamatsu, ‘Decisions, decisions: The Brain Drain of Decision Fatigue’, Taylor’s University
So, what does a relationship between the mind and body look like, when it comes to decision-making?
Psychophysiology is an academic discipline combining just as it suggests, the two subjects of psychology and physiology. In essence, it looks at how psychological processes influence physiological reactions and vice versa as physiological variables effect psychological responses. Meanwhile, this mind-body communication process is measured in a variety of ways, including:
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which analyses the structure of the brain
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as it differentiates oxygenated and deoxygenated blood
- Electroencephalography (EEG) which monitors electrical activity through the scalp
- Magnetoelectroencephalography (MEG) studies the weak magnetic fields produced in the brain
- Electromyography (EMG) which measures activity across the musculoskeletal system
- Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as it records the interbeat interval (IBI) of your pulse
- Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) gauges the level of moisture through skin conductance (SC)
- Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans a tracer atom placed into a molecule like glucose as it travels through the bloodstream
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) depolarises and hyperpolarises neurons at the scalp
These biofeedback methods allow for greater understanding of our positive and negative emotions, guilt, stress and adaptations as the mind and body weave through each other, like Bach’s double violin concerto. At the same time, when it comes to decision-making, we’re tied to influences, choices and conclusions. Flavours of life always pushing, pulling and waiting on will-power as they all intertwine; yet, the need to distil is what pulls us in further while taking a long look at what lies, in-between.
So, the feedback tells of chemical signals travelling from one neuron to another as neurotransmitters by name and nature, perform endless and repetitive tasks. When it comes to choices, though, some of that centres on dopamine, the gratifying molecule and hormone driving much of our decision-making as we reliably seek out rewards over punishment. It’s the binary, one-zero, pleasure or pain, balance and imbalance with release upholding the most basic impulse, devoid of internal judgement. So, whatever makes you feel good through anticipation or satisfaction turns the key, and while it’s a staple diet of Freud’s limbic-based Id and the ‘pleasure principle’: a rival narrative in the Superego’s pre-frontal ‘morality principle’, is ready to flip the script and possibly to extremes, too.
Fortunately, a dose of the ‘reality principle’ is never far away and although the Ego, rooted in the pre-frontal cortex, as well, can go awry in its employment of those, at times, counter-productive, protect-at-all-costs, defence mechanisms: it’s always looking for socially acceptable ways for the Id to find joy. Cue, tension, stress and all too often, compromised decisions.
‘Where Id is, there shall Ego be.’
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
Still, in terms of influence, the most significant player in your arsenal of molecules, is glucose. This simple sugar is our most fundamental source of energy and it’s been found to affect our decision-making ability across numerous studies, from pregnant women to a willingness to pay for things or work. It’s also a nod in the direction of the air traffic controllers, medical professionals and judges whose glucose-based verdicts affect so many of us in one way or another: making it a sobering prospect, all-round.
So, what does this particular decision-making relationship look like?
Well, glucose is the fuel of choice for most living organisms on the planet as it’s broken down to produce energy, through aerobic and anaerobic respiration. This means if there isn’t enough glucose in the bloodstream, your body will call on reserves called glycogen, that are stored in your liver and muscles. Meanwhile, if the depletion carries on long enough, symptoms will surface, like: tiredness, hunger, dizziness, anxiety and irritability, in addition to weakness and confusion. Clearly, this applies to most people who haven’t eaten for a while and they’re not the best conditions in which to be guiding aircraft or assessing medical symptoms or injuries or intricacies of law.
However, being human also means that we’ll by-pass our biofeedback system as it screams for attention against the clock while drawing consequences for our own health, let alone anyone else’s. This can lead to internal and external problems from nausea to fainting as the psychophysiology of decision-making takes a backseat, to staying conscious.
‘Our department specifically is applied psychophysiology, so it’s taking the science of physiology and looking at the applications of it, but my elevator speech for that is that it’s the science behind mind-body medicine. So, psychophysiology, of course, you break it down, psycho-mind, physiology-body, so it is a mind-body approach, but it’s looking at the actual underpinnings of it so that we measure what’s going on in the body whether we’re talking about heart-rate variability or muscle tension or brainwave activity. There are a lot of biological markers in the body that respond to the environment, including thoughts.’
Dr Eric Willmarth, Clinical Psychologist and Dept of Psychophysiology faculty, Saybrook University
So, decision-making can set off a ticking clock as it reminds us that pressure exists, in all sorts of ways. Similarly, one-way streets, roundabouts and dead ends are those figurative choices we’ll make in a day and sometimes they’ll work but on others, they won’t. Then again, it may be the opposite of a mistake and a great quote attributed to both Benjamin Franklin and Otto Von Bismarck, says: ‘Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes: fools by their own’. As true as that sounds it’s often tempting to take quotes a little too literally because wise men learn from their own mistakes, as much as fools occasionally grow from theirs. In the end, though, only time can tell whether all angles were covered or whether we’ve stepped into another mistake.
One way of processing choices is to consider Decision Theory, a branch of analytical philosophy, doing exactly what it suggests. In ‘normative’ and ‘descriptive’ form, where the former relates to what should happen in an ideal scenario as the latter describes what will actually occur in the real world: it examines the basis of judgement through conceptual tools like rationality, consent, utility, probability and conditionals. So, with a choice of any kind, it means understanding the true motives behind your thoughts. Is your thinking logically sound, for instance, in going one way or another? If you decide to do ‘A’ instead of ‘B’, is it informed? As in, do you have all of the available information? With utility, another word can be ‘usefulness’, which takes us to the idea of ‘expected utility’. So, what might be the expected value of choosing either one way or another?
‘The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you dcide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure, the process is its own reward.’
Amelia Earhart
This means taking into account any personal interest, too, where your idea of utility may clash with someone else’s. You could also replace the word conditional with ‘causal’, in that if you do this, such and such may or may not happen. Clearly, no-one goes through such an exhausting thought process, in weighing up options. It occurs at lightning speed for better or worse and where informed consent might not exist as it pushes you into thinking about the nuances of mistakes. Why don’t those conditionals act as more of an alarm in alerting us, to cause and effect? How can the rationality of your interests appear so blatantly irrational, soon afterwards? Why forgo informed consent, in favour of ill-informed dissent?
Well, everything happens for a reason but perhaps not retrospectively in that we can and do create all types of justification when looking back at something and where A or B, just so happened to lead to C. No; instead, there’s an aetiology to everything where decisions made by others way back in time lead to the things affecting you at some point down the line. It’s a fundamental trap of living as billions of neural networks in action and reaction, mould the environments that gradually shape us.
In the field of connectomics, researchers including Dr Wei-Chung Allen Lee at Harvard Medical School have made advances in understanding how the neural connections in the brain are wired together and specifically, how they mobilise during the decision-making process. Divided into classifications of scale, the micro, meso and macroscopic approaches complement each other as they reveal intricacies, previously unknown.
‘Until recently, technical challenges prevented direct measurement of this neuron connectivity also known as synaptic connection. But now, using a two-pronged imaging approach, scientists can first image neurons in real time during virtual reality decision-making, and then use electron microscopy to map these same neurons afterwards, so they know the structure relates to function.’
Kerry Day, ‘Decisions, Decision! How Neurons Connect to Shape Our Choices’, Advanced Science News
A key element of the connectomics quest is the way researchers can see the higher-level functioning of neural links, through functional magnetic imaging and the blood flow it records. In turn, this opens a window into our personal approach to choice that’s normally different and which, of course, it would be when our experiences vary, in some way. In applied terms, it may reveal a lot about mental health and its impact on decision-making which could potentially transform the lives of millions of people, everywhere.
‘My lab is interested in understanding how computations arise in the brain, or the general principles by which neural circuits organise themselves into functional networks. To do this, we aim to comprehensively map how individual neurons are connected to one another in complex networks. At the same time, we want to understand how those neurons are active within the functioning circuit. We do this in the context of behaviour, ranging from making decisions to executing actions. We are trying to couple connectomics with recordings of neural activity to do what we call functional connectomics.’
Dr Wei-Chung Allen Lee, Harvard Medical School Associate Professor of Neurology; courtesy of Catherine Caruso, Harvard Medical School, News & Research
It would be good news and yet, when it comes to mental health and decision-making, things like OCD compulsions are ironic in that they seem to be all and nothing to do with agency. Why? Well, if you’re triggered into various types of neutralising behaviour, for instance, a sense of agency and decision-making seems non-existent. You’re simply bleeping on a radar at the level of classical conditioning and trigger-responses and where there’s little to no capacity to express free-will over yourself. If there was, people would surely choose to de-link a trigger and a set of false meanings and it certainly might not take years.
That reflects a dreaded belief system in which people think they hold some kind of runic force regarding cause and effect, and there’s the rub because on some level: a sense of agency is needed to believe that. Flip the coin, though, and you’d see the same belief system bringing relief as mental inventions or ‘magical thinking’ are deployed to push back on the same system bringing grief. It seems chaotic while obsessions and compulsions are likely to be socially and culturally linked, although as seems to be the norm, there’s a great deal of debate about that, too. Nevertheless, a sense of agency is certainly defined by where and with whom you live.
Maybe, for example, your first existential trip related to God as you repeatedly tested the waters as a teenager to see if you’d be struck by lightning, for not believing. At first, perhaps you didn’t want to say it, but then, bit-by-bit, you thought about it and then whispered it with an outstretched ear as though, you’d hear the unleashing of three-hundred-million volts before it hit you. Finally, having said it enough times to convince anyone up there of a degree of disdain, you suddenly felt free. Relieved of some imaginary cloud following you wherever you went and also, critically: free of decision-making as a function of the fear of death. Obviously, that’s just one road to a relationship with a higher power or nothing, at all. For others, believing in something gives a sense of security with their decision-making and existential safety, too, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
‘The Decision Education Foundation (DEF) improves the lives of young people by empowering them with effective decision skills. DEF teaches HOW to decide, not what to decide, building essential skills that support better decisions.’
Decision Education Foundation, 2024
So, having something to believe in is important and Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck were two of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, to discuss choices. While the former was a playwright and the latter a novelist, these realists arguably captured some of the most interesting themes within storytelling. Namely, the effects of social and economic decline or uncertainty and the many decisions revealing basic clues about motivation and a belief, in something. Key aspects of human nature and related power struggles regarding incentives and decision-making at scale that, in turn, provide a multi-levelled take on the human condition.
These stories often force us to examine conflict, reactions, motivation and fear, and so as Joe Keller makes a fateful industrial decision in Arthur Miller’s, ‘All My Sons’ and George makes a tragic one, at the end of Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’: we get a glimpse into that space between so-called normality and an air of extremes. A place where the seemingly ‘normal’ behaves somewhat, oddly. As for, decisions: we’ll have to keep making them regardless of fears while those that bite are the ‘haps’ we’ll call lessons in humility, over time.
In reality, life levels us all in one way or another and accepting that is our recognition of a fallibility across time. That doesn’t impugn a sense of responsibility, either: on the contrary, it asks us to muse over motives, decisions and certain liabilities. Yet, the real issue is that a fear of ourselves outwits fearing each other, meaning self-hatred projects outward like a solar flare because it’s a combustible, psychological element the human body can’t contain – a straight-up choice between internal flames and scorching the earth.
That’s a big irony in hurting each other, but then who really wants to fight with themselves? Some might through addiction and a self-sabotage of love and where each barb and wince, only puts themselves out. It’s the cycle-of-self all over again in marching to the tune of Id’s love of the insane. So, just who are you really when all is said and done? Because if you’re not really sure, life’s clock is still running down while it’s not over until it’s over and we all know how that’s true; so, think about it in asking: who and what decisions can you trust?
So much importance can disappear on the hinge of a decision and over the years, it’s possible to be afraid of making them while choosing to float, instead, in no-man’s land. ‘Better to be still, than regret’ becomes an abiding philosophy and an overwhelming force driving you to the oddest of decisions, as it delivers further evidence of life’s endless push to make you choose between responses. It’s a reminder that the worst of circumstances can demand something new and challenging, in the face of whatever you bring to the table.
If you decide to move forward with a choice, just keep one foot ahead of the other while accepting that decision-making isn’t always set in stone. You can change because we’re at once free-willed and determined by our experiences leading some, to perhaps say: it’s easier to do so, for the worse. Well, maybe that’s true, but changing for the better is never off the table, either.
In the words of Dr Eric Willmarth, a clinical psychologist and department of psychophysiology faculty, at Saybrook University:
‘The body speaks much louder than the voice sometimes.’
For many people, it really does.
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Homelessness, by Visionmonkey Andy, Pexels
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