How We Decide: Live and let learn

The main premise of the second chapter of How We Decide deals with dopamine neurons, and their predictive power. What's so special about dopamine is that they help us to learn from our mistakes. Lehrer cites a famous champion of chess, backgammon, and poker, and discusses his practice. He relentlessly looks at his mistakes, seeing what plays he could have made - in doing this, he builds up so much experience that he'll know what to do in any situation by simply looking at the board. Offhandedly, this is what I consider to be expertise - you just know what to do without having to think about it. And that whole not thinking about it thing...that's exactly what gives humans the edge over other types of animals - our dopamine neurons fire signals in our brain before we make a decision; this is all based off of previous experience. Lehrer writes, "Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Our emotions are deeply empirical." Often, our feelings are smarter than our thoughts.

So, it only makes sense that "live and let learn" applies here. We do learn best from our mistakes. As Steven Tyler once wrote in "Dream On," "You got to lose to know how to win." And that's absolutely true. He might not have all of the neuroscientific tools necessary to back up that statement, but that doesn't make it false. Live and let learn.

But how can we actually carry out that philosophy? For me, I think that we have to continuously be aware of our decisions. Be conscious of the other possibilities, especially after the decision is made. What if I did this instead? What would have happened in that scenario? By carefully analyzing our decisions, we have a conversation with our dopamine neurons. We know that we messed up, and instead of tormenting ourselves about what could have been, we need to let dopamine do the work for us.