Post Decision Rationalization: How we are always justifying our decisions & how our hindsight fools us

I am pretty sure that once in everyone’s life there has come a time when you took a decision or made an action that was the incorrect thing to do. But somehow, almost mystically, your brain automatically comes up with an explanation or rationalization for the decision. Let me give you an example: suppose you have three ways you can subscribe to a magazine, a print subscription for 30€ or a digital subscription for 30€. Now I come up and say you could own both for 45 €. Which one would you choose? The last one I bet! And the reason would also be that the deal with digital and print subscription together sounds much more ‘rational’ than the other two. But wait, did you actually need both in the first place? AHA! The reason your mind gave you when you decided to go for the last option is called post decision rationalization! Do you want to know why exactly do we do this? How do we do it? Is it something inbuilt or we acquire it as a skill? Are more intelligent people or story tellers better at this? Let’s try and find out…

We Humans are extremely emotional creatures, emotions play an integral part in our everyday decision making (close to 1000 each day) most of them are taken by the automatic/emotional or fast thinking brain (mostly involving limbic system: the emotional center of the brain). It brings a feeling of fear when we see a snake, makes us cry, and brings the cute emotion when we see a toddler, Makes us like or hate someone etcetera. The blatant truth is that we are driven by emotions more than we know or more than we want to accept (that is again rationalization for not being rational! I call it the infinite loop something like M.C Escher’s remarkable drawings). Having emotions is not a bad thing at all (we all exhibit it: sobbing while watching an emotional movie or while empathizing with other's suffering) However, What counts is the awareness of the fact whenever we make decisions which are dominated by either emotions or reason! Being aware is probably the best thing one can do to avoid same errors arising from it in the future.
Then there is another more sort of slow region of the brain which is definitely not automatic and involves much more conscious engagement: The Pre Frontal cortex(PFC), this part is the rational center of the brain (processes logic and planning), it activates when we solve difficult math problems (24*7 is……? your prefrontal cortex just got Lit up!) or when we try to consider many options before making a decision to buy a property or when we say no for something really tempting (chocolate lava cake). It is hence responsible for all the executive functions. People who have a damaged prefrontal cortex show uncontrollable emotional drives (stock brokers and politicians), but they are also bad at lying (we will come back to this later below!). There is also a theory floating around that what makes the human is the prefrontal cortex, because that is the part of the brain which is bigger and more developed than any other closely related ape (this part controls the will power, abstractness and transcendence). Anyways, the point is that it is expensive (energetically) to use this region of the brain, you need to concentrate longer, and think deeper to activate it (doesn’t follow an involuntary mechanism). Therefore, it takes time to come up with the most optimal solution for a complex problem (slow thinking). And we humans it turn out don’t really like to engage it a lot!

A simplistic overview of the spatial organization of limbic system and prefrontal cortex in the brain.

So how can we understand decision making, and how it really works? What actually happens when we have made the decision, how and why do we stick to it? As mentioned before the decisions we make are mostly based on emotions so we make up stories that look ‘rational’ in supporting those decisions. We try and try to convince ourselves that we have made the right choice. We do rationalization in hindsight so as to reduce the discomfort arising from inconsistency in our thoughts.
The way it happens is the following: as every region in the brain has connections to every other part, so does the limbic system (emotional center) and PFC (rational center). Whenever we are overwhelmed with emotions the activity in limbic system is increased and that in turn overpowers the PFC. But when we consciously asses our options without letting the emotions dominate a decision, the PFC lights up and inhibits the limbic part of the brain. So you can imagine it like a tug of war between the two regions and it keeps on swaying one way or the other depending on which one is activated!

The tug of war between emotions and reason in brain! (signified by a heart instead of the limbic system here just to get an idea)

Now that the neurobiology of the inherent process is clear, one would want to know which domains is Post decision rationalization visible in. well not so surprisingly in almost every domain of human life. From realization of error by doctors post patient death: weather to tell it to family of patient or not because the patient is dead anyway so it would not make a difference now. Lawyers are another example for this!  Or how people who promote killing in the name of religion justify it by saying ‘we are employees of the almighty’.  Similarly whenever we burn fossil fuel we say to ourselves that only I boycotting fossil fuel use will not slow down the global warming. But probably the domain in which it is exhibited in highest amount is probably when we LIE or cheat. There is a whole ‘lie’ world in itself, after entering which one realizes how little we know ourselves. 

              Sometimes when I see the errors in action I think that there has to be a robot sitting in our heads manipulating our actions. Because it just blows my mind what a human can achieve without even realizing it themselves. There was an experiment done where people were shown the faces of three randomly selected men with different facial attributes and were asked to pick any one who looks suspicious and was lying about stealing money. The trick here however was that none of the three were actually guilty! But still each and every single individual rationalized their choice of the guilty guy. Some said he didn’t make eye contact, some said the guy didn’t smile, etc etc. the point is that we don’t like it when we don’t have answers or explanations for an event, so our brain tries to come up with ideas, stories to tell us we are right. Go ahead and ask yourself how many times you have lied in the last day or week! I am sure you will be surprised. The reason we lie could be many, we don’t want to hurt people (you were great in that play) or we want to save our face from something we did (I didn’t take a cookie from the cookie jar). The next question to ask is about the inception of this innate lying ability. Were we all born liars? or we learnt it just like we learn to bicycle, or drive? The surprising answer is yes, we are all born lairs, babies 9 months old for example have been known to cry whenever they wanted to be comforted even if they were not hungry! There was also a study done with 5 year olds who were left alone in a room with chocolate cake for 15 minutes and clear instructions of not to eat it. 75% of them did eat it and 80% of the 75% lied about it Hell one of the kids even said he doesn’t like chocolate (really?).  The Pre frontal cortex is known to be active when we lie (it is a pretty difficult thing to lie).
It’s not just humans but also squirrels do a fake bury of nuts for stealers. Our close cousins: monkeys make fake calls about predators so that they could steal some of the common food when everyone runs away to hide in the trees (the power of smart Apes).

            I hope most people here remember Lance Armstrong: the disgraced 7 time Tour De France winner who allegedly used performance enhancing drug in each and every one of the tournaments. Well, when the other cyclists were asked how they feel about it, they said ‘everybody is doing it’ and in saying that they make something illegal to something socially acceptable among the community. Just Like downloading stuff from internet. We all start as amateur experimentalist (oh this is just one time thing), and later get in to a sort of never ending cycle. Prof Dan Ariely of Duke University has done extensive research on this topic and he thinks that we all cheat, but a little bit, so that we feel good about ourselves at the end of the day by rationalizing it to ourselves. He argues that our system needs a change of how we treat dishonesty; we need to understand the basic motivations behind them and also the psychological insights into the mechanism or reason for the same. I personally couldn’t agree more!
So does lying making us a bad person? A criminal? Or is there something fundamentally wrong in the way our society is structured. I believe that people put in tough situations will probably be more likely to commit these mistakes. It’s not so much about the person itself but about the environment he/she is in. for example: we live in a society where we reward lying! Crazy right? Don’t believe me? Sure you have heard of games like poker (better the poker face more the chances of winning). Everyone also knows about fake smiles! And we do it all the time. We even have incentives for it (that guy is always smiling, he looks friendly!) And these things are based on the concept of lying. Now lying is okay but what we do to conceal it is even more interesting. We again rationalize to ourselves.
 

              The implications to this can range from big to F***ing big! As I said before, we do it without realizing it! My personal worries are: Where do we draw a line between what is illegal and what is socially acceptable? What can be rationalized and what cannot be? How do we even know there is a line there? We all like to think ourselves as good people, even if we might be driving cars that pollute the environment, eating meat that comes from animals slaughter houses that keep animals in the worst condition possible or by rationalizing capital punishment.
The question also comes of morality, if we keep doing hindsight rationalization for things that are supposed to be harmful to society (like destroying the environment) we might make it worse by ignoring it, considering our brains work according to an reward based learning process:  if we keep rationalizing to ourselves we do it once, twice and soon we get into a sort of habit. With novel explanations every time. For instance, how many reasons have you heard from smokers about quitting smoking? Every single time they have a new reason (societal implications here: overhead cost of cancer treatment, time lost on treating cancers that could be avoided, emotional and physical pain caused to individuals associated with smokers etc etc).some people cheat on the name of helping people which they are surrounded by, if people do money laundering to help their company or colleagues then they believe they are doing the right thing. Not paying for parking tickets because you already pay taxes is one more example of small scale cheating but done by many people. Not showing true income during filing tax returns is another. It’s this small scale cheating by the masses that has scathing effect on our society. Some would call it (rightly so) small petty issues related to one’s own life, not connected to the overall outcome in the way world will spin. But with every small step you embed the process that much deeper in our minds, like a needle piercing skin deeper with every single movement.
Alternatively, there are many concrete examples, where these mistakes done by few can have huge effects on groups of individuals or even whole nations. Once instance is legalizing firearm ownership on the name of democratic society and fundamental rights of freedom, or changing tax policy making it easier for the opulent class and burdening the middle class and what about lobbying? Even bailing out bank in the name of keeping the economy ‘stable’(but sir if evolution worked like that we would still be serving dinosaurs the food that was produced for us!) is nothing but PDR(post decision rationalization) which is corrosive on the whole to the society.  

A wise mind is an amalgamation: A bit of reason and a bit of emotion.

I believe intelligence does not just about know all the right answers; it’s about being aware of what one doesn’t know and trying to seek answers for the same. We don’t live in a rational world, we humans are fallible. Probably if we accept the fact and work accordingly, structure society accordingly the world could be a much better place.
Remember: realizing about the problem is job half done!

Before I end, Here is a pinch of humor for you: what did iota(i) say to pi(π)? Get rational!
And what did the pi reply? : Get real!

I would love to hear some of your experiences where you cheated a bit and rationalized it to yourself!   

Thanks for reading!
And like always: stay curious!!

The Left Brain, Right Brain Fallacy

Probably one of the greatest fallacy intriguing human minds is the one about being left/right brain person. Popular beliefs imply that if someone is right handed they have an active “left brain” and vice versa. Or the fact that being left brained makes one more logical with better mathematical skills, and being ‘righty’ is a sign of creativity and a better imagination, mostly seen in artists or writers.
The source of these myths date back to physicians in the 1800s, who observed that minor damages in one particular side of the brain cause a person to lose certain abilities specific to that half.

In 1844, a book titled, Duality of the Mind described the two parts of the brain as independently functional (this theory couldn’t be proven wrong because fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technology was still a century and a half away). This myth was further corroborated by classic severing surgeries of corpus callosum (fissure connecting the right and left cerebral hemispheres), which created totally unnatural brains, where the two halves could not communicate anymore. And what happened was stupefying: Now the two parts of the brain could actually work independently!

These people could respond differently to stimuli provided to their right and left sides, as they would always get contrasting responses. For instance, when shown a picture to their 'right' field of vision and asked to name it, they were always correct but when it was shown to the left field of vision they could draw the same by their left hand, but could not say it. Mind-blowing!

The Nobel Prize winning scientist Roger Sperry did some of these experiments to find out which parts of the brain had traits more closely related to mathematical abilities, language, etc. But it was popular psychology fanatics who took this idea and stretched it further from reality; the idea of human attributes being determined by dominants halves of the brain started spreading like fire.

It started appearing in books, journals and newspaper editorials. What made it worse were the personality assessment tests, which were designed to tell you whether you’re a right brained/left brained person. Various books started cropping up based on the idea, providing methods to train the weaker halves of your brain. One could not have thrown a dead cat around in the world without hitting a page offering such tests.
What the research actually alluded to was the fact that certain processes are spatially centered to one area of the brain, and disrupting them would cause a loss of that particular function. Now, there are certain functions, which reside more in one part of the brain than the other, like language in the left, and attention resides in the right frontal hemisphere, but that is simply lateralization. It has nothing to do with one part being more dominant than the other.

Brain lateralization has been known for almost 4 decades now and humans are not the only species, which possess it. Fish, reptiles and other mammals are known to have it too. It is known to have some evolutionary advantages then, may be during evolution, organisms with lateralized brain could perform two tasks simultaneously. But, neither one is known to be dominating over the other.

If nothing else, they have functional connections. i.e., almost all the functionally specific regions have connections to the other regions in the brain in ways which are complex yet almost mystical.

For analogy, consider the connections between proteins in a human cell. Each protein is regulated by other proteins (I am sure you know by now that I study protein networks). The computer science geeks can imagine the brain not like a single computer with multiple hardware units, but more similar to gazillion computers connected through infinitely fast (almost 100 m/s) cables.  

Let’s think of a better evidence to support this myth.

It would involve studying the brains of mathematical wizards, analytical thinkers on one side and creative, imaginative people (basically, anyone except politicians and bankers) on the other side. Measuring their brain activity could shed light on the facts that do they on an average use much more of their respective halves? (Some people actually manage quite well to use none). Well, there has been no evidence found yet to support this popular idea (If someone is out there with evidence, now is the time for the real slim shady to stand up!).

In fact, the opposite evidence for this myth has been found in musicians having larger than normal corpus callosum. Hence, learning music does not activate a particular part of the brain, but improves the connectivity between different regions (For those of you who want to know more should see this exhilarating video of live brain imaging of a musician while he is playing an instrument, I call it ‘brain hustle’).

Another landmark study conducted by Utah scientists triumphed in debunking this myth to some extent. They analyzed the brain scans of 1000 individuals and found absolutely no supporting evidence for left/right brain dominance. What they observed was already known, that is the strong lateralization of brain regions like language processing in the left hemisphere, and attention predominantly showed right lateralization. These so called hubs light up when performing a task particular to their functional specification.

Aha! Science: 1, pop-psychology: 0.

Even though the hubs lit up, they nonetheless received input from other areas of the brain. Therefore, everything in the brain is connected to mostly everything else. Sometimes it makes me wonder that how important is the role of technology in promoting the information about brain’s nature. This study would have never been possible without the dawn of fMRI.

And many of us would all be blindly following the myths, pulling our brains out struggling to get a particular half work better.

Interestingly, when one part of the brain fails due to seizures or other conditions, the other available regions take over certain functions. For example blind people being unable to use their visual processing regions, process sound in an enhanced manner, they are also known for processing language. Or the bio hacked guy (yes he is a cyborg) Neil Harbisson who had color blindness, now ‘hears’ all colors through a camera antenna attached to his temple. What is amazing about Harbisson is that he not only perceives visible light, but also infrared and UV light through various combinations of sound waves (and here comes the age of implantable technology to enhance human cognition).

A more enthralling phenomenon is of a functional take over from parts whether damaged or not. Blind people are able to use visual areas to amplify sound processing, like Daniel Kish, an American expert at human echolocation. The regions in his brain, which are usually known to be responsible for visual processing, now light up when he uses echolocation to find his way or make sense of his surroundings (by the way, he can ride a bicycle on a busy road using echolocation).

What can be more counterintuitive? There are several other cases where people have this ‘hustle’ in the brain regions responsible for vision to the sound of approaching footsteps. Of course this was only possible for people who are congenitally blind or lost their sight at an early age, so their brain was virgin enough to make connections with the other regions and had enough time to do so. This is known as neuroplasticity. But after looking at this evidence, it could not be said that one region is genetically hard wired to have only one particular function. 

During my research, I stumbled upon a report of a case defying all medical predictions, wherein a kid, Jake Gladstone was born with nearly half of his brain missing! What the F..k right ? One would expect such a kid to never be able to walk, talk, play or code (yes, that’s what many kids do these days for fun). Moreover, would he always be left brained? No! Jake is like any other 4 year old, running around, talking. Although his language skills are not similar to the kids of his age, and has a dysfunctional right arm. But his skills are slowly improving and he can solve math problems, paint and does everything else like a four-year-old. But it is still amazing to see what his brain achieved at half the size.

Surely now, the dominant half myth should be enclosed in a bag and thrown in a deep ocean. 

However, what would be interesting to know is whether there are chemical differences between the two halves. For instance, if one half has higher distribution levels of a particular neurotransmitter than the other or whether quantities of receptor channels are more on one particular half making it functionally more diverse. It would also be fascinating to know any structural differences in connectivity within the two halves; can one half have more connections within itself? What if the two parts experience emotions differently? Can one half be more dominant in repressing the activity of the other half? We are yet to stumble upon the specific answer to these questions.

Another reason for the prevalence o this particular myth can be its simplicity. But remember however tough it might be, we still have to suppress our beliefs and look at the truth even if it’s more complicated than what meets the eye.

I hope this myth is not more than a tiny hole in our ship whose journey is to decipher how our brains really work, and we seem of have seen only the tip of the iceberg!

So, next time you tell yourself that you weren't good at art as you’re a ‘leftist’ (analytical, logical) then you should look for a more politically correct excuse, for this one may not suffice.

Thanks for Reading.
And remember to always stay curious.