How can I make better decisions?

Answer: Get enough sleep.

Chronobiol Int. 2012 Feb;29(1):43-54.

Gambling when sleep deprived: don’t bet on stimulants.

Killgore WD, Grugle NL, Balkin TJ.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that sleep deprivation leads to suboptimal decision-making on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a pattern that appears to be unaffected by moderate doses of caffeine. It is not known whether impaired decision-making could be reversed by higher doses of caffeine or by other stimulant countermeasures, such as dextroamphetamine or modafinil. Fifty-four diurnally active healthy subjects completed alternate versions of the IGT at rested baseline, at 23 and 46 h awake, and following a night of recovery sleep. After 44 h awake, participants received a double-blind dose of caffeine (600 mg), dextroamphetamine (20 mg), modafinil (400 mg), or placebo. At baseline, participants showed a normal pattern of advantageous performance, whereas both sleep-deprived sessions were associated with suboptimal decision-making on the IGT. Following stimulant administration on the second night of sleep deprivation, groups receiving caffeine, dextroamphetamine, or modafinil showed significant reduction in subjective sleepiness and improvement in psychomotor vigilance, but decision-making on the IGT remained impaired for all stimulants and did not differ from placebo. Decision-making returned to normal following recovery sleep. These findings are consistent with prior research showing that sleep deprivation leads to suboptimal decision-making on some types of tasks, particularly those that rely heavily on emotion processing regions of the brain, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Moreover, the deficits in decision-making were not reversed by commonly used stimulant countermeasures, despite restoration of psychomotor vigilance and alertness. These three stimulants may restore some, but not all, aspects of cognitive functioning during sleep deprivation.

Here is an article in Scientific American  describing a similar finding:

Short on sleep, the brain optimistically favors long odds

Read the original scientifuc article:

Sleep Deprivation Biases the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Economic Preferences

How can I make better decisions?

Answer: Conduct a “premortem” just before you decide to go ahead with an important decision.

 


Gary Klein, author of  Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, thought up the premortem idea. He spells out why and how to do a premortem in this Harvard Business Review article:

Performing a Project Premortem


Daniel Kahneman glowingly describes the premortem technique in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He writes:

“The procedure is simple: When the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision.

The premise of the session is a short speech:

‘Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.’

Gary Klein’s idea of the premortem usually evokes immediate enthusiasm. After I described it casually at a session in Davos, someone behind me muttered, “It was worth coming to Davos just for this!” (I later noticed the speaker was the CEO of a major international corporation.)

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision  appears to be made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much needed direction. . .The main virtue of the premortem is that is legitimizes doubts.  Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier.” (p 264-5)

Kahneman again explains the technique  in this video–watch from 12 minutes 17 seconds:

How can I solve problems better?

Answer: Identify the best strategy (algorithm) to help you think your way through the problem.

There is an infinite number of problems for us to solve but just a relatively small number of strategies needed to solve those problems. If we can learn those clever problem-solving strategies and know when to apply those strategies, we’ll be much better at solving problems.

Examples of clever strategies for solving various problems:

1.  What is the best strategy to use to solve this famous “Einstein puzzle”:

  1. There are five houses.
  2. The Englishman lives in the red house.
  3. The Spaniard owns the dog.
  4. Coffee is drunk in the green house.
  5. The Ukrainian drinks tea.
  6. The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.
  7. The Old Gold smoker owns snails.
  8. Kools are smoked in the yellow house.
  9. Milk is drunk in the middle house.
  10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
  11. The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.
  12. Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept. (should be “… a house …”, see Discussion section)
  13. The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.
  14. The Japanese smokes Parliaments.
  15. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Now, who drinks water? Who owns the zebra? In the interest of clarity, it must be added that each of the five houses is painted a different color, and their inhabitants are of different national extractions, own different pets, drink different beverages and smoke different brands of American cigarettes. One other thing: in statement 6, right means your right.— Life International, December 17, 1962

You can spend lots of frustrating hours or days thrashing your way through to a answer–or,more likely, you’ll get so tied up in knots you give up.

Or you can apply a simple organizational strategy that guides you to the answer in about ten minutes.

Click here for the clever strategy.


2.  What is the best strategy for solving this type of problem:

How would you prepare 500 mL of a 1:35 bleach solution from a 1:10 bleach solution using water?

You have come down with a bad case of the geebies, but fortunately your grandmother has a sure cure. She gives you an eyedropper bottle labeled:

Take 1 drop per 15 lb of body weight per dose four times a day until the geebies are gone. Contains gr 8 heebie bark per dr 100 solvent. 60 drops=1 tsp.

You weigh 128 lb, and the 4-oz bottle is half-full. You test the eyedropper and find there are actually 64 drops in a teaspoon. You are going on a three-week trip and are deeply concerned that you might run out of granny’s geebie tonic. Do you need to see her before leaving to get a refill?

(problems from Medication Math Problems)

This type of problem crops up often in daily living and is especially common for nurses. They are mathematically challenging, unless you know a strategy for solving them.

This is a  good strategy: apply dimensional analysis

A Guide to Dimensional Analysis

How can I make better decisions?

Answer: First, learn about your mind’s default settings and how you need to do some serious re-writing of the code!

Watch this eye-opening and disturbing video. Yale Professor, John Bargh, the leader  in priming research today, shows us we’re not the rational, aware decision-makers we like to think we are. Instead, we’re more like automatons a lot of the time, unconsciously responding to subtle cues in our environment in really dumb ways! After watching this video, you’ll never trust yourself to make a fully sane, rational decision again!

Unconscious behavioral guidance systems – John Bargh

(To skip the intro, watch from 2 minutes in. The video starts off a bit heavy-going and technical, but then quickly becomes rivetting. )

John Bargh provides links to all his recent key scientific papers. His 2008 paper, Free will is un-natural, is a must read. Print it off and take your time to absorb the message.

What can we do about this highly impressionable,unconscious side of ourselves?

Read this article: Changing your brain’s factory settings. The author, Eric Haseltine, suggests we need to become aware of our unconscious default brain settings and to consciously and effortfully over-write these default settings with something better!

It’s hard work being  rational!