brain researcher reveals
This is how you make the smartest decisions
© Denis Kuvaev / Shutterstock
stomach or head? mom or dad? Do some more googling or enough information? Decision-making processes are sometimes quite tricky. How best to proceed according to brain researchers.
- Get up or snooze?
- Rolls or muesli? skirt or trousers?
- Smile back or look away coyly?
We make most of our everyday decisions without thinking much about them and with impressive success. Sometimes, however, we are faced with a choice that we are uncertain about:
- On holiday to Denmark or Italy?
- New TV or fridge?
- Study or earn money?
In order to make the best possible decisions in such cases, we need all the decision-making tools that are available to us. But what are they actually?
These 2 tools support us in making decisions
As the brain researcher and author Martin Korte wrote in his book “brain whisper“, we have two tools, so to speak, that we can use in decision-making processes:
- Intuition (also known as “gut feeling”)
- understanding
Since the two not only work differently, but also have different strengths and weaknesses, let’s take a quick look at each one.
1. Intuitive
Neurologists locate our intuition in the same brain area as our habits, the so-called basal ganglia. From an evolutionary-biological point of view, this part of our body’s computer center is very old and we are usually neither aware of what is happening there nor of a “linguistic nature”, as Korte writes. Our intuition draws the information it uses to make decisions from our own experience: by including sample recognizes what is familiar to us from an earlier situation. Based on this, she recommends us to decide one way or the other. The great strength of intuition: It takes into account insanely many parameters in a decision, namely everyone who caused the model situation. Her weakness: She likes to misjudge the difference between the new, concrete situation and the stored pattern – and of course that can lead to misjudgements … (Since we usually associate experiences with emotions and also recall memories of them through them, our limbic system is also involved in the intuitive decision-making process.)
2. Mind
Korte assigns the mind primarily to the prefrontal cortex to a comparatively young part of our brain that controls conscious thought and is gifted with languages. Thanks in part to his gift for languages, our mind can run through different options (“what if…”) and Clearly recognize connections such as causality – and ultimately this is also his greatest strength in a decision-making process. The weakness of our minds: It’s exhausting to use, it doesn’t have a particularly high capacity and it can only capture a fraction of the relevant factors – which of course can lead to considerable misjudgments and distorted weightings…
This is how we use our tools optimally
The following usage recommendation results from the description in the package leaflet for our two decision-making tools:
- In complex but familiar situations we can count on ours with a clear conscience intuition leave – especially when we have to make a quick decision. (Examples: traffic, everyday decisions, prioritizing usual to-dos …)
- In simple, unfamiliar situations is ours understanding the best guide – especially when we have time to think. (Examples: investments and purchasing decisions, when is the right time to go on a date at a new coffee shop?…)
- In complex, new situationsin which decisions are usually most difficult for us and which therefore interest us the most, is one Combination of intuition and reason the best variant, i.e. “thinking about our thinking”, as the brain researcher puts it: feeling inside ourselves what feels right, plus consciously consider why it feels right, what consequences it would have if we followed our feelings, what we would probably feel if we behaved differently … or as Korte says: “We always have to make it clear to what kind of decision it is straight and which information is essential for this are.”
The latter sounds exhausting – and it is. Fortunately, another rule that the neurologist says is essential to making wise decisions is quite simple (*cough, cough*):
We are never 100% certain about the consequences when we make a decision, whether it is a simple problem or a complex one, new or familiar. However, shirking and resigning to your fate for this reason is never the wisest decision with 100% certainty.
Source used: Martin Korte, “Brain Whisper: How We Learn to Train Our Memory Effectively”