>> charlie: welcomome to our program. tonight, a "charlie rose special edition." in the 11th episode of our brain series, we look at the deciding brain. >> neuroscience is capable of giving us insights into

phenomena that we would not think would be in science -- morality and economic decision making. >> charlie: this is bridging humanity and science. >> it's bridging two things and this is the beginningment we now have some methodologies, we have some strategies, we have some beginning insight. this is just opening up. i think it will make an insight on how people make decisions and also for making new kinds of diagnoses and developing few kinds of therapeutics. >> charlie: the 11th episode of the charlie rose brain series underwritten by the simons foundation coming up. it's about the most exciting scientific journey of our time -- understanding the brain. the series is made possible by a grant from the simons foundation. their mission is to advance the frontiers of research in the basic sciences and mathematics. funding for "charlie rose" was provided by the following. >> words alone aren't enough. our job is to listen and find ways to help workers who lost

their jobs to the spill. i'm iris cross. we'll keep restoring the jobs, tourist beaches and businesses impacted by the spill. we've paid over $400 million in claims and set up a $20 billion independently run claims fund. i was born in new orleans. my family still lives here. i'm going to be here until we make this right. >> additional funding provided by these funders. >> and by bloomberg. a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> from our studios in captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose.

>> charlie: this evening, we continue our exploration of the most fascinating topic in science. the human brain. tonight's subject is decision making. from simple decisions such as what to wear, to complex decisions such as whom to marry, the brain is constantly making choices. but choosing wisely is not easy. tonight we will examine why and how the brain is prone to error and irrationality. for example, we sometimes pursue short-term pleasure at the expense of our health. we sometimes crack under pressure instead of rising to the occasion. we also struggle to make the right moral decisions in the face of uncertainty. researchers today are trying to explain these discrepancies by unravelling the biology of the brain, exploring how decisions are made at the level of the individual neuron. they've also isolated the brain regions that control our thoughts and feelings. our discussion tonight will touch on some of the most important aspects of the human experience. including morality, social interaction, and economic decision-making. we will learn how emotions expert powerful control over our choices for better or for worse.

we will also learn how decision-making is disrupted in disorders like attention-deficit disorder and psychopathic behavior. joining me now is a group of neuroscientists who approach the science of decision making from different directions. william newsome studies the cellular level exploring the processes this mediate visual perception. he is a professor in the department of neurobiology at stanford university and a howard hughes investigator. tony movshon who studies perception. he is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at new york university. ray dolan, he studies how emotion and cognition interact to produce a decision. he is a professor at the university college in london and the director of the wellcome trust center of neuroimaging. joshua greene studies the mechanism responsible for decision making. an assistant professor at harvard yesterday and director

of the neurocognition lab. once again my co-host is eric kandel, a nobel laureate, a howard hughes medical investigator and a great friend to this program. we begin our discussion asking dr. kandell what neuroscience can tell us about decision making. >> decision-making brings us into a new area of neuroscience. in the past, we have considered how different parts of the brain control different aspects of our behavior. today wore going to examine how neurscience impacts on other areas of knowledge. neuroscience is a font of knowledge for other areas of scholarship. this is very important, and it's important since it was raised 60 years ago by a famous physicist by the name of c.p. snowe who wrote a famous essay called "two cultures" in which he pointed out that a major schism is emerging between the humanities concerned with the nature of human existence and the sciences

concerned with the nature of the natural world. this schism, this separation was based upon the fact that these disciplines distrust one another and fail to understand one another very well, and to some degree the failure to understand is unidirectional, because scientists have no difficulty enjoying shakespeare or picasso, while humanists have a great deal of difficulty understanding quantum mechanics or brain science, and c.p. snowe suggested that it's important to bridge between these two cultures. and there are a number of bridges that have been built. one is was do. trying to educate the public about various aspects of science. but as we have seen in the last 10 programs, one of the things that's emerging is that brain science is in fact giving us insights into the nature of human existence. and therefore, it's in a position to initiate dialogue with various aspects of the humanities.

with economics. with philosophy. with moral decision-making. with art. and with literature. and decision-making in economics and moral philosophy is one area in which neuroscience has made the most substantial progress. it's fair to say that this is probably the most rigorous of the bridging areas that's evolving so far. so we want to use this as an example for studying how neuroscience can impact other disciplines. decision-making has many aspects. it goes from very simple perceptual decisions to personal decisions, the social decisions, the economic decisions and moral decisions. let me give you an example. very simple to speak about a personal decision. i can decide i'm going to have dinner tonight at 7:30. i can also elaborate this into a social decision. we'll have dinner by myself. or we'll have dinner with my colleagues around this roundtable. this turns into an economic decision. will i invite people to a very

elegant restaurant which may be expensive? or will i invite them to a pizzeria around the corner. and finally it brings out a moral decision. am i, as the co-host of this program, going to pick up the tab? or am i going to ask the leader of this group to pick up the tab? as we know, in the past you have always picked up the tab and i hope you will again tonight. anyway, there are a range of phenomena, and we have a science and the science dates back to the development of several methodologies about 50 years ago. two different approaches began to develop the science of decision-making. one was trying to pick up signals out of noise. bell telephone company, for example, people working in the bell labs were trying to develop methods whereby in a noisy telephone line you could amplify the signal so you could tell the difference between pole and bowl, two very similar-sounding words so to pick the signal out of the noise was a thank they set themselves.

another group was focusing on picking the signal out of noise -- mathematicians trying to develop statistical methods to determine whether a particular scientific finding is reliable or a signal in the noise. it turned out that the approaches of both these groups turned out to be very similar and provided an opportunity to really begin to approach these problems in a very systematic way, and to study this in a biological sense, and the biological that emerged is fascinating because even though we're dealing with a variety of different processes -- perceptual, personal, social, economic, moral -- it turns out that a number of key brain areas involved in all of these. the fact that brain areas are involved in perception, in personal decisions is easy to understand. but to think that moral decisions involve the brain is a bit of a stretch, and we want to begin by asking wais the evidence that moral functions

are represented in the brain? and that dates to a very famous case, a man called phinneas gage who in 1848 was working on a railroad and working with explosives and in the course of working this with steel poles, a steel pole went through his skull from the base coming out at the top of the skull, damaged his brain very seriously. this physician, john harlow, a relatively inexperienced physician took excellent care of him, paying a lot of attention to him, making sure that he really recovered from this, and he recovered to the most amazing degree. within days, he was able to walk, and talk, and function effectively. within a few weeks, he was back in the job. the amazing thing is that despite the fact he was doing all of these routine things well, he had changed in the most dramatic way. people said "gage is no longer gage." before this accident, he was the foreman of the crew.

he was absolutely reliable. he was like you. you could always count on him to do the job and to do it well. after the accident, he was completely irresponsible. he never showed up on time. he became obscene. he paid no attention to his fellow people. he had really lost a sense of moral judgment. and this was absolutely remarkable. now, at the time he died, they didn't do an autopsy on him. harlow presented two major papers which are illustrated in this book. but hannah and tone damasio came back many years later and using the skull and the steel pole that went over him, they reconstructed pathway of this lesion and realized that one important structure that was damaged by it was the prefrontal cortex and particularly the under surface, the ventromedial and the orbitofrontal cortex.

we know from a number of researchers that these areas are extremely important for moral decision making. the damasios and ray dolan, had a part that these areas also expert control over the amygdala, a structure deep within the brain that orchestrates emotion and that has made a lot of people which hadding the damasios realize that moral decisions -- decision-making and emotions are often tied together, that you cannot separate one and the other, and we'll hear later on how certain kinds of moral decisions inevitably recruit emotions in a very powerful way, so we're going to have a wonderful time listening to the various aspects of emotion that we now begin to understand. >> charlie: all of that from one question. not bad. let me just begin with tony and talk about sort of how a person makes a decision. >> as eric indicated there is a tradition of decision-making based on problems in signal

processing and engineering and statistical decision making. how do you decide whether one quantity was in fact larger than another based on the measurements that you made, and the mathematics and engineering sciences that developed around this gave rise to a set of techniques and psychology which we call signals detection theory, and the theory of signals detection allowed people in the 1950's and 1960's to achieve a sophisticated understanding of how human observers made simple perceptual decisions -- the idea, of course, is that we can generalize those processes to more complex judgments by adding layers on top of them, and we'll talk about the layers as well. >> charlie: the basic difference between simple and complex decisions is? >> a very simple decision might just involve taking the measurement of two things, one brighter than the other. the question i'm asking you is is that one brighter than this one. a more complicated decision is the type of decision josh will be talking about later on, when you are asked to weigh goods and wills and to weigh the costs of things, you will be asked to make decisions in the face of uncertainty which is a major

challenge all of us face and you may be asked to make decisions in the face of variable costs and variable penalties for making the wrong decision and the right decision. so all of those factors become layered upon the simple basic question of if i measure x and i measure y, which one is the larger, but at the root, the question is if i have two measurements and i compare them can i choose the larger one and get it right. >> the wonderful area is we can not only study it in behavioral terms but physiological terms, and bill pioneered the cellular study of decision making. >> mike shadlon, who was working in the lab with me at the time realized we had an enormous possibility to train rhesusmonk monkeys to train -- rhesus monkeys and identify the circuits in the brain involved when an animal looked at the tv screen and made a decision. this was a risk that you could

chase a complex thing like a decision around the brain and never come to grips with it, we got fortunate and were able to identify some circuits in the monkeys' cerebral cortex that seemed to be highly involved in rendering these decisions and then we were able to use this as a test bed to bring in more complex sorts of decisions so more recently in the lab we have been looking at what we call value-based decisions, not moral values but economic values so we can put an animal in a situation where it's a difficult discrimination for the animal but we can promise him more reward if he chooses the one on the left than if he chooses the one on the right, and if it's difficult and he's not sure which one is correct he will go for the bigger reward. so they're very experienced economic foragers. animals are outstanding economic subjects because their survival depends on impressively good foraging so we can start mixing layers of complexity in the lab, in these animals, and get into a subject that is sort of called neuroeconomics which has been heavily investigated by paul

glichlscher, at n.y.u. and -- >> ray is a psychologist. he's ashths customed to complexity. >> interesting -- he's accustomed to complexity. >> one of the common things for humans and animals is that we care deeply about outcomes and most of our decisions are somehow shaped by the likely outcomes that will ensue but there is one big difference with humans which makes the study of humans difficult but also interesting. is that the range of outcomes we care about are vastly different than animals and more abstract. we care about money. we care about art. we care about status. one of the thing we care about is we care, also, about the future. so animals tend to be very bound in the presence. we care about the future, and we put a value in the present upon our future states. hence, we always say for pensions or those of us who are not impulsive -- so one of the

issues that come up in human decision-making is how do we put all of this into some sort of common currency, and it turns out, going back to phineas gage again is that the part of the brain that seems to be doing this is the same prefrontal cortex that was damaged in phineas gage. the interest here, of course, is that you can begin to explain the aberrant behavior seen by psychiatrists, neurologists, in patients who have brain damage, you can begin to explain it in terms of ideas that come from decision theory and from economics. -- in how aberrant behavior might emerge from dysfunctioning systems related to decision making. >> charlie: where do you come into this? >> i come in as a philosopher

with interests in the kinds of decisions that really get under the skin. i think often when we face difficult decisions we feel that there is a kin of tension between an automatic impulse, a gut reaction on the one hand and then another voice that feels a little bit cooler. more of a -- the voice of reason, perhaps, although that's a controversial way of describing it and this idea has beenand for a long time. plato divided the soul up into a passionate part and a more deliberate part and the enlightenment philosophies like david hume and emanuel kant discussed emotional and decision making, we find these aren't really just stories -- that the tension that we feel between passion and reason, between intuition and deliberation really is based on a tension between competing systems in the brain including some of the systems that ray mentioned so we've made and understood the

philosophical questions better by paying attention to the underlying basis in the brain. >> charlie: before we get too far here, i want to make sure i understand. what's happening in the neurons in terms of decision-making. >> in order to study any process in detail, you need a good psychological description of what's going on, and tony has pioneered in that. you then can tackle the problem at the experimental level in experimental animals using single-cell -- and then a revolution in the last 20 or 30 years to image it in intact, behaving people and ask him what areas of the brain light up when you make a moral judgment, when you make an economic decision. soee we need to discuss all of these. behavior. the cellular recordings of. and the imaging of people making progressively more complex decision. >> charlie: the represent -- >> the representation of sensory stimuli in the brain is something people have been familiar with for almost a century and the evidence comes

from making brain recordings of the responses that neurons give to sensory signals and one key thing it turns out is that in many different domains the sensory signal that you measure in a nerve cell gets stronger when the stimulus in the world gets stronger, so that means that the activity in the nerve cell gives you a measurement of how intense the stimulus was in the world. that gives you a natural framework for thinking about how you would distinguish between two stimuli that differ in intensity and so the reason being that if one stimulus evokes a stronger response and another evokes a weaker response then the weak difference between the two is the decision variable on which you are going to base your judgment. it helps to have a handy task on which you can ask a human observer or a monkey or a neuron depending on the experiment which of two stimuli is stronger and bill and i settled on a particular kind of moving stimulus as being handy for this and i'm going to run an experiment on that stimulus with eric. what he's going to get is a countdown, three, two, one, then

a bullseye. watch the dots. and at the end i'm going to ask you what direction those dots were moving in. eric, i think you can manage this. did the dots move to the left or right? >> to the left. >> correct. that task was basically effortless because the dots moved together and you didn't have to do any particular discrimination. >> it wasn't that easy. >> i'm going to make it a little bit harder in the next video by taking some of the dots and making them twinkle at random instead of move together. >> right. >> you are correct, but you will notice that some of the dots were not actually obeying that rule. >> a little more difficult. >> now i'm going to make things a little harder. which way? >> to the right, i think. >> very good. >> charlie: all right. >> i've got a future at this. can i become a monkey? >> as they say in the films, "don't get cocky." may i have the next piece. >> see how he handles the next one. >> next one, please. >> this is hard. to the left.

>> to the left. you are correct, eric. it was hard. one of the things i want to point out is that as i have made this harder by sprinkling all these random dots in it you haven't been able to look effortlessly at the display and say it's moving to the left. you have to watch. you have to attend. you have to do what we call integrate information over the course of the display before you can make up your mind and what makes this task very helpful for us as neuroscientists is that you can actually use that need to integrate over time to make things work. let me just give you the last hard one. eric. >> i think it's to the right. i'm not sure. >> you are correct but you were guessing. the reason we did this experiment this way is that we knew there were neurons in the brain that responded to the motion and responded more strongly when the motion was strong and more weakly when the motion was weak, and basically what we're doing is asking the neurons that respond for leftward motion and the neurons that respond for rightward motion to argue between themselves about which was basically the better signal. which was the stronger signal. and eric chose in the end of each of these trials on the

basis of the rightward neurons and the leftward neurons, he chose the population of neurons as we think about them that gave the strongest signal. >> there are two things you can measure about decision-making in the laboratory easily. one is whether you're correct or not the way we were doing with eric and another we were not doing with eric is how quickly you make the decision and those two tradeoff against each other. you can make more accurate decisions if you wait and integrate the information longer or sometimes at a premium to make decisions quickly you will sacrifice accuracy in order to go quickly, so what we did -- the models the psychologists have built these models in the past that actually account for the accuracy and speed data, and the notion if you watch my hands is that you've got these integrating mechanisms in the brain, one for rite ward motion, one for leftward motion and -- one for rightward motion, one for leftward motion and this goes up when he sees evidence for right, this one goes up when he sees evidence for left and they're going like this, and in eric's case right wins when it's

the rightward stimulus, but if it's the leftward stimulus the notion is they're both accumulating evidence and the left one wins so you have accumultulator models. for us it might be whether we're going to have chicken or beef for dinner this evening. which is going to win when we sit down at the table. what's amazing thing is that mike shadlin, and i and our colleagues have been able to see neurons in the brain that seem to reflect this accumulation of information so their firing rates get stronger. we have a pool of neurons favoring right and a pool of neurons favoring left and the information gets stronger and by recording from these neurons in real time while eric is watching those dots and trying to decide is it right or left we can predict eric is going to say or what the monkeys are going to say at the end of the trial. it's almost like you are reading the mind and we can see these accumulators working in real time and predict wadecision the

animal is going to make. >> you asked about the difference between simple and complex decisions so a simple decision when all that happens is you have to tell left from right and at the end of the trial you get a drop of juice if you got it right and you don't if you don't is a very simple decision because the costs and the benefits are well known. the benefit is a drop of juice if you get it right. the cost is nothing. but real-life decisions have more complicated outcomes and many times the outcome of a decision is uncertain. you don't know, for example, if you make a particular decision to go forage in that piece of the forest as opposed to this one whether you're actually going to find fruit or not so the question is whether the simple decision-making models that people like bill and i study can be made on generalize situations where the costs are complicated and there is a set of prior beliefs sitting around about with a good place is to grow. if i'm looking for oranges i'm not going to go to the desert, i'm going to where the orange trees are, so all of these factors become layers that you add onto this basic

decision-making process. >> charlie: is the process different for economic decisions? >> we have been talking about what we call our normative decision-making process, but when it comes to human decisions, it turns out that humans don't always act in a normative fashion the way the theories describe because we seem to be particularly susceptible to cues in the environment that trigger emotions and emotions can sometimes benefit decision process but sometimes they can corrupt it. this gives rise to the view of the mind, not of one central decision-making system but perhaps multiple decision-making systems, one being the sort of farsighted decision-making system we've heard about, another might be a habitual decision making system, one that gets you home from work, reading your newspaper, that's a habit, or a low-level decision-making system, an emotion which really corresponds to elisitation of very basic response tendencies

associated with reward. you approach things or are attracted to things, or punishment. this turns out to be very pervasive in everyday life because it seems to influence and bias how we make decisions and one example is based upon a very famous experiment done by daniel connaman and amos taverski. if i give you 50 pounds and say you've got to gamble, and one gamble is you can keep 20 pounds. or, you take the gamble you see below the 20 poundsment or i can give -- 20 pounds. or another option you lose the 30 dollars or 30 pounds or you go for the gamble. they're exactly the same thing. one i present it in a positive frame, the other in a negative frame, people are vastly different in terms of whether they go for the sure option, the

keep, or the gamble, depending upon the frame. and wabecomes important then is how pervasive is the effect of the emotional brain upon decisions in general. one of the things we've learned is that brain chemicals like dope mean seem to be important in controlling the -- like dopamine seem to be important in controlling the degree to the control of the rational brain and this becomes important when you come to the field of neurology. take parkinson's patients. parkinson's patients are frequently treated with drugs that drive the dopamine system and this can have the effect that the emotional system will begin to dominate the rational system. and you end up with very tragic situations where patients with parkinson's disease will engage in compulsive gambling. the immediate attraction of the reward of winning leads them under the influence of the drugs that they're being treated with

to sometimes spend all of their life savings. i have had a number of patients like this who managed to literally blow everything they've got by gambling on the internet using a credit card while their wife is in bed thinking everything is quiet in the house. so we begin to learn an awful lot about how different systems in the brain interact. what controls their interaction. and i like the analogy that the human mind or brain is not a singular sort of chief executive, it's much more like a parliament. you have a parliament of the mind. with much more rational sort of parties but some more low-level, unreconstructed, parties -- the emotional system. and the habit system, the old, conservative trend do the same things the same way every day. >> these are so fascinating because the framing problem is so interesting. the medicine. >> absolutely. so this may seem kind of a trivial example but most of us at some point in our lives will go along to see a physician and

the physician will tell you that you can have this treatment and you generally ask the question, "what's the likely outcome?" if i tell you that this treatment will cure you with 90% probability, i could also say to you, well, there is a 10% chance you will die with the treatment." i'm giving you the same information, but how i frame it will change how you take up the treatment. there have been many experiments like this done which show that how you convey information becomes critically important, and this becomes a public policy issue. social policy. i guess it becomes important when it comes to how you conduct a referendum. how do you frame the question? >> it's how you frame your question. >> many of the questions that ray conveyed about economic decision-making also apply to moral decision-making which comes to people's surprise sometimes because people often think of moral decisions as being made by a moral sense or a moral faculty that's somehow

special and apart from the rest of the mind but that doesn't seem to be the case, and one good place to start, to see how the mind is like a fractious parliament rather than a unified monarchy is to start with moral dilemmas. moral dilemmas are fascinating because they have competing factors and they're a good place to start if you're trying to do a science of moral decision-making because they can bring out the competing forces which may, and do, as it turns out, correspond to competing forces in the mind, so one famous set of moral dilemmas that philosophers have been arguing about for a few decades now is known as the trolley problem and it comes in aum coof different parts. in the first part of the trolley problem, you can see it up on the top of the screen there is a trolley headed toward those five people and there you are down at the bottom by the switch and the only way you can save the lives of those five people is by hitting the switch and that will divert the trolley away from the five and on to the one. if you ask people is it morally acceptable to hit that switch and minimize the number of

deths, almost everybody, not everybody but almost everybody says yes and then you give people the second case which is illustrated at the bottom. this time the trolley is headed toward the five people and this time we'll take a little bit of literary license and say that the only way that you could save those five people is to push a large individual -- you can see him there hanging over the edge -- off of the foot bridge and he will land on the track and he will be killed by the trolley but it will save the five people. put aside the fact couldn't you jump yourself, will the guy be able to stop the trolley and suspend disbelief for a moment if you will, even without suspension of disbelief most people will say it's not ok to do that so there is the interesting philosophical question and tlrs the corresponding set of neurological questions. the philosophical question is why should this case be different? the philosophical question is why do we have different intuitions about these cases, why do most people say it is ok here and not here when in both

cases one life for five, death by trolley, woos the difference? so the initial work that was done -- what's the difference? the initial work was done with brain imaging but the strongest evidence that comes from this competing systems idea comes from the study of modern-day patients who have similar damage to phineas gage, gage, the guy wogot the spike through his head, these patients have damage to the brain in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex which seems to be very important for integrating emotional signals into decision making so the theory goes something like this. something about that case where you're pushing that guy off the foot bridge in this up-close and personal way using him as a trolley stopper so to speak triggers an emotional response that makes us say, "no. i see that there is a rationale for doing this but that just seems wrong." whereas in the other case it doesn't have the same element and we're willing to treat this more like an accountant and say, "one life, five lives, that seems a reasonable thing to do." if that psychological theory is

right then we might expect patients like phineas gage to make a very different kind of decision. those patients with that emotion-related damage, because of the damage they don't have the same kinds of emotional signals as other people they might focus more like an accountant. five lives for one? that sounds good. five lives for one? sure, use the guy as the trolley stopper. when you give these patients these dilemmas they're four or five times more likely than the ordinary people to say push the guy off the foot bridge for the greater good. there are different kinds of moralities that are embedded in different systems in the brain. you've got in the one hand in this case an emotional system that's saying "don't do it," like an alarm bell going off" and there is another system that says, "we want to save the most lives, five for one, that sounds like a good deal" in ordinary people they compete and in patients the two systems come apart. one is knocked out while the other is still intact. one way to think about this is

to think the mind as being like a camera. it has automatic settings like you can use it to take a point and shoot landscape or portrait or put the camera in manual mode and the research program that tony referred to known as the euristics and biases program shows how we have these decision making rules like the camera that do a good job most of the time but they're not flexible. you put in a different situation and they misfire. what's going on in a lot of these cases, the kind that ray described, i think, is that there is an automatic system that's applying a heuristic that's good but at the margin can get us into trouble. i would argue this is contentious, you see it in moral decision making as well, the framework is common in a lot of the brain regions that are involved in these kind of economic decision making such as the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

are el salvador in decision making and seem to play a similar role. >> is there any study in people capable of doing horrendous deeds, not having a difficulty pushing people over the bridge? >> there has been a lot of research on psychopathy which indicates that it is primarily an emotional disorder, that the two defining features of psychopaths are their bad behavior, the antisocial things they do and the lack of empathy for other people and corresponding lack of remorse for the bad things that they do, and so some people have actually started using these kinds of moral dilemmas with psychopaths, and one of these studies has shown that with people -- this is a community sample -- but when people with psychopathic tendencies respond to these dilemas, particularly to the footbridge case where you are harming somebody in a direct kind of way they exhibit decreased activity in the amygdala, which as ric said is one of the reasons that orchestrates emotion more

widely. i'm currently working on a study with someone named kent keeler at the university of mexico who drives this mobile m.r.i. machine around to different prisons in new mexico and scans the brains of incarcerated individuals, many of them psychopaths, so we're just beginning to look at a cohort of full-blooded psychopaths and to see if we can use moral reasoning as a way to better understand the mind of the psychopath and better use psychopaths to better understand moral reasoning. there is some traction but we're just in the early days. >> charlie: even in the early days, what are you learning? are there indications of what you are going to learn? >> what i'm hoping -- hoping -- i'm a dispassionate scientist, of course, but wamy theory would predict is -- is that -- wamy theory would predict is that these psychopaths would be in a more subtle way be like patients like phineas gage, they don't have the emotional response that

says that feels wrong and they're more likely utilitarian, go with the numbers, one life for five but we also know that psychopaths are are much trickier than patients with the ventromedial prefrontal damage. they work hard to blend in. so to catch them in the act we're going to have to use subtle tricks. we may have to, as bill suggested not only at what they do but how quickly they do it, so that's one of the things we're looking at and kent is looking at their genes. there is a whole lot going on. but i think that the story may turn out that they're a kind of more subtle version of the phineas gage type, for different reasons. >> the two issues that arise that is curious to have people address, one is neuroscience is beginning to address issues that concern economists. this is what david brooks emphasized in his discussion with you is one thinks of people as being rational actors, and

what these analyses reveal is that there is a lot of irrationality, emotional aspects to it that deviate from what would be a rational decision. >> it's not necessarily an irrationally computed decision. it may be based on an irrational estimate of outcomes, an irrational estimate of uncertainties. discussed in the concept of uncertainty that ray mentioned is that you basically give an individual, it could be a bird, it could be a monkey, it could be a person, a choice between two situations, one in which the bird is guaranteed to get a reward of six nuts, if birds like nuts -- >> they do. >> your birds like nuts -- and then the other choice that the birds can make is that it can go someplace where it forage and it might get 12 nuts or no nuts. on average it will get six nuts but only on average. that's a situation in which the expected outcome, statistically, over many trials is the same. six nuts each. but the chance of getting a big reward is much higher over here and the chance of losing big is

much higher over here so the question of which of those you choose is a sort of diagnostic in some sense for the kind of personal style which you approach decisions. >> charlie: let me come back to you and say what is the most valuable thing we're learning from this? in other words, so what? >> i think several things. one is that neuroscience is capable of giving us insights into phenomena that we would not think would be in the corpus of neuroscience like morality and economic decision-making. >> charlie: this is bridging humanity and science. >> it's bridging the two things and this is the beginning. we now have some methodologies. we have some strategies. we have some beginning insight. this is just opening up. so i think there is going to make a major impact on how people make decisions. about how we influence people to make appropriate decisions. and also, for making new kinds of diagnoses and new kinds of therapeutics. for example, if we could diagnose kids early that had a tendency toward psychopathy because we see a malfunctioning

of the prefrontal cortex it's conceivable we might be able to develop a therapeutic process whereby some other brain region would be encouraged to function to take over those aspects of behavior. >> charlie: but how far away are we from understanding this? if we make a lot of bad decisions, horrify away from learning how to correct that issue so that we make a higher percentage of good decisions? >> gentlemen. >> i think that we can get there, but i think first of all we have to understand wait is that drives decisions. we have understand the neuromechanisms and how they actually interact with each other. i was having exactly this conversation that you raised with an economist colleague of mine at stanford recently and the guy at stanford is skeptical about the relevance of neuroscience for economics and he said "all i care is the choices that people make. i just care what happens in the end. i don't care what's going on in the brain to produce the choices. the choices are something i can measure. that's my data. that's what i work with."

and i think my counterpoint to him was "you can measure the koiss now but how are you going to predict choices in the future -- the choices now but how are you going to predict choices in the future?" the dominant model in economics now that's used to explain choice is economic rationality -- that you choose the thing that actually is the best in the long run in terms of economic outcome but we know people don't work that way. konoman and taverski whom we've talked about know we don't work that way so the question is what are the deeper underlyling principles by which decisions get made. if we can understand those we can predict behavior better. we've just come through a period in this country with disastrous economic decisions having been made and disastrous kinds of decisions being made at the level of do we regulate, do we not regulate, wakinds of instruments are wise to use, and these of deep-rooted decisions that get made in human behavior and that we need to try to understand where the decisions come from, and the rational model in the end is not going to be a very good guide. >> i think a simple example of

what neuroscience can offer citizen realization that we've had from freud and even before how important emotion is to people's behavior. and your example how sometimes emotional processes are recruited and sometimes not for moral decision making, we need a direct measure of that. if we can image people and say we recruit the amygdala under these circumstances, we don't recruit the amygdala under these circumstances, we have an independent way of evaluating under what circumstances emotional processes are recruited, and i think that's extremely important. because otherwise, we're just inferring that this is happening. this provides us a direct measurement. >> emotion is something we have a very difficult time studying in animals. this is much more tractable in humans -- one of the things that's much more tractable, and ray sort of talked about this parliament of decisions and decision-making voices and sort of the higher-level reasoning and this rambunctious, bubbly, kind of emotional substrate, and

josh mentioned emotion, and i know -- and the question is sort of is emotion something that's valuable and we should be keeping or is emotion sometimes that leads us astray in decision-making and how do you recognize one vs. the other? because sometimes emotions clearly lead us astray and utilitarian calculus would discount emotion completely and say it's a numbers game but sometimes the emotion, the ability to empathize with other people that the psychopaths lack is a good thing. how do we think about pluses and minuses of emotions? >> this is where i think that the camera analogy is very useful. if you think of the emotions as being like the automatic settings and you think of manual mode as being like reasoning, you can ask of a photographer, what's better, the automatic settings or the manual mode and the photographer will say different things are good for different circumstances. if you're in a standard kind of photographic situation, the kind that the manufacturer of your camera can anticipate, then go ahead and use your automatic landscape setting or whatever it is but if you're facing a

fundamentally new kind of photographic challenge then you are probably going to have to put your camera in manual mode, so i think that what we really need to do as a society is understand ourselves so that we can know how to use our moral brains. understand when we're dealing with the kind of situation that we have been well prepared for, either by our genes or by cultural influences or by our own experiences and when we're sort of going out on a decision-making limb. an example of going out on a decision-making limb would be dealing with something like global warming. we have no genetic experience of dealing with global warming. we have no personal experience with it. we've never gone through a trial and error experience because we're still on our first trial and for a cultural ways of honing our decision, so in trying to come up with what's a fair way to divide up the burdens of solving this problem, should we go with historical emission levels and say whatever's been in the past that's more or less fair or should we say that every human

on earth has the equal right to emitcarbon? different ways of looking at it. different countries favor looking at it one way or another and i think our intuitions about justice and fairness may not be much help and we have to put our cameras in manual mode. other times it would be crazy to think like a wonky economist, you want to think like a poet. we have to use our minds better. >> an important thing not to use site of in josh's trolley example which talks to josh's question, the difference between the two situations in the trolley example is not in the outcomes as josh said -- the guy in front of the trol segoing to die an equally horrible death, in both cases, he's anything to be run over by the trolley the difference is inure why personal involvement and how you arraignment to other people. if you want to answer bill's question in terms of the trolley problem, the emotional system is one that regulating your dealings with other humans, not so much regulates your decisions about economic outcome. >> i also think that's a rather

important -- >> it is, but i think it's important not to think of the emotional system as being monolithic. there are positive emotions and negative emotions to fractionate that and imaging can help us dissect that out and what circumstances they're appropriately recruited, in what circumstances they're not. >> emotions are useful depending upon the context. if you have to make a very fast decision, emotions have, we assume, proved very, very helpful through evolution and sometimes you only can make a decision with the help of emotion. falling in love. deciding to marry somebody. often requires the vacillation of the logical mind to be trumped by the passion of love. emotions have their place and a lot of our richest experience comes through emotions. one other comment on the trolley example. one of the situations is a

propositional situation. you have never actually had direct experience. the other one where you push the guy is much more one where you have had experience and we don't like pushing people. we're told not to do it, and if we've done it we've got a blow on the nose from the person we've done it to, so i think those things come into it -- the difference between experience and how we -- the count the calculus of experience vs. the calculus of the more abstract propositional world tathat we confront. >> tony and eric are pushy guys. >> you didn't give up the choice of pushing each other. i have a question which i know is one that eric thinks about a lot which i think bears on this and i would like to hear what these guys have to say about it. people can be induced by social situations to make reprehensible decisions, decisions that we perceive objectively to be reprehensible and we can make a long list of hideous things that people have done to other people and one assumes that the circumstances in which the decisions were made to make take

the actions were taken those decisions were couple puted on the base of a -- on the basis a brain system and we care about to know how brain systems that lead to such outcomes can be shaped by experience, shaped by environment and how they can be regulated. >> it's the framing problem. how could a civilized society like the german societies of the 1920's become hitler-dominated, destroying jews and gypsies in the 1930's and 1940's? and i think the answer to that is the capability for evil is built into our genome. that most people are, under certain circumstances, capable of doing it. there are exceptions. you, obviously -- >> you, of course, sir. >> the framing of the question. how you structure society is absolutely essential to this. if you say the jews are vermin in society, they're parasites. they're destroying german culture. they're subhuman. you have a completely different attitude than saying "we're all

equals." >> i wonder if that's the only answer. >> it's not the only answer but it's certainly part of the answer. there are additional answers. there are opportunistic answers. if you get rid of half the population of the faculty becausitary jewish lots of people can move up. the fact is there is a lot of flexibility involved in human behavior. >> neuroscience of decision making is pressing for the society. josh and i have been involved the last few years in a neuroscience and law project sponsored by the macarthur foundation because neuroscience evidence is starting more and more to be increased -- being introduced into court situations can defense attorneys showing brain scans and saying, "look, my client's brain is different from normal brains. how can my client be held responsible for his action when he's got a different brain from the rest of us?" federal judges are looking at psychologists and neurosciences and saying what do we do with this stuff? what are the reliability of these data and things. and if we come to think that decision-making has very

mechanistic, causal sequestion lae that lead to different decisions, can people be held responsible for decisions? can we be held financial for our decision or are we merely dancing to the tunes of atoms and molecules in our brains? i don't think that's the case but it's an argument that can be made and i think that's what we decide about this and what a mature neuroscience has to say about this is going to impact our social system. >> i think that's a very profound insight. if for example you brought a patient into the courtroom and you showed that he had lost his orbitofrontal cortex, there is no question you would feel differently about his consciously doing something under his own control than if he had a normal brain. >> i actually was asked -- a journalist called ask asked me a question about this. one of the things we know is that the frontal cortex is the last part the brain to be fully mature so in adolescence the front of the brain is the last to be fully mature so this journalist asked do you believe that because the frontal cortex

develops late that teenagers should not be responsible for their actions because they have improperly developed frontal cortex? to which my response was are you out of your mind? they're teenagers. what do you need to know about the frontal cortex? the discourse has moved from the domain that we all understand which is that adolescents do adolescent things into this sort of dressed-up version of neuroscience which i think does not serve our society or our community well. >> charlie: this has been exciting to me, "the deciding brain" and the idea of the kinds of brains that we talk about at this table and all the decisions that are made, for example, here, an interesting thing, i had a conversation at this table before we taped this program with president carter, former president carter and the decision he made as to what to do about the hostages. and what process of decision making might have led him to make a different decision. >> profound.

affected his whole presidency. >> charlie: it affected his presidency. it would have affected lives. what would be the decision you make about the response if in fact you said to the iranians at that time we're going to do it this you don't do this, we're going to do this twice, the enormous consequences and just beginning to understand that, is it possible that we could make smarter decisions? >> it's like the trolley problem. >> it's absolutely like the trolley problem. >> going on in the hostage case, what you are saying is if we negotiate to try to save these people all the future hostages, more will be taken and they'll be in greater danger, when you say i'm not going to negotiate what you are really doing is pushing somebody in the front of the trolley in the name of the greater good so that's a beautiful example of how these toy little kinds of philosophical fruit flies that we can use in the lab can actually apply to serious issues in the wider world. >> i think what is also emerging is the time scale. you were referring to that. where neuroscience moves into decision making, it's moving into a deep body of knowledge

and it is going to be a long time before it makes the kind of impact it's capable of making. but there is a systematic and very encouraging beginning, and this is wathese people have outlined for us. >> this is the deciding brain. what will we do next month? >> charlie: >> this is the first step showing how neuroscience can have an impact in other areas of knowledge. next month we're going to consider what neuroscience can contribute to creativity. we're going to consider art and what we can contribute to understanding that. and we're going to have richard serra and chuck close, two of the most important artists of the last 50 years and try to see whether they can explain to us aspects of their creativity in addition to showing us their beautiful work. we'll continue to have a great time. thank you very much. a pleasure having you here. thank you for joining us. we'll see you next time. ♪ ♪

>> charlie: the "charlie rose brain series" is about the most exciting scientific journey of our time. understanding the brain. the series is made possible by a grant from the simons foundation. their mission is to advance the frontiers of research in the basic sciences and mathematics. funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the coca-cola company, supporting this program since 2002. >> words alone aren't enough. our job is to listen, and find ways to help workers who lost their jobs to the spill. i'm iris cross. we'll keep restoring the jobs, tourist beaches and businesses impacted by the spill. we've paid over $400 million in

claims and set up a $20 billion independently run claims fund. i was born in new orleans. my family still lives here. i'm going to be here until we make this right. >> additional funding provided by these funders. >> and by bloomberg. a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> we are pbs.

>> good evening from los angeles. first up, a conversation about the sluggish economy with former labor secretary robert reich. the best-selling author is out labor secretary robert reich. the best-selling author is out with his