Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain

Any self-reflective person understands that attention and concentration are limited resources. It's as if some chemical is metabolized when we engage in focused concentration and eventually this chemcial gets used up requiring a break--or sleep--before we can continue. But according to this fascinating Scientific American article, research suggests that making choices also appears to deplete executive resources.

These experimental insights suggest that the brain works like a muscle: when depleted, it becomes less effective. Furthermore, we should take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn't try to make a major decision. These deleterious carryover effects from a tired brain may have a strong shaping effect on our lives.

Helps explain why shopping for clothes can leave you feeling so mentally drained, why longer meetings accomplish less, and what leads us to procrastinate imporatant work by indulging in frivolous entertainment.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making

the effects of expectations

Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we react to events, or how we respond to medication. But in recent years, scientists have been intensively studying how expectations shape our direct experience of the world, what we taste, feel, and hear. The findings have been surprising - did you know that generic drugs can be less effective merely because they cost less? - and it's now becoming clear just how pervasive the effects of expectation are.

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Although much of this research has been done by scientists interested in marketing and consumer decisions, the work has broad implications. People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

Read the article here