How We Decide

First of all, I have to recommend the book itself, written by Jonah Lehrer I love how he explores the two general factors that affect out decision-making process: our feelings/emotions and our logic/reasoning. The book is very lightly written yet contains relevant and significant concepts, with great examples highlighting how our brain works, including scientific-based ones.

The book starts off by exploring our ‘natural/instinctive’ ways of making decisions, which is through our feelings and emotions. In fact, he showed that without emotions we will be unable to make any decisions at all, despite still having our rational being doing the evaluation of all the choices. In a way, our feelings are acting like graphs that show the general overview of the wealth of data that our sensory functions and memory collect. Imagine you have an Excel document open, with a thousand rows and columns, and you need to look for a pattern. It would be impossible to do without turning it a graph that shows the trends/properties we’re looking for. That’s similar to when we have to make decisions without having any feelings at all. We ended up looking and evaluating every single options, yet unable to see patterns.

Despite this amazing ability of our feelings to provide us a rapid glimpse into a certain situation and help us make decision, it turns out that they are easily manipulated. Some examples are framing effects and risk aversion. Therefore, we can’t only rely on our emotions to make all decisions. This is where the importance of our rational brain shows up. With our rationality, we won’t be controlled by our emotions and act simply based on impulses. We take time to evaluate and reason before making a decision, which often leads to a better decision. For example, a fireman instead of running away from an unavoidable forest fire – the instinctive thing to do – figured that he won’t be able to outrun the fire and created a patch of burnt grass by lighting an area of dry grass and lied down on it to avoid the fire. He came out surviving, whereas the rest of his company died engulf by the flames. Sometimes, resisting our natural urges is the best thing to do.
Unfortunately, a research showed that our rational brain is very limited, with most people only able to evaluate about seven properties before being overwhelmed with too much information. Hence, having more information won’t help us at all. In fact, he gave some examples that ‘knowing’ – in a sense that we are consciously aware of them – too much will make us worse decision. One of them was the role of MRI scan in diagnosing back pain. Before, doctors tend to tell patients with back pains to just have bed rest and some pain killers, however after they start using MRI scans and seeing abnormalities in the discs and spinal cortex, and started suggesting more invasive treatments. This didn’t result in better outcomes for patients; in fact, often the additional treatments weren’t necessary and can cause further complications. Several researches performed a study by showing doctors MRI scans of patients without telling them whether these patients have back problems or not, and apparently the doctors diagnosed those without back pain as having serious spinal problems whereas they are perfectly healthy in real life. Now, medical journals advise doctors against using MRI scan to diagnose patients with back pain.

As a conclusion, he illustrated our brain as an airplane cockpit: our feelings and emotions are the indicators, the autopilots, and the computers that run most of our functions, while our consciousness/reasoning is the pilot that continually monitors the situation and provide intervention as needed. In the end, there is no one best method making decision. It all depends on the situation that we are facing. However, he cautioned that we shouldn’t favor one way of thinking of another otherwise we might fall into their limitations. He suggested that the best we can do is to take into account both our emotions and reasons, allowing them to make their arguments and use the outcome as our decision.

What I like about his book:

I felt so happy when he used concepts that I have learned from my courses, such as “cognitive dissonance,” “framing effects,” that I learned from Communication and Behaviour in Organisations; “ultimatum game,” from my game theory class. I like how it reminded me of those classes and brought back concepts and ideas that I almost forget about. I love it when what I learned is connected all around, ala spiral learning. He also explored some of the concepts in more depth and providing detailed studies, such as showing the role of the different part of the brains in a particular situation.

(500) Days of Summer - What's the big deal? Part 1

Most people are aware of my 'obsession' with 500 Days of Summer, but many probably don't know the reasons behind it. This is why I love the movie:

Summer

Ok, beside being played by the amazingly adorable Zooey Deschanel, Summer is actually a very intriguing character. Unfortunately, as the movie is set from Tom's perspective, not much is directly revealed about her and in order to try to understand her, you need to look careful at the fine details put to reflect her character. First, Summer is clearly an independent free-spirit:

"You don’t believe that a woman could enjoy being free and independent?" 

She was not looking to be comforted, to be held, or to be supported by a man, as traditionally has been the case with most women (apology for stereotyping). Her actions, especially in the IKEA, karaoke and "penis" game in the park scenes, show how cheery and carefree she is, not afraid of enjoying herself, having fun and bending rules. Though the movie also revealed the other side of her:

"I just, don’t feel comfortable being anyone’s girlfriend. I don’t actually feel comfortable being anyone’s anything."

"I, like being on my own. I think relationships are messy and people’s feelings get hurt. Who needs it? We’re young, we live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world; might as well have fun while we can and, save the serious stuff for later."

These phrases gave hints that Summer is not looking for a relationship because she was afraid and feared that all it can bring is hurt. As the opening scene told us about Summer's childhood:

"Since the disintegration of her parents' marriage she'd only loved two things. The first was her long dark hair. The second was how easily she could cut it off and not feel a thing"

Summer's fear of commitment is likely caused by her childhood, where her parents' divorce might have traumatised her. We also learnt that Summer has been involved in several relationships when she was younger, yet she claimed that she has never seen "love" in any of them. "[She was]not even sure what that word means." This brings up the second point, at Summer is very fragile and has chose to protect herself by building a shell around herself.

There are other things small things that gave clues about Summer's personality. Her recreation of Magritte's Son of Man on her coffee table:

Of which, Magritte said:

At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It's something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Magritte's paiting fits perfectly with the portrayal of Summer as a much deeper character compares to what she may look or act from the outside. Ringo Starr being her favourite Beatles' member and liking him because "nobody loves Ringo Starr" show how she doesn't conform to society, in fact it even suggests that she enjoys being different and cherishes it, as evident from her unorthodox apartment decorations, featuring a frame with Voodoo dolls, flower paintings, paper cranes, and various vintage trinkets. Her choice of books, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, which she was reading before meeting her future husband, suggests some sort of associations between her and the characters from Dorian Gray. Was she reading it to reflect on Basil Hayward, as the voice of reason, Lord Henry, as the voice of all thing worldly, or on Dorian Gray himself, as the vain and confused main character who lived a double life?

Summer is definitely a real and believable character. She does not always appear cheery and happy, but shows her emotional self: when she cried after watching "The Graduates," the bedroom scene where she told Tom about her strange dreams. She also grew and developed throughout the movie. Starting off as a very shelled individual, hiding her feelings behind a wall that Tom eventually managed to bring down, until she found her 'one' and ended up marrying him. Near the end of the movie, in one of her scenes with Tom, she even admitted how "Tom was right."


To be continued....

Why congestion problem in Jakarta does not have a solution, yet.

According to recent article in Kompas, traffic in Jakarta will be in gridlock by 2011/12 instead of 2014, the previous estimation. This news is definitely not a surprise. The lack of convenient, clean, and reliable mass public transportation was cited as one of the main reasons for the rising traffic problems.Though, even its availability won't solve the problem. Here's why:

Currently, most people that are using public transports are using it not by choice, but because of their limited economic income. If they can afford buying motorcycles, then I'm sure most of them would definitely get one, and similarly, those that own motorcycles will try to purchase cars. For those that has enough income, but can't afford a car and can't bear riding motorcycles, will opt to use taxis. This means that the number of private vehicle users will only increase as the city grows, the income rises, and the price of motorcycles and cars decreases.

Now, does good mass transportation will solve congestion problems? Take for example Singapore, despite its comprehensive and clean mass transit system, congestion still occurs on the main roads, and from what I heard it's getting worse year by year, which implies that the number of private vehicles are increasing. It's only natural that as the one's wealth grows,one wants to afford more luxury (in this case a private car). Considering that, what are the odds that those that can already afford private transport actually convert to using public transport?

Therefore, no matter how good the public transportation system, congestion is unavoidable. Perhaps one way to solve it is by forcing everybody to use public transport within the central city area. However, its feasibility is very unlikely. Such system would require not only proper facilities in place, such as parking areas, comprehensive and reliable transport network, but also a change in people's habit, which is probably the hardest thing to do. A good solution must not only take this human factor into consideration, but treat it as the primary concern. How can we satisfy their need for transport, and remove their want for private means, at least in urban areas? That is the question.

A Quick Intro

This is now my third attempt at blogging routinely, and as they say "third time's a charm" right? Well, we'll see how long this phase lasted, and hopefully it'll be much longer than the previous ones. My first two attempts at blogging have always focused on my personal life, it's mostly about me, me, and me: what I have done, what I was doing, what I want to do, what I wish for. I have used them as a venue to keep a record of some part of my life, and yet I failed at it miserably. Sometimes I felt that some things are too personal to post, and at another I wanted to share my thoughts and idea to the whole wide web. This time, I want to focus more outwardly, focusing on writing things such as critiques, reviews, and maybe even some philosophical thoughts. I have no intention of being entirely objective on any of my writings, my emotions and feelings will no doubt be involved in them and the subject matters will probably be things that interest me at that point in time. I might even attempt to write about those that I'm not familiar with, basing my knowledge mostly through Wikipedia or articles that I stumbled upon. What I hope to achieve from this blog is to be able to look back one day, and see how the way I view things - my worldview- has changed as I grow up and gain more experience.

Oh, and beside this blog, I'll try to occasionally write more personal things and my baking adventure on other blogs.

We'll see how this fare.