Episode 1
Should I Choose C
INTRO
Welcome to Brain Matters, a podcast where we explore anything and everything related to the brain and learn how we can improve YOUR life. In each episode we talk with scientists, researchers and educators (professionals in the field) to better understand how neuroscience can help young people learn more effectively and take care of their mental well-being.
Episode Intro
In today’s episode, we’re exploring mental shortcuts in the brain, also known as heuristics, and how they influence the choices we make every day, from answering test questions to trusting our “gut feelings.” (what even is a gut feeling?)
Guest Intro
We’re excited to be joined by Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, an expert in educational neuroscience who studies how brain science can help us understand learning and decision-making.
Dr. Tokuhama-Espinosa, thank you so much for joining us today.
Tracy: It's really my pleasure, Vivian.
Vivian: Okay, so start us off, let's start off with gut feeling and what a gut feeling even is. How would you explain that?
Tracy: Yeah, gut feeling, that's a funny name, isn't it? It really kind of targets the area of your body, right? And this has a lot to do with Interoception, how you perceive the insides of you and how you're feeling and all the rest of that. When people talk about a gut feeling, they often times say, "Oh, yeah, I just answered it, you know it was off the top of my head, or "in my gut." And it pretty much just talks about that, you know, quick reaction that you might have to things. And I guess part of it is if you are thinking of it as just coming as a spontaneous reaction, sometimes it's because it's a habituated thing that's gone on so much, so you just react the same way. But other times, there's really heavy emotional contexts. So given the situation you're in, you can have a gut reaction or a gut feeling towards things that are triggered by emotion, or by past memories. So they have a lot of different roots to it.
Vivian: Okay. So, I can't say for everyone, but I think it's a pretty universal experience that we've all taken a test and chosen an answer simply because it felt right or made a quick decision without knowing why. So when we do that, what's going on in our brain during those moments? Or when students say they are following their gut, like, what is actually happening in our brain?
Tracy: Well, that can be answered in a whole lot of ways, depending on the individual, you know, all new learning passes through the filter of prior experience, right? And so your brain adapts to what it does most. And so if you habituated a way of reacting to things, maybe you follow through in that sense. When you're in, like a testing situation, something that's really interesting. The reason people repeat, repeat, repeat things is so they become second nature. And so basically, you can consider a gut reaction to be hyper cognition, like, basically, you're just fastporting all the rehearsed practices that you've had before, and so you reacted in that sense. But it can be for other reasons. One of you mentioned a time to test situation.. which I always just. I feel very strongly about them. because I never use them all so much, but it doesn't necessarily measure your intelligence because it measures the way you can speedily, quickly, within the time constraint, spit out an answer. But if I were to give you a team a bit more time, you probably would have a much higher quality answer, because you would be able to sift through in your own mind and decide which are the good things, the bad things, and instead of limit yourself to the, is it ABCD or E, and, you know, these limited possibilities, it would be a much better measurement of what you know, to actually have a more open ended and open timed kind of thing, but this is, I say this very sincerely because I know so many super smart students who just can't handle the timing of it, right? They know all the answers if you give them a bit more time.. But they know the content, but it's the format that we choose to measure. And so half the time what you're measuring on a time test is the ability to manage time, the other half you're measuring what they really know. And so anyways, the idea of how you react to that, if you react really quickly, oftentimes that is due to hypercognition because you have rehearsed that information so well in your brain, all you got to do is just spit it back out because it's right there, the connections are really strong. But other times, you might have a good feeling because you have been taught ways to guess correctly. Like the first thing you do, you scan the question, oh, I'm for sure it's not A, and for sure it's not D. So, if it's B or C, you start to, you know, process your own strategies faster and faster, the more rehearsal you have with it. And so sometimes you gut feeling is coming from, that process of elimination that you've habituated. So there's a lot of ways to react to, you know, what is that gut feeling. I don't know. I always thought it was hysterical that most people didn't know. Like you, you're probably a really good test taker, because you've also figured out how to do school. But beyond that, you're creative, which is that you actually can think outside of the box. You're not stuck in your box, which is great, which is why I agreed to talk to you today, because you're one of those few students who really knows how to get out of that box and not be, you know, you can do school when you have to, but you also know how to be creative. And that's really, I think, what most universities should be measuring when they decide if you go there, pass a test.
Vivian: Yeah. So then you’re saying basically that gut feeling is like a practice reflex? And then, is it?
Tracy: Well, I would say there's at least two big buckets, right? One is that it's such a rehearsed and practiced reflex. It's kind of this heuristic, this mental shortcut that you're jumping into. So in some ways, it can be their gut feeling is led by that, which has to do with repetition. How many times you've seen or done something, so that's the go to place, right? The other side of it is gut feelings are also framed a whole lot by emotions, an emotional states and, you know, this is, oh my gosh, I feel it's a lucky guess, but I'm going to go AAA here, or whatever you I say sometimes, it's based on an emotional pool. So those are very different. One's very cognitive rehearsal, the other is very much emotion driven, but they can both lead to that sensation that you have of, you know, I'm going to go with my gut on something.
Vivian: So that be like kind of specific, but then like, when we're taking a test, like feel stress, is there a way we can make our brain lean more way towards like, a more logical guess instead of like a feeling like, I'm feeling lucky I want CCCCC.
Tracy: Yeah, I think that you actually have to take the time to number one, recognize that you are being pulled in one direction or another and take the time to ask yourself why. Why am I being pulled in that direction? Is it because I'm feeling lucky or, you know, the letter C got a significance for me today? There's something, you know, not grounded in rationality. Or if you're doing that because you have seen that kind of a problem so many times that you've rehearsed it so much that you are quite sure of those answers, right? And so using heuristics are neither good nor bad, but you have to realize they exist. They're inevitable, you have them. And so you have to stop yourself every once in a while to sort of ask yourself where did that come from? Is this a heuristic that helps save me time? And I'm skipping a step here? Or is it a heuristic that causes me to have a terrible bias? Because I've just stopped thinking about the idea or thinking about that question too much. So here was the number one step in all of this is to ask your step, why are you being pulled in that direction? If you realize, oh, I've just rehearsed this so much I know it, I've got it, go for it. But if you're saying, "Oh no I'm, you know that lucky letter C or whatever it is, if something else is going, you know, do stop and question yourself, because that's usually wrong.
Vivian: Yeah. Well, if it's if I take a random guess, I always choose C, cause I saw somewhere that's like, C is the most likely to be, right out of the four, so maybe that was my personal bias as well.
Tracy: Okay, so before you do that random trace of C, also the step before that, this is learning how to guess that you first eliminate all absurd answers or things like that that are, yeah, get rid of the things that you know are wrong. Then you limit your choice, right? And then, instead of a one in four chance, you have now a two and four chance, and so you've upped your odds, but then you, you know, you should be rational in how you make a selection..
Vivian: If there's time, process of elimination first.
Tracy: Yes, exactly. And then at the end of the day, if you skipped over the ones you didn't get, I didn't have time, you didn't have time, then, at that point, C, C, C, C. You know what I mean? Because odds are. Anyways, there's a lot to that. But I hate to teach people how to scam these tests, but that's exactly what happens a lot and then overseas programs. We see that we get some international students who get perfect SAT scores, you know, like how did that happen? Well, you can learn to guess. You learn to guess. It doesn't mean you know stuff. In fact, I've had those students show up in my classroom, and they cannot speak and articulate a sentence, but they could ace their SATs. So it's not a goodmit, it's not a terrific measure. It's one input, it's a good amount of information to have, but it definitely should not determine whether or not you get into a university or not. My strong opinion.
Vivian: I feel like learning how to guess courses would be awesome, but maybe not that ethical.
Tracy: Well, I mean, it's another tool, and that's what, you know, you're up against people who know how to guess. I don't think that should be your goal, your goal should be to know content and never have to worry. I mean, no matter what tests come up, you'd be able to do well, just because you know the information, not because you know the strategy of how to get around the testing structure. So, yeah, I'm all for true learning.
Vivian: Yes, yes. That's the goal, right? But, um, so going back to what we were saying before about heuristics, could you maybe like define heuristics like what is heuristics, maybe for a younger audience doesn't know and for myself?
Tracy: So heuristics are a simple definition is that they're mental shortcuts. What happens is when you are exposed to new information or new situation or something happens in your life, or you see a new question on a test or whatever. The first thing your brain does is make a decision if it's going to go heavy cognitive load and use energy or low cognitive load and use heuristics. Because your brain always wants to save energy. It's the most, it's the energy hungry organ of your whole body. It uses more energy about 20% of all the caloric intake you have goes to your brain. So your brain is always burning up so much energy. So when it sees the world stuff, questions, the first thing it says is, okay, can I save some energy here? Do I already know something about this?" And if it already knows something, it leans into the heuristics, which saves it a lot of energy. If it decides, "Oh, I'm gonna really invest in this," it actually is the opposite. You spend a lot of metabolistic energy, you spend a lot of energy trying to dig into memory and pay attention so that you can actually learn that thing or pull from your memory to have that information. So, heuristics save us energy, which is why your brain typically, the go to place is to use heuristics. But if you really want to do well, you actually have to ignore your heuristics, your natural tendency to go low energy, and decide, okay, I'm gonna invest some more energy into this, and actually learn something, or actually dig and retrieve what do I already know about this? And so because it's a higher energy cost, your brain typically leans into using heuristics, which is a good thing. It saves you energy. Like, if you know how to drive a car, Vivian?
Vivian: I do.
Tracy: Do you remember how hard it was when you first started?
Vivian: I was like, how do our parents do this? And I'm just like, there's so much to think about. Everyone makes it look so easy. But I'm like, struggling so much at parallel parking, and I'm just like, how do people just know this?
Tracy: So that's exactly it. Use that as an example.. Your brain uses so much energy to try to figure out all these things and understand the mirrors and understand how to pay attention, watching something and also listening for stuff and all this stuff happening at the same time. And you invested a ton of energy, but now, backing in out of the driveway is not a problem. Now you've done it 100 times, and it's lower cognitive load, right? Lower energy. Because your brain decides when you get in the car, I'm not going to start from scratch, I'm gonna use what I already know, prior knowledge, and it leans into all those heuristics, all those shortcuts, and you just drive, right? So, heuristics are great. It's helpful, it's beneficial not to have to think about everything all the time. However, they're dangerous, as well. Because if all you do is use heuristics, you stop having better judgment about things. You don't even realize you have so many biases that are going on because you've just done things the way you've always done them. So the idea is that heuristics can be beneficial, but they can lead to bias, and that can be dangerous.
Vivian: So the next time, you have a gut feeling, don’t just ignore or blindly trust it, pause and ask, is this an experience helping me or it is a shortcut I need to question, and next time, we’ll look at another type of shortcut. What happen when offload thinking technology from scrolling to Chatgpt. See you next time on Brainmatters.