JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich. 

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today's program is about choice, how we choose, why and what is choice.

ROBERT: And I'm going to choose—I'm actually going to dream of the possibility one day of walking into a store and instead of being obsessed and turned on by the beauty of an object or by the promise of an object, the price, or the status that would be conferred upon me if I choose, or not conferred upon me. All those messy emotions. What would happen if I could be like Spock?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Star Trek: I am half-Vulcanian. Vulcanians do not speculate. I speak from pure logic.]

ANTOINE BECHARA: Hello?

JAD: Hi.

ROBERT: Hi.

ANTOINE BECHARA: Hi, Jad and Robert.

JAD: We actually put the Spock question to neurologist Dr. Antoine Bechara, who works at the University of Southern California.

ROBERT: If I could say abracadabra and go all logic, would I be a happy chooser?

ANTOINE BECHARA: I would say no. Based on our work with neurological patients ...

ROBERT: Then he told us about a patient he once had. He's changed the name of the patient. He was—we'll call him Elliot.

JAD: Could you—can you describe him? What was he like?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Well, he's about five feet ten. You know, 170 pounds, I would say. He's at that kind of—he looks very normal, like a normal person.

JONAH LEHRER: He—he was an accountant.

JAD: That's Jonah Lehrer again.

JONAH LEHRER: For a large corporation.

ANTOINE BECHARA: A successful accountant.

JONAH LEHRER: Upper management, active in his local church.

JAD: And he was married at the time?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Yes. Very conservative family. Very religious.

JONAH LEHRER: House in the suburbs.

ANTOINE BECHARA: Good money saving.

JONAH LEHRER: Smart, successful man. Kind of the American dream.

ANTOINE BECHARA: And then, you know, the tumor happened.

JAD: This was in 1982. Doctors discovered a small knot in the front of Elliot's head.

JONAH LEHRER: In a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex.

JAD: And where's that?

JONAH LEHRER: That's just behind the eyes.

JAD: Did the doctors remove the tumor?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Yeah, he had the surgery. The tumor was removed.

JAD: And then the doctors sent him home.

JONAH LEHRER: Well, at first glance, it seems like a tremendous success. No language impairment. No movement disorders. He still scores 97th percentile on the intelligence test. He's—he's—he seems fine. Like good old Elliott.

ROBERT: Does good old Elliot go back to the good old job?

JONAH LEHRER: He—he starts going back to the good old job, the good old family.

JAD: And that's when things got really weird.

JONAH LEHRER: At first, it's just subtle things, these very minor decisions.

JAD: That he suddenly couldn't make. Like he'd be at the office, he'd want to sign a contract, and he'd have in front of him a blue pen and a black pen. And he would think, Well, the type on this contract is black, so maybe I should use a blue pen.

JONAH LEHRER: Maybe a blue pen sticks out more. On the other hand, maybe it sticks out too much and will become too distracting.

JAD: Then again ...

JONAH LEHRER: Black pen is lower on ink. So you want to save that for later.

JAD: This would go on and on, says Jonah.

JONAH LEHRER: For a half an hour.

ROBERT: And if it takes him a half an hour to decide which pen to choose, imagine Elliot in the cereal aisle in the grocery store.

JONAH LEHRER: I mean, the cereal is particularly tough because there—you know, there must be 200 varieties of cereal.

ROBERT: This is a sugary cereal. This is a not sugary cereal.

JONAH LEHRER: Standing there, I think about, you know, what would I prefer tomorrow?

ROBERT: The one with extra protein ...

JONAH LEHRER: I've got these other cereals at home. Are they also honey nut themed? Do I want something to break up the honey nut monotony? Is there one that's on sale that is a better deal?

JAD: With Elliot ...

ANTOINE BECHARA: It will take forever to decide.

JAD: According to Dr. Bechara, he would just keep on analyzing.

ANTOINE BECHARA: Analyzing ...

JONAH LEHRER: Well, this one's 14 ounces.

ANTOINE BECHARA: ... analyzing ... 

JONAH LEHRER: 15 ounces, but they're the same price.

ANTOINE BECHARA: ... analyzing.

JONAH LEHRER: Are they also honey ...

ANTOINE BECHARA: Analyzing.

JONAH LEHRER: All day long.

JAD: The question was what exactly had happened to Elliott to make him that way? Like, what exactly did that tumor do? And the breakthrough came when Elliott went to see a neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio immediately noticed something, even though Elliott was perfectly thoughtful, perfectly articulate ...

JONAH LEHRER: Always controlled, always relaxed.

JAD: ... when he spoke, he seemed kind of numb.

JONAH LEHRER: No sign of anger or rage or self-pity.

JAD: No feeling at all. So Damasio had an idea. He put Elliott in a chair, hooked him up to all these measuring devices, and then showed Elliott a series of really charged pictures.

JONAH LEHRER: A severed foot, a naked woman, a house on fire. Pictures that in normal people trigger an automatic emotional response. You can't help it, but your blood pressure increases. Your pulse increases, your hands start to sweat. 

JAD: But with Elliott ...

JONAH LEHRER: These pictures triggered nothing.

JAD: And that's when it became clear what had happened to Elliott. What his tumor had really done was cut him off from his emotional mind. He'd become, in effect ...

JONAH LEHRER: Some kind of, like, Spock-like Vulcan. The conventional theory would be that a person without emotions would be perfectly rational. That emotions somehow interfered with rationality, that they got in the way. Yet here was this guy who couldn't experience emotions, and he was pathologically indecisive.

ROBERT: So then the answer to my question, my first question, wouldn't we all be better off if we could be completely rational? You now have the answer. It's no. When you've got all these options to consider and they're more or less the same, the only way to wheedle your way to a choice is to stop thinking and go with—go with the feeling. 

ANTOINE BECHARA: Right.

ROBERT: And so the—the logic of yes, no, yes, no, yes, o leaves you nowhere, but the feelings of yes! No! yes! No! That does leave you somewhere.

ANTOINE BECHARA: That's right.

ROBERT: Feeling, says Antoine Bechara. That's the key. Without feeling, you're stuck.

JAD: So what—what ended up happening to Elliot?

ANTOINE BECHARA: Ended up in a divorce, ended up losing his job, losing all his savings.

JONAH LEHRER: He got involved with a con artist. He had to move back in with his parents. Elliot was stuck. His—his—his life fell apart.

ROBERT: Which makes you kind of re-evaluate the Dr. Spock advantage, so-called, because if we really were keeping company with a flock of Spocks and we brought them to the grocery store, there they'd be, 55 Spocks, staring at the Cheerios, staring at the Honey-Comb, staring at the Cheerios ...

JAD: Not to mention that they're divorced and broke.

ROBERT: So I mean, obviously, we have some advantage over these Vulcans because we have these feelings that can push us to a solution.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: But what—what I still don't get is: Is it just the roar of feeling that does it? Or is there something about having a feeling that's more subtle than that? There is some—is there some—what is the power of the feeling?

JAD: That's an interesting question. Let me—let me—let me get—let me walk this story in from a writer, Steven Johnson. He's written a whole bunch of books, Emergence, Mind Wide Open.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Cool.

JAD: And he tells this story that ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: Can we press record?

JAD: ... really gets at what you're asking.

STEVEN JOHNSON: My wife and I had moved into this new, wonderful apartment that overlooks the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. It had this vast window. It was one kind of window in this room, but it was huge. And we would sit there and stare out at the river all times a day. And at one point, the first summer we were there, the storms started to come in and they would kind of build up over Jersey and come rolling in and we thought, Oh, this is great. We can look at the whitecaps on and see the lightning over Jersey City and all this stuff. And one late June day, we're sitting out there in our apartment. We can see the sky is getting darker and darker, and we immediately say to each other "Wow, this is gonna be a great show!" So we both go over to the window and we were standing at the window, my wife literally with her hands pressed against the glass. And I'm standing right next to it, just to the side of it, kind of looking out and the storm starts really kicking up. There's a lot of lightning and you can see the window actually kind of flex just a tiny little bit, which ...

JAD: So you noticed this.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Yeah, we noticed that there was a little bit of giving a window that says it has to have a little bit of give, but otherwise it's not stable. So we could tell it was really—it was really windy. And—and there are a couple of pretty powerful gusts. And then all of a sudden there's this very strange, sharp kind of clicking sound. My wife instantly jumps back from the window, jumps back, you know, kind of four or five feet and says, "What was that?" I say, being the incredibly perceptive person that I am, I say, "I'm pretty sure it was the study door slamming with the wind around the corner in the other part of the apartment." So she goes back around the corner to check on whether it was, in fact, the study door slamming. And at that moment, as I'm standing two inches from the frame in the window, the entire thing blows in. It makes an insane noise, it shatters glass.

JAD: Whoa!

STEVEN JOHNSON: And all of a sudden there's a, you know, 60 mile an hour storm like blowing through our apartment. So we both run into the bathroom and close the door. And all of a sudden, you know, I suddenly think, like, "Oh, my God, you were standing in front of that window three seconds before. If—if I hadn't stupidly told you that I thought that clicking sound was the door slamming that thing would have landed on you." I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her.

JAD: Okay. So that—that happened. His wife, by the way, was fine.

ROBERT: Good.

JAD: They installed a new window. They cleaned up the apartment.

ROBERT: They did, because I am covered with imaginary glass. I mean, our sound effects are so unbelievably real. [laughs]

JAD: Thank you very much. But what's illuminating and what gets at the question you asked? ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: Is actually what happened next. It's the postscript to that event.

STEVEN JOHNSON: For literally years, every time I heard the sound of wind blowing through a window in that apartment and really pretty much anywhere else, I had an involuntary fear reflex.

JAD: The sound of any wind, or was it a specific kind of wind sound?

STEVEN JOHNSON: It was the sound of wind associated with the window. So, you know, it's the "whoosh" you know, I would go to my parents house who live on the ground floor in a house in suburban Washington. And I would just hear wind kind of going through the window there. And I would think something's not right.

JAD: And this was not a rational feeling?

STEVEN JOHNSON:  It was certainly not a rational thought. I could look empirically and say, it's 30 miles an hour, this wind, the window is clearly not gonna blow in. It's not that big a window, and I'm standing nowhere near it.

JAD: But you still somehow couldn't shake the dread?

STEVEN JOHNSON: I couldn't get rid of that feeling. And it's one of those moments where you really—you really ask yourself, I think, you know, "Who's in charge?" [laughs] You know who's driving this ship, you know, because some part of me is looking at this situation empirically and saying rationally, "This window is no threat to me."

JAD: Right.

STEVEN JOHNSON: It's not gonna blow in. And yet some other part of me is unable to shake this emotional state of—of dread and fear and alertness and threat.

JAD: All right. Now to get back to your question, Robert, where do feelings come from?

ROBERT: Yeah, why do I say yes to Wheat Chex, with a—with power?

JAD: Right. Well, consider the story we just heard from the perspective of Steven Johnson's brain.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: So what a brain wants to do most of all is keep the organism safe. Right?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And it does that by looking for patterns like, here's an explosion. Wife almost died.

STEVEN JOHNSON: I think it's entirely possible that it would have killed her.

JAD: In that moment, brain soaks it all in. It takes kind of a snapshot, like, what have we got here?

STEVEN JOHNSON: Wind. Window. Glass. Shock.

JAD: So that later, wind blows, the brain thinks, "Wait a second."

STEVEN JOHNSON: Wind. Window. Glass.

JAD: "We've seen this before. Warn the organism."

STEVEN JOHNSON: Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. 

JAD: My point is that feeling of dread ...

STEVEN JOHNSON: Dread and fear and alertness and threat.

JAD: That's just an alarm signal. The brain is just trying to help Steve make the right decision.

ROBERT: Huh?

JAD: Okay. Now to the cereal aisle.

CHILD: I got Cheerios at home!

JAD: There you are, you're looking at all the boxes.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Cheerios. Captain Crunch.

JAD: And as your eyes fall on the Rice Krispie box.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Rice Krispies, Rice Krispies.

JAD: Just like Steve Johnson with the wind, somewhere way deep down your brain is calling up all the experiences you've ever had with Rice Krispies. The good Rice Krispie experiences, the bad ones. Maybe in college you got dumped by that girl who likes Rice Krispie treats. I don't know.

ROBERT: I remember her.

JAD: Thousands of little memory fragments down there roil about ...

ROBERT: A lot of information.

JAD: Too much! So what ends up happening is that it all gets summed somehow in your subconscious, and then it bubbles up as a feeling.

STEVEN JOHNSON: Rice Krispies. All right.

JAD: So one way to look at a gut feeling is that it's a kind of shorthand average of all of this past wisdom.

ROBERT: So you have this tremendous sturm und drang of feelings inside.

JAD: Sturm und what? Ooh, that's a nice ...

ROBERT: That's German. I can do a little German.

JAD: That's very nice.

ROBERT: But there is, say scientists, one feeling that humans have that seems to trump all the others, and that is the feeling of loss. People hate to lose.

JAD: You can actually put a number on it, how much they hate to lose versus winning.

ROBERT: And it's a really cool experiment that was done. It's been done everywhere, but our experiment will be done by National Public Radio's wonderful reporter Mike Pesca.

MIKE PESCA: Are you a bit of a gambler, or would you rather just keep your money and not risk it?

MAN 1: I mean, I wouldn't mind risking a few dollars, but I just don't want to go overboard, you know?

MIKE PESCA: Would you say you're a—you're a gambling woman? Do you like gambling?

WOMAN 1: No, I don't.

WOMAN 2: I don't really gamble.

MAN 2: I'm very cautious and finicky, whether it's eating or taking chances.

WOMAN 3: Yeah, the risk of losing something isn't worth the gambling. I mean, I guess ...

WOMAN 2: I wouldn't take a risk. Let's put it that way.

MIKE PESCA: If we were to play heads or tails. Would you want to do it? If you won, you won a dollar. But if I won, I won a dollar?

MAN 4: Probably not. No, no, no, thanks.

MIKE PESCA: If you knew the game was on the up and up and I were to flip a coin and I said, "Oh, look, I'll pay you, you know, $1.25 if you win. You only have to pay a dollar."

MAN: 5: No, I ain't doing it with you.

WOMAN 2: No.

WOMAN 4: I don't know. That just doesn't seem worth it.

MIKE PESCA: If I said, Look, I'll give you $1.50 and you only have to put up a dollar. Would you do it then?

MAN 5: No.

WOMAN 2: Not really. $0.50 is not worth ...

MIKE PESCA: What if I offered you $1.75 if you want?

MAN 5: That's a possibility ...

MAN 6: Maybe ...

WOMAN 4: I would do that. I would do that.

MAN 7: Yes, sure.

JAD: Wow, so everyone seems to converge around two bucks? Two to one?

MIKE PESCA: Yes.

JAD: So that means that, like, loss is twice is painful.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, you could say loss hurts twice as much as gain feels good.

JAD: Why do you think that is?

MIKE PESCA: It must have something to do with,you know, when we were all running away from lions on the savannah.

JAD:Yeah, it always seems to come back to that, doesn't it?

MIKE PESCA: I guess a wildebeest in the brush is worth a lion on the heels or something.

JAD: I don't know what that means, but were there any people that you talked to who went way past two to one?

MIKE PESCA: Sure.

MIKE PESCA: Okay. A hundred to one.

MAN: No.

MIKE PESCA: Come on. You're crazy. A hundred to one on a coin flip.

MAN: A hundred to one. No, no. I'm just not a gambler.

MIKE PESCA: Is this a religious thing?

MAN: Nope. I'm just not a gambler.

JAD: So here's the question. Let's get us to our next thing. Well, given that human beings hate to lose, what do you do if your entire business is getting people to lose money?

ROBERT: You're talking about casinos, are you not?

JAD: Indeed I am!

ROBERT: We're going to Las Vegas, are we?

JAD: Atlantic City.

ROBERT: Atlantic City then? All right.

JAD: Now normally what a casino will do, they will try to distract you with, you know, fountains of jellybeans and, you know ...

ROBERT: Greek statues that move.

JAD: But there is one casino in particular called Harrah's, it's a chain, that doesn't do any of that.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, they offer slots and they offer blackjack, but there's no exploding volcano. There's no Picasso on the wall.

JAD: And yet, according to Mike ...

MIKE PESCA: Harrah's jumps out at you.

JAD: They are the success story in the casino biz.

MIKE PESCA: And Gary Loveman has a lot to do with that.

GARY LOVEMAN: Yeah, any minute you're not drunk or depressed, I'd like you in the casino.

MIKE PESCA: He's the CEO of Harrah's Casinos, and he's developed a really brilliant technique for slaying the beast that is loss aversion.

GARY LOVEMAN: That's one way to put it.

JAD: What's his technique?

MIKE PESCA: Loyalty cards.

ROBERT: What's a loyalty card? What does that mean?

JAD: Well, basically, I mean, you know how back in the day if you wanted to play the slots you just stuck a quarter in?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Can't do it anymore.

MIKE PESCA: Right. You're like, I'd like to—I'd, like, throw a quarter in the one-armed bandit. It turns out there are no quarters. Okay, I'll slide a dollar bill in. Turns out before you have to do it, you have to sign up for a card. Well, why would I want to sign up for a card? Well, A) you have to, but B) the first time you play we'll give you a couple extra dollars. Everyone wants to sign up for that card. It's free money.

JAD: Now, just to be clear, at Harrah's, it's actually not obligatory to sign up for this card, but most people do get the rewards. And so there you are. You've got this little loyalty thing and you're sticking it in every slot or machine that you play and that offers them certain—well, they've got this new pilot program where they basically watch every move you make. Check it out.

MIKE PESCA: Okay. Let's say you're playing the slots.

JAD: Okay.

MIKE PESCA: You stick your card in the slot machine.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: All right, my card is in.]

MIKE PESCA: At that very moment ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: Let's try this.]

MIKE PESCA: The information is transmitted downstairs. In the case of this casino we were at, it goes downstairs deep in the bowels of the casino. There's a dispatcher sitting there in front of a monitor. This computer sees that you've put your card into slot machine number 42 and the computer begins taking notes. Every game that you play, they're logging, adding, dividing, graphing, whatever. It's able to crunch those numbers. And over many visits, the casino begins to know you. They know your game is slots.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: Come on.]

MIKE PESCA: They know you like to play for an average of six hours, and they know that generally you have a limit, say $89.

JAD: Wow. They can know that I usually leave after losing 89 bucks?

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. And they know on this particular visit you're not doing so well.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Player: Why didn't I win?] 

MIKE PESCA: You've lost more than you're winning. In fact, you've lost 72 bucks, which is really close to your personal limit.

JAD: And this is a crucial moment. You're starting to get that sinking feeling. You might just pack it in.

ROBERT: I walk out of the casino.

JAD: Yes, and the casino does want you to do that.

MIKE PESCA: They want to keep you there. So ...

JAD: As your losses are increasing from 72 to 77 to 85, and you're getting closer and closer to that point ...

MIKE PESCA: In a back room, there's a computer going off, the dispatcher is seeing it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Julia, 3703.]

MIKE PESCA: The dispatcher knows to call the slot attendant up on the floor.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, dispatcher: Tango, Four, Willie I have a DCL at GOL 1401 for Karen Massa.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant in over radio: Copy that, Tango Four ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant in room: ... Willie, DCL one for Karen Massa.]

MIKE PESCA: The slot attendant walks out, taps you on the shoulder ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: Hello, how you doing, ma'am? Miss Karen Massa?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Karen Massa: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: Everything going okay for you today?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Karen Massa: I'm losing.]

GARY LOVEMAN: And of course, we know that's the case because our systems allow us to monitor that.

MIKE PESCA: And so the attendant offers her something you might like.

GARY LOVEMAN: A visit to the steakhouse. A visit to our coffee shop.

MIKE PESCA: They could offer you tickets to a show. Celine Dion's playing the big room.

JAD: Ooh!

MIKE PESCA: Or, they could just offer cold, hard cash.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: You won some money today, just by playing with your card, your lucky reward card.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Karen Massa: Oh really?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Slot Attendant: Yes, I got $15, DCL 1 for you. Will you accept it?]

MIKE PESCA: And all of a sudden, you're happy that you want 15 bucks. You're not fixated on the fact that you've lost $72. So you come back again and again and again.

CASINO PLAYER 1: I think it's great. It's something to do.

CASINO PLAYER 2: I'm always over.

CASINO PLAYER 3: I lose $300 all the time. Good thing our boys don't know how much. [laughs]

JAD: Now here is the amazing part.

MIKE PESCA: For all the different thousands of people who come through the doors of Harrah's casinos, they could figure out their own individual pain points.

JAD: So you're telling me that if you walk into a casino, I walk in right after you, Robert Krulwich, right after us ...

MIKE PESCA: Yeah. 

JAD: And we do that enough times. After a while, they can know that you like to gamble until you're about $700 down, me I'd usually leave around 11 bucks.

MIKE PESCA: And moneybags Krulwich over there ...

JAD: Moneybags Krulwich usually holds out until he's four grand in the hole. And they can know that about each of us?

MIKE PESCA: Yeah, they can.

JAD: What—what do you think about this? It strikes you as a good business proposition, or does it strike you as a creepy example of Big Brother-ism?

MIKE PESCA: Obviously this works out well for Harrah's, so does it work out well for me, you and Robert Krulwich? I think it does.

JAD: What do you mean?

MIKE PESCA: Well, they can't ever change the odds. So when we go into a casino by state law, they'll never be able to change the odds of the game. All that Harrah's can do is kind of manage the feeling that we get.

JAD: Hmm.

GARY LOVEMAN: They leave a lot happier than if they had simply had a bad gaming experience, put their wallet back in their pocket and gone home unhappy.

MIKE PESCA: And everything about going to the—to a casino is a poor decision, an irrational decision. And if there was a way they can make me walking out of there feeling like a million bucks when I spent 2 million, well, then I say more power to them.

GARY LOVEMAN: And I would add, of course, that almost any business could try something similar, assuming they had appealing sorts of things to do for customers that had bad experiences.

JAD: What's your pain point, by the way?

MIKE PESCA: You know what it is? If I'm down 300 bucks, I'm really pissed off. I'm not gonna get there.

JAD: Yeah.

MIKE PESCA: There's only one thing that would keep me at the table.

JAD: What's that?

MIKE PESCA: Celine Dion.

JAD: [laughs]

MIKE PESCA: Not—not tickets to her concert, if she was actually in the game. She's a terrible poker player, what we call dead money.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Celine Dion: [singing] All by myself!]

JAD: Thanks, Mike.

MIKE PESCA: Yeah.

ROBERT: We'll be back in a moment.

JAD: Hey, by the way, Mike works at NPR News. Thank you to them for letting us borrow them.

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