The Neurons of Recovery

One of the cornerstones of many addiction treatment programs is what’s called “moral inventory.” Rather than just white-knuckling it through day after miserable day without drugs or alcohol, recovering addicts and alcoholics are taught to honestly and rigorously monitor their daily thoughts and behavior and relationships, and when they do something wrong to promptly set things right. The idea is that personal dishonesty is somehow related to destructive habits, and that authenticity in daily life is a key to staying clean and sober.

Just how this happens is a mystery, and most recovering addicts don’t much care about the details. But psychologists are very interested in the spiritual dimensions of sobriety. How can
daily vigilance and small ethical acts—apologizing for being hurtful or rude or uncharitable—translate into the concrete choice not to light up a crack pipe or pour a tumbler of whiskey? What could such moral striving possibly have to do with the tormenting compulsions of addiction?

New brain research may help illuminate this mystery. Psychologist Rebecca Compton of Haverford College and her colleagues have been observing the vigilant brain in action, and exploring the connection between cognitive watchfulness and serenity. They don’t use a spiritual vocabulary, of course. In the jargon of the laboratory, they have been studying “error-related negativity,” or ERN. This is shorthand for an electrical pulse that comes from particular region of the brain, a bundle of neurons known to watch out for mistakes. They have also been studying a separate but nearby part of the brain responsible for correcting errors once they’re spotted. They wanted to see if and how these basic tools of cognitive regulation relate to stress and anxiety in the real world.

Here’s how they set up the experiment. They had college students volunteer to take an exceptionally difficult version of the Stroop Test. You’re probably familiar with this test, because it circulates on the Internet as a kind of parlor game: The names of colors appear on the screen in various colors, and you’re required very rapidly to name the color of the ink—rather than read the word. So the word R-E-D might appear in green, and you have to punch green. It’s very difficult to do, because you have to override the brain’s impulse to read the word. But difficulty is precisely what the psychologists were aiming for, because they wanted the volunteers to make a lot of mistakes.

The volunteers were wired to an EEG while they were taking the Stroop Test, so the researchers could record their ERN pulses. They were in effect gauging how vigilant they were, how much of their brain power they were using to spot errors. At the same time, they measured their speed and accuracy in the test—basically to see how readily they corrected course after detecting a mistake.

Then they sent the volunteers home. But before they did, they asked them to keep a journal of their trials and tribulations and emotional life for a couple weeks. Every night before they went to bed, they assessed the day: Were they under deadline pressure that day? Did they feel overwhelmed by responsibilities? Was there too much to do today, and too little time? That kind of thing. They also kept track of their moods—whether they were anxious or calm or worried or relaxed.

Then they crunched all the data together, with interesting results. As they describe in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, participants varied both in their levels of vigilance and in their ability to learn from their mistakes. That in itself is not all that surprising, but here’s the interesting part: Those with overall greater cognitive control—the ones who monitored themselves closely and adjusted efficiently—were also the ones who were best at handling stress. Remember that these were college students, so almost all of them felt pressures from deadlines and too much work. But the ones who spotted and corrected errors in their own mental performance were in general more calm and relaxed, even with college life’s predictable stresses. The ones who did not inventory and learn from their mistakes were beaten down by life’s pressures.

Why would this be? It’s not entirely clear, but Compton and her colleagues believe it’s because mental regulation and emotional regulation draw on the same set of skills, perhaps even powered by some common neurons. People who are quick to spot their own slip-ups and quick to fix them are the same people who are good at keeping their emotions in tow when hit by life’s travails. In colloquial language, that’s called not sweating the small stuff. In the language of addiction recovery, it’s often called serenity, or emotional sobriety, and the path there does indeed seem to begin with a simple moral statement: “Oops, I made a mistake.”

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the weblog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

You've Got to Feel the Zero

I work out in the gym just about every morning, but I can’t say that I’m always eager to get started. I’m basically lazy, and exercise is hard. Many days I would much rather linger over a second mug of coffee and browse the newspapers. But I don’t, because I have made a bargain with the universe.

The bargain is simple: I pay a small price for a big payoff later, in good health and well being. I know there are no money-back guarantees, but it’s a wager I’m willing to make. People strike similar deals all the time. We choose years of hard work and poverty to go to college and graduate school, banking on later gratification, or we forego this winter’s tropical vacation to save for retirement.

Or we don’t. Lots of people see these as bad deals, and would rather take the money and run, live for today. Why is that? How can some of us see a particular tradeoff as advantageous, while others of us see precisely the same deal as foolish? Psychologists are very interested in this question, as are policy makers, who see the huge social costs of impulsive decision making.

One theory is that some people are simply not as good at forecasting the future. If something is way off in the distance, it’s very difficult to keep its importance front and center in the mind. So we discount it, literally. But is it possible to think about such tradeoffs differently, in a way that might help us delay our immediate rewards for a better deal later on?

Stanford University psychologists Eran Magen, Carol Dweck and James Gross decided to explore this in the lab. Specifically, they wondered if the way a tradeoff is “framed” in the mind might affect whether or not we choose an immediate but small payoff over a greater reward later on. For example, you probably think of a tradeoff as two competing options: You can have $5 right now, or $6.20 in a month. By framing it this way, you focus on the difference between $5 and $6.20, which is $1.20. That’s a lot less than the immediate $5, which has a lot of emotional pull. So it’s easy to understand why a lot of people might go for it.


But what if you conceptualized the tradeoff in a very different way, focusing on the passing of time? Picture yourself on one of those moving walkways, going through life. Every so often, someone hands you an envelope, which contains your wages in cash. You could still take that $5 now, but that’s not the end of the deal; time keeps moving, and a month later someone hands you another envelope. You open it expectantly and . . . nada, zero, zip. And you were expecting a raise to boot. Think about the disappointment.


That’s the real choice you have in life, and that empty envelope makes all the difference. The details of the tradeoff haven’t changed. The empty envelope was there all along, but it was hidden. That is, choosing between $5 and $6.20 suggests two payoffs frozen in time. But life is a continuum, and in reality there are two paydays, one of which must be a big zero. Projecting yourself forward to the day of the greater disappointment may be enough to make you opt for less disappointment today.


At least that’s the theory, which the psychologists tested on the Internet and describe in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science. They had participants choose between immediate and delayed payments in a variety of scenarios, varying the amounts of money and the time interval that separated now and the future. Sometimes the tradeoff was stated as: $5 now or $6.20 later. Other times it was: $5 now and $0 later OR $0 now and $6.20 later. Invariably, when the zero-dollar payday was spelled out, rather than hidden, the subjects were less impulsive in their choices. Put another way, they didn’t like the notion of opening that empty envelope, even off in the future, and it nudged them toward a more rational weighing of the options.

So what does this have to do with exercise and health? Say you blow off the gym and linger over coffee, or get another hour’s sleep—whatever. That’s like taking your $5 now. But it’s harder to enjoy as much when you know that the walkway is still moving. And somewhere down the line there is an empty envelope with your name on it.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from this weblog now appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

Polling the Crowd Within

Imagine you’re a contestant on the TV trivia show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? You’re poised to win a cool $32,000, but you’re stumped and annoyed. Who cares which country is the largest exporter of grapes? You could use your 50-50 "life line," which asks the computer to narrow the choices from four to two. But this is unlikely to help, because more often than not the computer deletes the two answers you’ve already ruled out on your own. You could use your “Phone-a-Friend” option, which means ringing your father at home. He’s sitting there with a pile of reference books waiting for your call. But he’s only got 30 seconds, and how would you look that up anyway? You can already imagine his resigned voice saying: “I’m really sorry, Mary. I’m afraid I just don’t know.”

But there’s a third option: You can use your “Ask-the-Audience" life line. You can poll the entire studio audience on the four possible answers, and their responses are instantaneously assembled into a bar graph. Invariably, this graph shows one overwhelming choice, and with rare exceptions the audience is right. “I’ll trust the audience,” you tell Regis. “Final answer.”

Good move. But why? No person in the audience is any more likely than you to know where grapes come from, yet the collective intelligence of the group is almost always a better bet than your best guess. Psychologists are very interested in this perplexing statistical phenomenon. If the crowd is always wiser than any individual, what does that say about the way knowledge is stored and arranged in our minds? And can it help us make better choices, even beyond game shows?

Psychologists Edward Vul of MIT and Harold Pashler of the University of California in San Diego decided to explore these questions in the laboratory. More specifically, they wondered if perhaps each of us carries around in our mind a “crowd”—with a range of knowledge like that of any real life crowd. If so, they reasoned, then it should be possible to get a more accurate answer by asking ourselves the same question more than once, and averaging the responses.

To test this idea, the psychologists created their own Internet quiz show. They asked participants a variety of questions about trivia, not unlike the questions one might get on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire: For example, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the United States?” But then they asked some of the contestants to answer the same questions again, immediately. Others were asked three weeks later to answer the same questions. The idea was to sample the range of answers within an individual mind, and to see if the range changed over time. It seems logical that one’s first answer should exhaust a person’s best knowledge about the world’s airports, but what if that’s not true? What if each of us has a whole range of possible answers to that trivia question, and the best guess lies in the middle somewhere?

That’s actually what Vul and Pashler found when they ran the experiment. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the average of two guesses for any individual participant was better than either guess alone, regardless of the time between guesses. So polling the “crowd within” does indeed yield a statistically more accurate answer. What’s more, this internal crowd gets more independent-minded with time: Contestants who were asked to second-guess themselves three weeks later benefited even more by averaging their two guesses than did those who second-guessed themselves immediately. The psychologists speculate that the cognitive pull of the original answer loses its power and allows more mental flexibility over time. In other words, the researchers say, there may be some science behind the folk wisdom: “Sleep on it.”

But no individual contestant did as well as a large group. That is, second-guessing oneself always yielded an answer that was better than the first, but it was still a sampling of one mind—and no match for the wisdom of the collective mind. For that, it appears, your best option really is to ask the audience. In the real world, that’s called vox populi.


For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from this weblog now appear in each issue of Scientific American Mind and on http://www.sciam.com/.