Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons by Garth Sundem

Author:Garth Sundem
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Reference, General
ISBN: 9780307588043
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2010-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

• Most healthy participants take between forty and fifty flips to recognize good and bad decks and then stick to the good ones. But galvanic skin tests, like those of a lie detector, show that after only about ten flips, participants start to show stress responses as their hands hover above bad decks. We know a bad deck before we’re aware of it.

Iowa Gambling at Home

A quick online search turns up a couple places where you can test your own prowess at the Iowa Gambling Task.

• The orbitofrontal cortex processes the emotion of reward and punishment as it relates to decision-making. When you wince after a bad choice, that’s the orbitofrontal cortex at work. People with brain damage in this region, while cognitively unimpaired, are devoid of the emotions of good and bad choices. And they show no galvanic skin response to impending bad choices on the Iowa Gambling Task. In fact, these people will sometimes continue to choose cards from bad decks long after they’re aware that they’re losing money.

• Dumber is better. It turns out that a college education is a predictor of poorer performance on the Iowa Gambling Task. Though unproven, most people think this effect is due to higher education’s emphasis on rational decision-making at the expense of emotion-based decisions. In other words, college squashes our intuition. Education can also increase our confidence in false beliefs—when an educated person thinks he or she has found a pattern, or has made a good-deck/bad-deck judgment, he or she is likely to have confidence in this evaluation … even if it’s wrong.

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