Why Don't You Sleep On It?

thefirelane wrote to mention a New Scientist study that indicates your subconscious mind is a better decision maker than you are. From the article: "The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say. Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with."

Comments

Brighter in the morning?

[Verteiron]

Is this really due to the brain "working on" problems in your sleep? Or is this because the hours after waking are when the brain is at its operational best and it is easier to process large amounts of information at that time?

This fits in nicely with another finding

[MarkusQ]

This fits in nicely with another finding that seems amazing when you first hear about it, but is obviously true:

People spend more conscious thinking time on a choice when it doesn't really matter.

Hard to believe, right? You'd think we would think long and hard about things that matter (in the sense that one or the other of the choices will be far better or worse than the other) and not waste time on choices where the outcome is pretty much the same regardless of what we decided. But that's not, in fact, how we operate.

If you give people a choice between, say, being paid a dollar or getting hit with a stick, they make up their minds much quicker than if (to choose an example at the other end of the spectrum) you let them pick a candy out of a box of identical chocolates. You can even induce the effect; people will eat potato chips out of a bag one after another without even looking at them, but if you spread the same chips out on the table and ask "which chip do you want to eat next?" so that it becomes something they have to decide they will generally slow to a crawl.

--MarkusQ

The summary is a bit misleading

[TubeSteak]

The real conclusion is that if you give someone all the information they need to make a complex decision, then you tell them they're going to have to make a decision after you make them run through a set of distractions... They'll make the right decision.

If they don't know they're going to have to make a choice after their distraction, their subconscious won't do anything special.

This is just the same old story where if you have a problem, go think about something else & your subconscious will work it out for you. It's nice to see scientific proof for something that I've always considered anecdotal.

My last thought: Some people are better at making snap decisions and some people only think they are good at it. It takes a real man to be able to admit he needs to mull things over... which is why high-pressure sales tactics often work.

A Two-fer...

[Vexler]

So far today, /. tells us that we shouldn't study that hard if we want to stay sane, and now this. It reminds me of that quote from "The Sea Wolf" where Wolf Larsen said of his brother Death Larsen, "He is too busy living life to think about it. My mistake was in opening the books."

Happy Friday.

Alternate theory

[jbeaupre]

Since sleep and dreaming are linked with learning, it could be the other way around. Rather than making a decision in your sleep that you will be satisfied with when away, you could be learning to accept the decision you made while awake (consciencely or unconsciencely). The next day you wake up believing you made a decision in your sleep but really just imprinted your previous decision more firmly.

That isn't to say you can't figure stuff out while asleep. I'm still glad my brain decided to solve a differential equation while sleeping. I sure wasted enough time working on it awake.

So who know. Maybe it's a constantly changing mix of solving and acceptance.

Isn't this how our economy works?

[bomb_number_20]

Marketers have known this for years. Marketing departments spend huge amounts of money exploring ways to nudge people into making the 'impulse buy' and trick them into unwise decisions. Grocery stores line their queues with trinkets and small items. Best buy is even worse- forcing people to wind their way through a twisty aisle made of boxes of small, inexpensive items to get to the checkout counter. Once, when shopping for a car, the salesman asked me 'What would it take for you to buy this car today?'. The list goes on... and, it seems to me, we are making worse and less informed decisions as time goes on.

Trying to find real information on a product is sometimes very difficult. Instead of making better products, companies make a cheaper product and spend a little more on marketing to promote it.

blah blah blah... im getting offtopic...

I think it's an issue of context. I don't think it's that you're sleeping on it, but rather you are thinking about the issue outside the context of marketing and environmental pressures. Removing something from context generally allows you to see that thing more clearly.

Ancient custom?

[garyebickford]

I recall reading somewhere (back in the day) that in some ancient tribal culture (Bedouin?), when dealing with something important, the parties would first negotiate in a social situation in the evening around the campfire (IIRC smoking something was involved, but maybe that was just me!), and make the decision. But no decision was not final until the next day, when the question was reviewed thoroughly in the "cold light of day".

In this way, a person could get to know the potential business partner or in-law, learn how they do things when their guard was down at least a bit, and find out whether they can get along as people; and get the basic facts and factors of the decision.

Then, after sleeping on it and 'digesting' the information, they could use their more analytical daytime-brain to go over what they might not have thought of the night before. In the end, one might say that each side of their brain had the chance to contribute to the decision. (Since the two hemispheres of male brains as a generality are be less well connected than those of females, I would argue that this strategy may be especially useful for men.

I wish I recalled more detail but it was just a page or so of a book or article, and I don't even recall what the book was about.

Decision making made easy

[RealProgrammer]

Well, sort of.

A complex decision is a whole bunch of trade-offs, profit-and-loss variables. Each variable has a probability associated with it, and they can cascade together. I use a system of "expected value" summations, and it works pretty well.

For instance, in buying a car there is the price (and the 100% likelihood that you'll have to pay it), a set of features, and a set of unknown costs (maintenance), and a set of emotional value points (prestige, convenience, dependability). Each of the costs has a probability that you'll incur it, and each of the values has a probability that you'll receive it. Some of them are related, and may need to be refactored to make the math work out for you.

You multiply each of the costs and outcomes (positive and negative) with their value to you (on some scale of your choosing) and their probability of occurring, and sum them all up. That choice gets a score.

Compare the score from all of the other choices you could make, and your decision is made.

The nice thing about this system is that by breaking down the fuzzy-factor "value" for each outcome and pairing it with a probability, you see the real cost for each while simultaneously hiding the answer from yourself. Subconciously you will tend to favor the choice you want to make, but be careful that you don't fudge the probabilities.

As a simple example, consider recreational sky-diving. The value you get from jumping -- a rush, some prestige, and maybe some sex out of it somehow -- compares with a (call it) 99% probability of landing safely and a (call it) 1% probability of landing with a splat.

For me, I assign a pretty high value to keeping my skin intact. How much would I pay someone not to flatten my skull?

stay on ground = free + 0 (death from falling) + 0 (fun)
        = 0
skydiving = -$50 + .01 (death from falling) + .99 (fun)
        = -$50 - 1/100 (very big number) + .99 (small number)
        = (probably something negative, and I have to pay 50 bucks).

As a side note, you can see that the resultant costs of a decision and the cost to make it happen are just two labels for the same thing. That is, whether something is a cost or benefit is just the sign on the term.

Re:No big surprise...

[kbielefe]

You just described my in-laws perfectly. They rarely go out to eat because it is too difficult to decide what to eat. They never go on vacation because it is too difficult to decide where and when. He has worked at a company he dislikes for decades because it is too difficult to decide what other company to work for. They've been trying to decide between getting a master's degree in engineering or business for so long that he could have had both by now.

Meanwhile, they lose thousands in financial investments that were entered too hastily, and are jealous of the fun vacations and outings we do -- with less income -- while they wait for the perfect opportunity to come along. Usually, being able to ignore unimportant problems is a big asset.

This is the way of the Tao

[scorp1us]

I forget which book i was reading, probably "The Tao of Personal Leadership" which maintained that the proper way to accomplish any weighty task is to familiarize yourself with it. Dig in deep. Then do nothing. At a later time, reproach it and the task will go far more smoothly. Once I read that I realized that in the past several years of profesional development, I had done just that. I don't just sit down and code as if I were running a marathon. I think about it all, then I "mull it over". This mulling really involves little. Just a little directed consciousness and everything falls into place without deliverate thought. As the years slip under my belt, I do less and less directed thinking and the results are always better than the last.

This is the way of the Tao.