Brain Trust (25 page)

Connections in a school of fish are shown below. Imagine each step of communication loses half its influence, so that direct communication is 50 percent influential, friend-of-a-friend communication is 25 percent influential, and thrice-removed communication is 12.5 percent influential. Which of these fish has the most influence?

Other things that pass through networks
include people through subway systems and soccer balls through World Cup teams. In 2009 Wall Street whiz kids Chris Solarz and Matt Ferresi used a cool math/computer science network analysis tool, graph theory, to discover the path of least resistance through the city’s subway system, and then used their info to shave two hours off the existing record for visiting all 468 stations.

And after the 2010 World Cup, Hugo Touchette and Javier López Peña, applied mathematicians at Queen Mary, University of London, modeled teams’ passing data as if a team were a network, players were nodes in the network, and the ball was the information passing through it. The resulting graphs showed team styles of play. “Mexico’s passes are concentrated in the defense,” says Peña, “and Spain’s passes are mostly in the midfield.” It also allowed them to calculate any given player’s centrality—their importance to the network and thus how difficult it is for the network to adapt with the player removed. For example, in the early games of the 2010 World Cup, the Dutch player Arjen Robben had high centrality—ball movement went through him—and then in the final, he was nonexistent. Spain’s aggressive marking of Arjen Robben pruned him from the system, thereby disrupting the entire flow of information through the network that was the team deemed the Clockwork Orange.

Spain was without a similar Achilles’ heel: “Spain has a balanced centrality,” says Touchette. In other words, it’s a more flexible and thus a more robust network. If you cut off a head, the other ten heads on the pitch easily absorb the loss.

A quick online video search returns hugely entertaining footage of four-year-olds presented with the choice of immediately eating a marshmallow sitting on a table in front of them, or waiting for twenty minutes, at which point if their initial marshmallow remains, they earn a second marshmallow. The question, Will they wait? quickly starts to look like the question, Can they possibly physically wait? Kids writhe, kids cover their eyes, one angelic girl hollows out and eats the marshmallow center before innocently placing the gooey shell back on the table. Really, it’s worth seeing.

But it’s not just entertaining. The famous marshmallow test is highly predictive of success later in life. Kids who defer gratification get better SAT scores and have happier marriages.

Do you go to the dentist? Do you turn down an affair? Do you undergo surgery? Do you stay in school or reject a bribe or tie up money in investments that you could use immediately for a seven-day Caribbean cruise?

According to USC neurologist Antoine Bechara, this want/should is a teeter-totter between competing brain structures with the decision going to the weightier side (see this book’s entry about oh-wow/oh-yikes shopping with Brian Knutson). “The immediate reward of a drug or a marshmallow or a bribe is processed by basic brain structures,” says Bechara. The stronger the immediate reward, the more your lizard brain wants it. But then the ventral medial prefrontal cortex evaluates the consequences. “The prefrontal cortex signals that the bribe might put you in jail or the drug might take over your life,” says Bechara.

That’s easy: Your brain is a want/should teeter-totter.

But there are things that thumb this teeter-totter, and here’s where the story gets especially interesting. For example, in 1848 the famous patient Phineas Gage blasted the “should” side of his teeter-totter clean off when the three-foot tamping rod he was using to pack blasting powder shot through his face, passed behind his left eye, and exited just above his forehead. Amazingly, not only did Gage survive, but he retained IQ and cognition. However, with the executive function portion of his brain aggressively pruned, he became impulsive to the point of dysfunction (see the tongue-in-cheek entry with Steve Schlozman on
this page
about frontal lobe degeneration and zombiism).

In addition to injury, lack of impulse control can be due to genetic abnormality. Or “traumatic early life experiences can cause dramatic rewiring of the brain in the prefrontal lobe and striatum, making a person perform much like someone with a lesion,” says Bechara.

Among other shortcomings, these people are terrible investors, ruled completely by emotion without the check of logic. Bechara, along with the researchers Baba Shiv, George Loewenstein, and Hanna and Antonio Damasio, wondered how investors on the flip side of the emotion/logic teeter-totter would do—how would investors with lesions in the emotion centers of their brains perform?

The team engineered a study in which a participant is given $20.00 at the beginning of a twenty-round gambling game. In each round, the participant is given the choice to risk $1.00 on a coin flip to win $2.50. You can probably see that it’s a good deal to bet every round—an expected value of $1.25 for playing versus $1.00 for declining. The result? On average, healthy subjects took home $22.80, while those with lesions to their emotion centers won $25.70.

Other researchers have shown similar is true on Wall Street. Traders who test as devoid of emotion earn more money. “Not
everybody on Wall Street is a functional psychopath,” says Bechara. “Instead you can learn to control your emotions. But many of the best investors do things that would be expected of functional psychopaths.” So if Phineas Gage (and zombies) prioritize amygdala over frontal lobe, the brain of the ultimate investor does the opposite: pure rationality, without the influence of emotion.

And to bring this full circle, you can train this rational brain by practicing not eating the marshmallow. Delaying gratification prioritizes “should” over “want”—frontal lobe over amygdala—giving power to the rational rather than emotional areas of your brain. The more you do it, the better you’ll get, not just at investing, but potentially at making decisions with the long run in mind—the delayed gratification that is so predictive of success.

But Phineas Gage’s impulsivity ruined his life, and so too would living as the purely rational Spock ruin yours. In addition to training the brain of the ultimate investor, be sure you also practice leaving the functional psychopath at the office.

Among other achievements, Bechara
developed the now überfamous Iowa Gambling Task, in which subjects choose a card from one of three facedown decks. In the IGT, each deck has a different payoff, and so over time, subjects learn to draw cards only from the richest deck. In fact, “learn” is a less precise word than “intuit” as it seems intuition is a quicker teacher than cognition in the IGT. More years of schooling and higher SAT scores both predict worse performance on the IGT, as these brainiacs are more likely to concoct and stick to theories of hot and cold decks, rather than listening to their hunches.

Puzzle #15:
Time Discounting

Psychologists and economists know that a future reward is worth less than a significantly smaller, immediate reward. Imagine you have the choice to eat a marshmallow now or delay this gratification to earn an additional four marshmallows at some point in the future. Also imagine that the value of a marshmallow reward decays like a radioactive material, losing a quarter of its value every three minutes. At how many minutes into the future would you have earned more “value” by simply eating the one initial marshmallow immediately?

“The longstanding field of muscle physiology says that better performance is achieved only through training,”
says Ronald Evans, molecular biologist at the Salk Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In other words, “you may have the innate ability to be the fastest swimmer,” says Evans, “but if you don’t work hard, you’ll be overtaken by the second-fastest swimmer.”

Bummer. Down that line of reasoning lies long hours in the gym and self-denial in the face of Cherry Garcia.

But between exercise and muscle development is an important step. “The cell nucleus is the control system,” says Evans. “Done right, you can make the nucleus undergo the changes it would experience during exercise, without exercise.”

Booyah!

Unfortunately this cellular sleight of hand isn’t as simple as visualizing running or watching
Sweating to the Oldies
while sucking an energy drink. Instead, the story starts with the body’s chemical form of energy: ATP. When you exercise, your cells’ mitochondria convert fat, carbs, or really whatever else is floating around your midsection into ATP, which you then break down to create energy and a by-product called AMP. More exercise equals more ATP use and thus more AMP by-product. So when the body detects AMP, it assumes it’s exercising and burns more fat, carbs, and midsection to keep pace with its expected needs. Upon detecting AMP, your body also increases the rate of muscle building, which repairs the natural damage of exercise and beefs up muscle reserves in preparation for what it sees as likely future demands.

The drug AICAR mimics AMP.

When you inject it, your body thinks you’ve exercised. You burn more sugars and build more muscle, but, “Really only the signal of exercise has been given,” says Evans. In the lab, mice on AICAR lost weight and increased endurance even when given a high-fat diet.

So simply get a prescription for AICAR and you’ll qualify for the Boston Marathon while consuming all the Cherry Garcia and Krispy Kreme donuts your trans-fat-choked heart desires.

Only, there’s a catch.

“There are two problems with this drug: It’s [only] injectable, and it’s old,” says Evans. Simply, drugs aren’t created to cure disease or increase health. They’re created to make money. And the market doesn’t want to inject. Also, with AICAR being old and off-patent, any drug company in the world can make it, and so any company that put $100 million into the R&D needed to push a human-ready drug through the FDA would face immediate market competition from generics.

So don’t look for AICAR anytime soon.

But there’s another pathway you can punk.

PPR-delta is a nuclear receptor—it hangs out on a nucleus’s wall, waving like a sea anemone until it sees the molecule it wants, at which point it grabs it and relays the information of the catch inside the nucleus. What PPR-delta grabs is fat, and when it gets it, cells know that instead of conserving scarce resources, a glut is floating around your bloodstream and they can burn fat quickly. Evans and others have engineered synthetic molecules to mimic this effect—keep your eyes peeled for drug release in the next few years.

Until then, ditch saturated fats.

PPR-delta doesn’t bind saturated fat, which goes straight into your body’s storeroom without signaling your body to increase its burn rate. But the PPR-delta anemones love mono- and polyunsaturated fats—they grab them from your bloodstream and tell your body to get cranking. Foods high in omega-3s (fish) or resveratrol (red wine!) present PPR-delta only the fats it can grab and that thus fuel your body’s fire, and not the saturated fat that quickly makes one unable to see one’s toes. Dairy products consistently
have the highest saturated fat percentage, and walnuts have one of the lowest. In oils, stay away from coconut and palm, and instead go for corn or flaxseed.