Day in and day out, we make decisions--some tough, some trivial, some good, some bad. And as Yale University neurobiologist Dr. Daeyeol Lee told The Huffington Post in an email, "poor decision-making in many domains, including finance, family, and health can all dramatically affect our well-being."
What's really going on in our brains as we make decisions? Are there steps we can take to become better decision-makers? For answers to these and other questions, HuffPost Science turned to Dr. Lee, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at Yale and director of the university's laboratory of cognition and decision-making. Here are our questions and his answers:
Why are some people better at making wise decisions than others? Personally, I don't think there are "better" decision-makers that can always make good decisions. Even people who seem to make bad decisions for some decision making problems might be able to make good decisions for other problems.
What part of the brain is involved in decision-making? We think that the almost entire brain is involved in decision making. One of our recent studies have found that the signals related to reward (e.g., money) are distributed throughout the entire human brain. This was very surprising, because traditionally, we used to think that there are specialized modules in the brain that process reward information and uses it to make decisions. This may not be the case.
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Source material from Huffington Post