A Conversation with Emily Falk
Author of What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change
Satori Neuro: Your book is called What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. But you use the word ‘value’ in a specific sense. Could you frame for us what value means in the context of your work?
Emily Falk: Whereas people often think of specific subsets like moral values or economic value, neuroscientists think about a brain system that takes all of those kinds of value and integrates them, coming up with a sort of final common assessment of the value of any different kind of choice option. Whether we’re choosing between snacks or activities or any number of other things, our brain’s value system can help us decide even in apples-and-oranges comparisons. For example, would you rather have $10 right now or go to the bowling alley?
SN: According to your book, a central question the brain goes to when considering an option is, “Is this me or not me?”. Let’s say you’re confronted with something unfamiliar, like you’ve been invited to laser tag and you’ve never played it before. On the surface, this is not ‘me’ at all. But if you start approaching those situations by saying, “Is there an aspect of this that could be me?”, then your life can change dramatically. Did I get that right in terms of your findings?
EF: I think that’s a great example, and I do find it really powerful to understand how intertwined the value system is with this other brain system, the self-relevance system that helps track what’s me and what’s not me. It shapes, but also limits, who we are. When it’s biasing these decisions in favor of things that are consistent with what we’ve done before—or who we imagine ourselves to be—then we take a bunch of options off the table.
There are lots of opportunities to connect new things with core parts of our identity. That can be one path. And the other way is just noticing that the story your brain tells you about yourself isn’t necessarily an objective set of truths. Your brain delivers a caricature of yourself that feels real but there may be more flexibility than we give ourselves credit for.
Decades of research in psychology highlight that people’s thoughts, feelings, preferences, and beliefs change depending on the situations that we’re in and who we’re with. And yet, we hold on tightly to the idea we know who we are and that that should guide our choices. But we don’t have to believe everything that first comes to our mind in this regard. For example, people who are experienced meditation practitioners start to let go of that bounded notion of self, that fixed sense of who I am, and also the fixed boundary between me and the rest of the world.
SN: You wrote about that kind of meditation as a way of distancing yourself and reducing defensive reactivity. But even without those years of training, there’s something else that has proven surprisingly effective: talking to yourself in the second person. As in, “Okay, Emily, you can do this.” How does that work to change your brain state?
EF: I’d like to give a little plug here for Ethan Kross’s new book, Shift, which goes into depth about some of these very specific emotion regulation techniques. You could be talking to yourself in the second person or imagining you’re a fly on the wall watching this conversation—anything where you’re taking the perspective of a more distanced observer can be helpful for regulating our emotions and how we think about choices.
Oftentimes we give wiser advice to other people than we do to ourselves, so stepping back and shifting perspective can modulate the activation of emotional processing systems.
Stories are also a powerful vehicle for reducing defensiveness through distance. Jason Coronel ran a study as a postdoc in my lab using brain stimulation to alter prefrontal cortex activity in smokers. You can decrease activation in the brain areas that allow people to reason, and it reduces their ability to reason about facts like “If you smoke for 30 years, it significantly increases your risk of lung cancer.” But if you tell them a story about John, who smoked for 30 years and developed lung cancer, their reasoning ability around that exemplar remains intact. Stories tap into different, social brain systems.
SN: Sometimes we need to distance ourselves to be more rational, but at other times, in order to align our choices with our long-term goals, we must bring ourselves closer to the consequences of those choices by identifying with our future selves. How do we do that?
EF: The value system is biased in favor of short-term rewards, as well as psychologically close rewards. Something I find fascinating is that our medial prefrontal cortex—a core part of our value and self-relevance system—treats different kinds of psychological distance in similar ways. Temporal distance (like stuff that’s far in the future) is encoded in an overlapping way with geographical distance (something that is around the world in Sudan) and with social distance (somebody who has a very different identity from me.)
So you’re right that our future selves might as well be a different person, from the perspective of our brain, and one of the things we can do is to focus on what is rewarding right now about a choice that is also compatible with our long-term goals. Try choosing exercise that is fun, like dancing, or choosing food that is both healthy and tasty. Try going to the networking event and asking questions you actually want to know the answers to instead of engaging in meaningless small talk. Instead of living in the future, a focus on enjoyment of the journey can help us make choices compatible with our bigger-picture goals.
If it’s something that just isn’t that fun, like saving for retirement, then maybe it feels compatible with your identity as a responsible person or maybe imagining, in a viscerally sensory way, the rewards that will come to your future self can be the connection that makes you behave more patiently.
SN: Is there anything happening in your lab that you’d like to share?
EF: Yes, there are several areas that I’m particularly excited about right now. First, I’m excited to move beyond what happens in single, individual brains into the dynamics of interpersonal interaction. Conversation is a key to our success as humans, so with a team of folks at Princeton, Pomona and Caldwell, we’ve scanned people’s brains in two adjacent fMRI scanners to look at what makes for a good conversation.
Second, I’m also the director of the Climate Communication division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center where we are researching what types of psychological and neurocognitive interventions motivate people to take direct action, as well as pursuing community-based work in West Philly about how our environments shape our decision making. My lab also researches how adolescents and young adults develop a sense of self-clarity and social connection, which helps them bolster a sense of agency and autonomy.
Third, At the intersection of the work I am doing as an administrator at a big university and the rest of my work as a scientist is thinking about how to convey the enormous returns on investing in basic science and innovation. When you look at the work of places like NIH and NSF, it’s so important to help people understand the benefits we all gain from that investment.