How We Decide (2 page)

But the brain doesn't exist in a vacuum; all decisions are made in the context of the real world. Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, famously compared the human mind to a pair of scissors. One blade was the brain, he said, while the other blade was the specific environment in which the brain was operating.

If you want to understand the function of scissors, then you have to look at both blades simultaneously. To that end, we are going to venture out of the lab and into the real world so that we can see the scissors at work. I'll show you how the fluctuations of a few dopamine neurons saved a battleship during the Gulf War, and how the fevered activity of a single brain region led to the subprime housing bubble. We'll learn how firefighters handle dangerous blazes, and we'll visit the card tables of the World Series of Poker. We'll meet scientists who are using brain-imaging technology in order to understand how people make investment decisions and choose political candidates. I'll show you how some people are taking advantage of this new knowledge to make better television shows, win more football games, improve medical care, and enhance military intelligence. The goal of this book is to answer two questions that are of interest to just about everybody, from corporate CEOs to academic philosophers, from economists to airline pilots: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

There is a minute and twenty-one seconds left on the clock in the 2002 Super Bowl, and the score is tied. The New England Patriots have the ball on their own 17-yard line. They are playing against the heavily favored St. Louis Rams. They have no time-outs left. Everyone assumes that the Patriots will kneel down and take the game into overtime. That, after all, is the prudent thing to do. "You don't want to have a turnover," says John Madden, one of the television broadcast's commentators. "They should just let time expire."

The game was never supposed to be this close. The Rams had been favored by fourteen points over the Patriots, which made this the most lopsided Super Bowl ever played. The potent Rams offense—nicknamed the "Greatest Show on Turf"—led the league in eighteen different statistical categories and outscored their opponents 503 to 273 during the regular season. Quarterback Kurt Warner was named the NFL's Most Valuable Player, and running back Marshall Faulk had won the NFL Offensive Player of the Year award. The Patriots, meanwhile, had been hamstrung by injuries, losing both Drew Bledsoe, their star quarterback, and Terry Glenn, their leading wide receiver. Everyone was expecting a rout.

But now, with just a minute remaining, Tom Brady—the second-string quarterback for the Patriots—has a chance to win the game. Over on the Patriots' sidelines, he huddles in conversation with Bill Belichick, the Patriots' head coach, and Charlie Weis, the offensive coordinator. "It was a ten-second conversation," Weis remembered later. "What we said is we would start the drive, and, if anything bad happened, we'd just run out the clock." The coaches were confident that their young quarterback wouldn't make a mistake.

Brady jogs back to his teammates on the field. You can see through his facemask that he's smiling, and it's not a nervous smile. It's a confident smile. There are seventy thousand spectators inside the Superdome, and most of them are rooting for the Rams, but Brady doesn't seem to notice. After a short huddle, the Patriots clap their hands in unison and saunter toward the line of scrimmage.

Tom Brady wasn't supposed to be here. He was the 199th pick in the 2000 draft. Although Brady had broken passing records at the University of Michigan, most team scouts thought he was too fragile to play with the big boys. The predraft report on Brady by
Pro Football Weekly
summarized the conventional wisdom: "Poor build. Very skinny and narrow. Ended the '99 season weighing 195 pounds, and still looks like a rail at 211. Lacks great physical stature and strength. Can get pushed down more easily than you'd like." The report devoted only a few words to Brady's positive attribute: "decision-making."

Belichick was one of the few coaches who had grasped Brady's potential. "Our vision wasn't that Tom was our franchise quarterback," Belichick said later, "but that Tom had been in situations—both in playing-time and game-management situations, tight games against good competition—and he'd handled all of them pretty well." Brady, in other words, had poise. He didn't choke under pressure. When the game was on the line, he found the open man.

Now Brady is in the spotlight, standing all by himself in the shotgun formation. His decision-making skills are about to be put to the test. He yells an audible to his tight end, then turns and yells at his wide receivers. The ball is snapped. Brady drops back, looks upfield, and understands instantly that the Rams have fallen into a tight zone coverage. They know the Patriots are going to pass; the cornerbacks are looking for an interception. Brady's primary target is covered, so he looks to his next target; he's also covered. Brady avoids the outstretched arm of a Ram defensive lineman, steps forward, and makes a short pass to his third target, the running back J. R. Redmond. It's a gain of five.

The next two plays unfold in the same way. Brady reads the Ram defense and calls out a series of coded commands: "White twenty! Ninety-six is the Mike! Omaha go!" These instructions tell the offensive linemen which linebackers to block and also serve as guides for the wide receivers, whose pass routes depend on the formation of the defense. After the play begins, Brady settles into the pocket, checks off his targets, and wisely settles for the safest option, which is a short pass in the flat. He doesn't force the ball into tight coverage. He's taking what the defense is giving him. The chains are moved, but the Patriots are running out of time.

It's now first and ten on the New England 41-yard line. Twenty-nine seconds remain in the game. Brady knows that he's got two, maybe three plays left. He has to move the ball another thirty yards just to get into field-goal range. The commentators sound like they're preparing for overtime, but the Patriots still think they can score. Brady settles into the shotgun. His eyes pan across the defense. He sees the linebackers edging a little closer to the line of scrimmage. Brady yells out the snap count, sends a man in motion, and then the ball is in his hands. He drops back and notices that only three defensive linemen are rushing him. The fourth is trying to cut off the short pass. Brady looks to his right. The receiver is covered. He looks to his left. Nobody's open. He looks at the center of the field. Troy Brown, a Patriots' wide receiver, is trying to find a plane of unoccupied space, a gap between the linebackers and the cornerbacks. Brady watches him clear the defenders and then fires a bullet fourteen yards down-field. Brown catches the ball in stride and runs for another nine yards before being pushed out-of-bounds. The ball is now thirty-six yards from the end zone, which is just within field-goal range. The Rams fans have gone silent.

With twelve seconds remaining, the Patriots' special-teams unit is brought onto the field. Adam Vinatieri steps into the forty-eight-yard kick. The ball sails straight between the pylons. The clock says triple zero. The Patriots have just won the Super Bowl. It's the greatest upset in NFL history.

The quick decisions made by a quarterback on a football field provide a window into the inner workings of the brain. In the space of a few frenetic seconds, before a linebacker crushes him into the ground, an NFL quarterback has to make a series of hard choices. The pocket is collapsing around him—the pocket begins to collapse before it exists—but he can't flinch or wince. His eyes must stay focused downfield, looking for some meaningful sign amid the action, an open man on a crowded field. Throwing the ball is the easy part.

These passing decisions happen so fast they don't even seem like decisions. We are used to seeing football on television, captured by the cameras far above the grassy stage. From this distant perspective, the players appear to be moving in some sort of violent ballet; the sport looks exquisitely choreographed. You can see the receivers spread the zone and watch the pocket slowly disintegrate. It's easy to detect the weak spots of the defense and find the target with man-on-man coverage. You can tell which linebackers bought the play-action fake and see the cornerback racing in on the blitz. When you watch the game from this omniscient angle—coaches call it "the eye in the sky"—it appears as if the quarterback is simply following orders, as if he knows where he is going to throw the ball before the play begins.

But this view of the game is deeply misleading. After the ball is snapped, the ordered sequence of neat X's and O's that fill the spiral-bound playbook degenerates into a street brawl. There's a symphony of grunts and groans and the meaty echoes of fat men hitting hard ground. Receivers get pushed off their routes, passing angles get cut off, and inside blitzes derail the best intentions. The offensive line is an unpredictable wrestling match. Before the quarterback can make an effective decision, he needs to assimilate all of this new information and be aware of the approximate location of every player on the field.

The savage chaos of the game, the way every play is a mixture of careful planning and risky improvisation, is what makes the job of an NFL quarterback so difficult. Even while he's immersed in the violence—the defensive line clawing at his body—the quarterback has to stand still and concentrate. He needs to look past the mayhem and make sense of all the moving bodies. Where is his receiver going? Will the safety break toward the ball? Is the linebacker going to drop back into coverage? Did his tight end pick up the blitz? Before a pass can be thrown—before the open man can be found—all of these questions need to be answered. Each pass is really a guess, a hypothesis launched into the air, but the best quarterbacks find ways to make better guesses. What separates Tom Brady and Joe Montana and Peyton Manning and John Elway and the other great quarterbacks of the modern NFL era from the rest is their ability to find the right receiver at the right time. (The Patriots like to pass out of a five-wide formation, which means that Brady often checks off five different receivers before he decides where to throw the ball.) No other team sport is so dependent on the judgment of a single player.

NFL scouts take the decision-making skills of quarterbacks very seriously. The league requires that every player in the draft take the Wonderlic intelligence test, which is essentially a shorter version of the standard IQ test. The test is twelve minutes long and consists of fifty questions that get progressively harder as the test goes along. Here's an example of an easy Wonderlic question:

"Paper sells for 21 cents per pad. What will four pads cost?"

And here's a hard Wonderlic question:

"Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests $4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?"

The underlying thesis of the Wonderlic test is that players who are better at math and logic problems will make better decisions in the pocket. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable assumption. No other position in sports requires such extreme cognitive talents. Successful quarterbacks need to memorize hundreds of offensive plays and dozens of different defensive formations. They need to spend hours studying game tape of their opponents and be able to put that knowledge to use on the field. In many instances, quarterbacks are even responsible for changing plays at the line of scrimmage. They are like coaches with shoulder pads.

As a result, an NFL team starts to get nervous when a quarterback's score on the Wonderlic test is too far below the average for the position. For quarterbacks, the average is 25. (In comparison, the average score for computer programmers is 28. Janitors, on average, score 15, as do running backs.) Vince Young, the star quarterback from the University of Texas, reportedly scored a 6 on the test, which led many teams to publicly question his ability to succeed in the NFL.

But Young ended up excelling in the pros. And he isn't the only quarterback who achieved success despite a poor Wonderlic score. Dan Marino scored 14. Brett Favre's Wonderlic score was 22, and Randall Cunningham and Terry Bradshaw both scored 15. All of these quarterbacks have been or will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. (In recent years, Favre has surpassed many of the passing records once held by Marino, such as most passing yards and touchdowns in a career.) Furthermore, several quarterbacks with unusually high Wonderlic scores—players like Alex Smith and Matt Leinart, who both scored above 35 on the test and were top-ten picks in the 2005 NFL draft—have struggled in the NFL, largely because they make poor decisions on the field.

The reason there is virtually no correlation between the results of the Wonderlic and the success of quarterbacks in the NFL is that finding the open man involves a very different set of decision-making skills than solving an algebra problem. While quarterbacks need to grapple with complexity—the typical offensive playbook is several inches thick—they don't make sense of the football field the way they make sense of questions on a multiple-choice exam. The Wonderlic measures a specific kind of thought process, but the best quarterbacks don't think in the pocket. There isn't time.

Take that pass to Troy Brown. Brady's decision depended on a long list of variables. He needed to know that the linebacker wouldn't fall back into coverage and that there were no cornerbacks in the area waiting for an interception. After that, he had to calculate the ideal place to hit Brown with the ball so that
Brown would have plenty of room to run after the catch. Then he needed to figure out how to make a throw without hitting the defensive lineman blocking his passing lane. If Brady were forced to consciously analyze this decision—if he treated it like a question on the Wonderlic test—then every pass would require a lot of complicated trigonometry as he computed his passing angles on the plane of the football field. But how can you contemplate the math when five angry linemen are running straight at you? The answer is simple: you can't. If a quarterback hesitates for even a split second, he is going to get sacked.