Indecision and Why I Can't Decide on a Title

    

A cartoon image of the brain by Yale News

We got assigned this blog post as a project for biology class, and immediately thoughts began to pour into my brain of all the possible topics I could write about. I constructed a list of about fifteen different topics that I had interest in and could potentially use. But how could I chose? I began to reach out to people asking them which they thought was best. Almost everyone replied with "Just pick one, it is not that hard."

This led me to ask a new question to myself, Why was it so easy for them and so difficult for me. That is when I decided that my topic was in front of me all along. I began to explore indecision, what making a decision actually is in your brain, and why it is so hard. 

The average person makes 35,000 decisions everyday without even realizing it. Decisions happen in the frontal cortex of the brain, but researchers who studied brain activity at Yale University using rats, used a tool to control different parts of their brain when making decisions between different things that led them to either being rewarded or not. It was discovered that there are three different distinct circuits that connect to different regions of the brain and are involved in making decisions. Stephanie Groman, the associate research scientist of psychiatry at Yale University, who led this research said, "There are at least three individual processes that combine in unique ways to help us make good decisions."

 

A rat in an experiment about risky decision making 

With this, it was discovered that different decisions require more than just the frontal cortex, and activate deeper regions of your brain for different decisions. 

That is how decisions work, but why is it impossible for me to make a decision about a school assignment when others picked right away?

I can spend hours figuring out what I want to eat for dinner, or what I want to wear to school. Not only that, I will continue to analyze this decision even after it is made. A professor from the University of Zurich named Christian Ruff performed a study about how different people faced different levels of indecision. The researchers set up a brain stimulation method that was able to control activity in the particular part of their brain, which would either intensify or limit the flow of information between the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex. The people being tested were asked different types of questions about food; some were preference-based, e.g., would you rather eat a steak or a burger?, and some were sensory, e.g., which fruit is red, the apple or the pear?

The results of this experiment supported that when there is a disrupted flow of information between different regions of your brain, preference-based questions were harder to answer. The decisions were more difficult and these subjects were seen as more indecisive. The study had no effect on questions based off of facts. 

This study provides evidence that making a decision is hard! It involves different parts of your brain and depends on how easily the information flows between different regions of your brain. Factors that influence this are how loaded the question is and how much the person is thinking. This relates to how the question, "What do you want for dinner tonight?" can be difficult. Depending on how much the person is questioning what they truly want for dinner, it can be much more difficult to make a decision. Psychologists have discovered limiting options is a way to cope with indecision. 

Another problem that has led to difficulty in making decisions for people today is information overload. Sounds silly, but the human brain is a system just like a computer. When you are trying to do multiple things on a computer at once, it gets slow and overheated. Your brain works the same way. We are designed to have a certain way of processing and retaining information, which is not changing despite the recent changes in the amount of information the average human is exposed to every day. We are constantly checking the internet and coming in contact with lots of different kinds of media, leading to us not being able to remember it all. This is also impacting our decision making, due to the large amount of information "clogging" our processing channels, leading to a disruption throughout our brain circuits. 

A person clearly suffering from information overload

Although I feel like I have tried everything to "cure" my indecision, maybe there is constantly too much information in my brain causing a disruption of the flow between my prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex. My constant consumption of information and searching for more and more topics for this assignment was actually making the decision much harder, making it feel borderline impossible. For all of the people who have an intense flow of information through your brain, you are lucky! I hope this convinces you that your friends who have trouble making decisions, like me, are not insane! Just a little messed up brain activity going on with us :)