THE NOVEL AND THE DEFAULT NETWORK
If you are interested in exploring the full-spectrum complexity of a decision—from the inner life of the participants all the way out to the realm of gossip or technological change—no artistic form has ever rivaled the depth and breadth of novels like Middlemarch. (Nonfiction biography and history are their only peers.) Capturing the hard choice on all the scales of experience that are implicated in it; following the threadlike pressures from mind to mind, from drawing room to town square; taking us from the inner life of the decision-maker to the vast sweep of generational change—these are not just a few reasons we happen to read novels, among many others. They are what the novel does best.
In a way, you can think of the novel itself as a kind of technology. Like most technologies, it builds on and enhances existing skills that human beings possess. Novels—along with other long-form arts like movies or serial-narrative television—are an amplified version of the default network’s instinctual storytelling. The novel is to the daydreams of the default network what the Hubble telescope is to our visual system. They are all tools that let us see farther and deeper. Over millions of years of evolution, our brains developed a predilection for running through imagined futures, anticipating the emotional reactions of people close to us, sketching out the potential consequences—all in the service of making better decisions in the present. That knack for speculative untruths—made-up stories about how it all might turn out if you choose this path over that one—gave us the wisdom of Homo prospectus. And over time, we developed cultural forms that allowed us to make ever more elaborate simulations: first as myths and legends, passed down through oral tradition, and then as the full-spectrum narrative of the novel, following the paths of imaginary people as they wrestled with the decisions that would define their lives. More than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multilayered choice, even if the choice itself happens to be a fictional one. The ensemble runs of the weather forecasters are fiction, too: in some runs, the hurricane veers left and spares the mainland; in others, it bears down on the coastal cities with devastating force. We can better predict which path the real hurricane will take—and thus which path we should take ourselves to avoid it—because the computers that generate those ensemble forecasts are such able fabulists, stringing together thousands of alternative narratives in a matter of minutes. The novel gives us a different kind of simulation. Not the long view of climate change, or even the short-term view of a tropical storm, but something more intimate: the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world that surrounds it.
EPILOGUE
WE MIGHT AS WELL GET GOOD AT IT
I spent most of the first quarter century of my life in school, and I don’t remember one class over that entire stretch where decision-making itself was on the syllabus. My teachers taught me grammar, chemistry, algebra, European history, postmodern literary theory, film studies—but not once did a teacher stand at the lectern and explain how to make a farsighted choice. I’m not the sort of person who gripes about all the useless trivia I learned in school; I’ve made a career out of finding meaning in the obscure realms of different disciplines. But I wish at least some of that time in the classroom had been dedicated to the art of deciding.
It is true that the brain science and philosophical implications behind the way we decide will regularly appear on the syllabi of Cognitive Science or Psych 101, or in electives on, say, the utilitarians. And business schools regularly feature entire courses on the topic, most of them focused on administrative or executive decisions. But you will almost never find a required course dedicated to the subject in even the most progressive high school. Are there more important skills than the ability to make hard choices? I can think of a few rivals: creativity, empathy, resilience. But surely complex decision-making has to rank near the top of the list. It is at the very heart of what we mean when we use words like “wisdom.” So why isn’t it an anchor tenant in our schools?
The nice thing about a field like decision science or decision theory—or whatever name you want to give to it—is that the field is a sort of intellectual chameleon: it plays well in a highbrow context, and in a pragmatic one. There’s a deep well of philosophical literature and a growing body of neuroscience research that wrestle with the problem, but it’s also a problem with immediate practical utility for everyone. Who doesn’t want to make better choices?
There’s a pedagogical argument for this approach as well. Framing an entire course around the farsighted decision actually has the potential to light up interest in other fields that can sometimes seem dry when they are quarantined off in their traditional disciplinary silos. The default network, for instance, might come up as a sidebar in a sophomore biology survey, during the unit on neurology. In that context, it’s just another set of facts to memorize: today, it’s the default network; tomorrow, we’re covering neurotransmitters; next week, we move on to the amygdala. But put the default network in a class that’s explicitly designed to teach you how to make better decisions, and suddenly the whole idea of daydreaming as a cognitively rich activity takes on new relevance. You don’t have to be planning a career as a brain surgeon to find it useful to learn about this strange superpower that was only revealed by overactive PET scans.
What fields would such a syllabus incorporate? Certainly it would involve the study of history, moral philosophy, behavioral economics, probability, neurology, computer science, and literature. The course itself would be a case study in the power of diverse perspectives. But beyond the multidisciplinary sweep, students would learn a series of techniques that they could then apply to their own lives and careers: how to build a full-spectrum map of a complex decision; how to design a scenario plan and a premortem; how to build a values model and Bad Events Table. They’d learn the importance of sharing hidden profiles among diverse groups, and the value of measuring uncertainty. They’d learn to seek out undiscovered options and to avoid the tendency to fall back into narrowband assessments. They’d learn the importance of being other-minded, and how reading great literature can help enhance that faculty. No doubt there are a thousand electives out there—in high schools and college humanities programs, not to mention business schools—that dabble in some of these themes. But why not bring them into the core?
The other case for bringing decision-making into the classroom is that it provides a valuable bridge between the sciences and the humanities. When you read philosophy in the context of the promise and peril of superintelligent machines, you can see immediately how seemingly abstract ideas about logic and ethics can have material effects on our technological future. When you read literature as an exercise in improving our ability to make farsighted decisions, you can appreciate the way novels mirror the scientific insights that arise from randomized controlled studies and ensemble forecasts, in their shared reliance on the power of simulation to expand our perspectives, challenge our assumptions, and propose new possibilities. This is not a matter of “reducing” the humanities down to scientific data. For the most intimate decisions, novels endow us with wisdom that science cannot, by definition, provide. When my wife and I were contemplating our California move, we couldn’t somehow run a controlled experiment and send dozens of comparable couples off to the West Coast, then wait around for a few years crunching the data on their future happiness. You don’t get to run ensemble simulations on your own life. Storytelling is what we have as a substitute.
Of course, the reverse is also true: science gives us insights that novels cannot provide. When Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf invented stream of consciousness as a literary device, they helped us perceive the strange habits of mind wandering, but it was the PET and fMRI scans of the default network that allowed us to see, for the first time, just how powerful that kin
d of cognition really is. Behavioral psychology and mock juries and cognitive neuroscience have all helped us perceive the challenges posed by farsighted decisions more clearly, particularly on the scale of the small group. Novels just happen to shine a different kind of light. We see farther when both lights are on.
Acknowledgments
Appropriately enough—given the subject matter—this book was a long time in the making. I first started taking notes on the topic of complex decision-making almost ten years ago, and it took me a full five years to get from the initial proposal to a first draft of the manuscript. Consequently, I am even more grateful than usual to my publisher, editor, and agent—Geoffrey Kloske, Courtney Young, and Lydia Wills, respectively—for having faith in this project over that extended period, and for convincing me that this book was important to write when I had my doubts. A special thanks to Courtney for her stellar editorial guidance: challenging my arguments where they deserved challenging, suggesting new avenues to explore, deftly reminding me at points that this was a book about decision-making and not a literary monograph on the late works of George Eliot. As always, I am very lucky to be a part of the extended Riverhead family: thanks to Kevin Murphy, Katie Freeman, Lydia Hurt, Jessica White, and Kate Stark for all their help bringing this book into the world.
This book was also greatly improved thanks to many conversations with friends and experts over the past decade: Eric Liftin, Rufus Griscom, Mark Bailey, Denise Caruso, Doug Vakoch, Kathryn Denning, Betsey Schmidt, David Brin, Frank Drake, Paul Hawken, Scott Klemmer, Peter Leyden, Ken Goldberg. My old friends at the Long Now Foundation—especially Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Alexander Rose, Peter Schwartz, and Brian Eno—were an inspiration from the very beginning of this project. Special thanks to Zander for introducing me to the METI project, and to my editors at the New York Times Magazine, Bill Wasik and Jake Silvertstein, for allowing me to explore the epic decision of METI at such length in the magazine. Thanks to Wes Neff and the team at the Leigh Bureau for introducing me to so many interesting people and industries over the years, some of which found their way into this book. My wife Alexa Robinson—my partner in so many long-term decisions—gave the book an astute edit in the late stages. Our sons—Clay, Rowan, and Dean—are a constant reminder of the importance of keeping your eye on the long view.
This book is dedicated to my father, master of the premortem and wise counsel for every major decision I’ve faced in my life.
Brooklyn
March 2018
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