185 - Brian Knutson: What Neuroscience Reveals About Our Decisions

Katia Kriakova (0:01)

Welcome to the Stanford Psychology Podcast, where leading psychologists come to share their most recent work. My name is Katia, and today I'm joined by Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University. In this episode, we explore the neuroscience of decision-making, how brain activity can predict behavior and relapse in addiction, and why our choices don't always align with how we want to live.

I would love to start off by asking, do you have any values or a guiding philosophy that guides your research in your day-to-day life?

Brian Knutson (1:02)

Do you mean just my research or my life also and my research?

Katia Kriakova (1:06)

I would love to know both, actually.

Brian Knutson (1:08)

Gosh, that's a lot, but yeah, I've never thought that deeply about the connection. In our research, we try to answer questions. We like how questions, we focus on psychology, how the human mind works and how it influences behavior. One of the guiding themes has to do with affect, how we feel, and how feeling influences what we do and what we think. Then that has implications for some disorders, disorders of addiction, for instance. Also, for just the normal choices, everyday choices that people make, like do I want to buy this? Do I want to date that person? Those sorts of choices.

We think that affect is really important in all of those choices. That's a theme.

We have to resort to tricky ways of measuring, not just what people say and do, but what is their brain doing? How are they responding to things? We try to get ahead of the choice and measure that quick response that people have. Brain imaging has actually been very useful for that. That's why we use that quite a bit.

We can ask that question at different scales. Usually, psychologists will ask about individuals. They'll say, why did Katia choose this and Brian chose that? That's super interesting to us. But then we're also interested in this larger scale of like, well, why did all those people on the internet choose this thing over that? Also at this more micro scale, so going down a level, like, okay, how does it work? What is causing the signals we're seeing in the brain? Can we mechanistically control it? Maybe not in people, but in animals? Can we really understand what is generating these affective experiences that then influence choice? I don't know if that's a philosophy, but it's a framework that we use to try to understand human behavior and explore it.

Obviously, we think self-report and behavior are important, but we don't think it's the whole story.

Katia Kriakova (3:08)

I'm so excited to ask so many questions about this. But before we do, I would love to know what initially got you excited about studying this, and how did your journey into psychology begin?

Brian Knutson (3:21)

Yeah. That's a long and twisty story. One thing I like about academia, especially psychology, is they're all different kinds of people, and they succeed in different ways, and they have different approaches, and I think that's really important actually. They come from different places, and they have different backgrounds. It's super important to have that diversity of success.

It's not always a straight path, and it's not always formulaic, and it certainly wasn't for me. But as an undergrad, I was not an undergrad at a little liberal arts school in Texas called Trinity University.

I gravitated towards experimental psychology, so I worked with a guy named Dan Wagner, who studied thought suppression. He's unfortunately not with us anymore, but he was a very quirky scientist and very creative. And I ended up running his lab because he became the chair of the department because somebody died. But so I got some early experience running an experimental psychology lab, and that was exciting to me. But then I also was interested in comparative religion, specifically Buddhism. And so I got a chance to spend four months in Nepal, kind of living among Sherpas and other people who practice Buddhism. And so that gave me a totally different view on how people think about the mind and how they live and how that might influence what they do, what they think is right and wrong. And so both of those stuck with me, actually. And it's funny, like now, many years later, when I think about the themes running through the research, they come from both of those sources, right? So one source is sort of like, okay, in order to understand something, don't believe what other people say or what you think, test it out, see if it works. If it doesn't work, update your beliefs. Learn from experience, learn from your data. Look at your data.