Your Brain Uses Experience to Determine if It's Worth It

Every morning I wake up in extreme discomfort due to many of the chronic injuries I carry around with me. It hurts to lie down and also to move. But my morning "routine" is to get up, go outside, and train in martial arts for about an hour. If I do that, my brain and body will be ready for the day and I will be in much less discomfort. It's really hard to do sometimes, yet I always do it. Literally every day, no matter what.

I know that the effort of pushing through the initial discomfort will be worth it to me. But I only learned that by doing. This is why I thought a recent study on decision-making in monkeys was so interesting.

Sometimes you have to just do it

Mark Burrell, Alexandre Pastor-Bernier, and Wolfram Schultz in Cambridge, UK were interested in how behavioral decisions are made. Their work is based on the idea that everything living creatures do is a function of getting the most benefit for the least energy. Behavioral economics suggests that choices are optimized in decisions that take the benefit or utility of something and subtract the subjective cost of the effort required.

Burrell and his colleagues did a study with monkeys (Macaca mulatta) who needed to make decisions and behavioral choices while reward and physical effort were varied. The fascinating main result was that the monkeys "discount reward by an effort cost that is measured relative to an expected effort learned from previous trials". This means that prior experience helps to influence current choices based on both what might be gained and how much it "costs" to obtain. This study demonstrates that the physical cost of the effort to achieve a reward is a critical part of decision-making and is based on prior knowledge of the activity.

After you do something you learn if it has value

A key limiter for many in trying new things or changing behavior is that we are by definition forced to choose without knowing the true cost of what we might do. The subjective value of something and the subjective effort it takes to achieve that thing can be estimated in advance but only truly arrived at with experience.

Appreciating this helps frame the modern-day disconnect between effort, value, and reward. We don't have to physically do much to get a lot. We can sit in a chair and order food, groceries, and just about any other commodity to be brought directly to us. We don't have to move except to open the door, and we can do that at our convenience. In contrast, our neurobiology evolved with a critical link between physical effort and outcomes.

Things we value have worth

This means establishing what is worth it requires experience. Those experiences mean going through things even when we don't know whether it will feel subjectively "worth it" until afterward. This is a real challenge for all of us especially folks trying to carry out some "behavior changes". By definition a new thing we are trying means we don't know if it has value to us yet. Many times we have to just try it out and see.

This can be a real challenge because we are working against a powerfully evolutionarily conserved imperative to minimize energy expenditure. We are programmed to not "waste" resources and to be thrifty with energy out. While this is very economical from the perspective of the preservation of a species, it's perhaps not so useful in our modern-day lives where we typically have a disconnect between reward and effort.

As such a way to view effort-based decision making is instead around an economy related to how we feel and react to a situation. This "economy of experience" can conceptually guide decisions we might make, especially in new contexts where novel choices, those without any history of known reward or certain cost, are made.

What is useful is not always obvious

"Absorb what is useful" is something Bruce Lee wrote and talked a lot about during his brief time with us. It's often interpreted from the concept of you can look at certain things and pick and choose what you think might be useful, especially in the context of martial arts but it applies to just putting everything I would suggest. A lot of the time you don't know what is useful until you've tried to use it. Some things are difficult to predict in advance of trying them out. That's why it's so important to realize that our ability to have value judgments can't come just from a simple glance or what we feel is our understanding of the situation. We have to try it to know.

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Paradoxically the more we work at something and it becomes a habit the more we can value what originally had the same physical cost. Or in some cases, even if the cost is higher. My own experience with my daily martial arts training and all of my accumulated injuries over the years have made that much more difficult to do physically, but instead of this being a discounted function that changes my perception of the value, I value it more.

If you are planning something new in your life, perhaps turning a corner into a new year, what I'm suggesting here is blending Bruce Lee's absorption of what is useful with the idea of just doing it. Sometimes just doing it now is the only way to find out if we'll still want to do it in the future.

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2024)