Why It Takes So Long to Decide

By KAREN STABINER
NYT

One of the surest ways to frustrate my mother was for her to accompany Grandma Ethel, then in her mid-90s, to her favorite delicatessen near the assisted-living facility she called home in Chicago. It had a menu as big as a billboard, and Ethel relished the chance to consider almost every dish before she settled on an old favorite, no matter how long the process took.

This familiar dynamic — an elderly parent who acts as though she has all the time in the world, and an adult caregiver with an eye on the clock — has a basis, as it turns out, in science. According to Gregory Samanez-Larkin, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University and co-director of the Scientific Research Network on Decision Neuroscience and Aging, the way we make decisions changes on a fundamental, physiological level as we age. The brain begins to approach its tasks differently, and once we understand the changes, we can learn to work with them.

To research his doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Dr. Samanez-Larkin focused on brain systems involved in computing value when making financial decisions. “These systems are at the core of making decisions,” he said. In one study, he studied brain activity among research subjects aged 20 to 85 as they considered a set of investment options.

(More here.)

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