Take your chances

Journalist Kayt Sukel blends self-help and neuroscience to explain why we do what we do when faced with risk

HUMANS ARE POOR AT MAKING RATIONAL DECISIONS WHEN FACED WITH RISK

The Art of Risk: The New Science of Courage, Caution, and Chance

Kayt Sukel

National Geographic

288 pp; $28

You couldn’t daunt Kayt Sukel in her daredevil youth. “I faced challenges head-on,” she recalls, including such feats of science journalism as experiencing an orgasm in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. But somewhere along the line, she writes in The Art of Risk: The New Science of Courage, Caution, and Chance, “I lost my mojo.” She began to fear taking risks, in life and in her work.

Hence the book, an effort to recapture her mojo, although in a smarter, not so reckless version. In aid of this objective, she has available to her the resources of a new field of study, “decision neuroscience,” a discipline that attempts, Sukel writes, “to shed light on what is happening in our brains as we make decisions.” It’s not a pretty sight. Human beings are poor at making rational decisions when faced with risk, Sukel states. Defining risk as “a decision or behaviour that has a significant probability of resulting in a negative outcome,” Sukel insists that “We are terrible at calculating the actual probabilities of specific outcomes.”

To find out why this is so Sukel begins her investigation with a look at that rawest form of risk- taking, casino gambling, in the company of an expert player, one Gayle King. “He put his faith in mathematics,” Sukel reports. He is an exquisite calculator of odds. Yet even in this pure domain of math, variables intrude, including King’s state of mind. He sometimes plays craps, for example, a much more amiable game than the pastime favoured by those stonefaced sharks of the poker table. “The numbers don’t tell us how it feels to throw the dice with a dozen people not only cheering you on but also raking in the wins right along beside you,” he tells Sukel. Even in poker, math is not all — the good players read the other players as much as they read the cards.

Indeed there is a tension running throughout the book between understanding risk-taking as a “mathy” exercise of analysis versus a more feeling approach. “I’m someone who likes math,” Sukel protests at one point — but she also dismisses the “mathy” theories of risk-taking espoused by the “neuro- economists,” who maintain that human beings are rational and ultimately make rational decisions.

In the meantime we are supposed to be poking around the laboratory. Lest we forget that the book represents the latest in what the brain has to say, The Art of Risk includes drawings of the Limbic System and the Mesocortical Limbic Circuitry, and mentions a few “pretty darn interesting” genes along the way. But this science talk leads us often to fairly commonplace conclusions. We are told, for example, that individuals are more likely to engage in specific risky behaviour if they see other people doing it. We are told we can get a grip on our emotions when faced by a tough decision by stepping back from those emotions via meditation or even drawing up a pro and con list.

We are told that practice makes perfect, lessening the risk of certain risky acts. This is important — the problem with mastering many highrisk behaviours is the practitioner’s tendency to think too much. A comedian — practitioner of a true high risk occupation — tells me that the trick with improvisations is not to think. But that comes from hours of trying out things onstage.

We are complex creatures who need a fair bit of dopamine and other neurochemicals to get us out of bed in the morning, much less learn a new skill or organize a business presentation. Sukel is apt at constructing analogies that simplify the brain process. “You need your gas, that increased basal ganglia activity,” she writes, “and your brakes, that prefrontal regulator, working together to make optimal decisions.” But she well knows it is a simplification. She knows, as she puts it, that “no one gene is dictating our response to risk.” She quotes a psychologist: “Human behavioural traits are influenced by hundreds, perhaps even thousands of common genetic variants.” And each variant may have only an extremely minuscule effect.

Genes, dopamine, basal ganglia are all subject ultimately to what Sukel calls “good old-fashioned reason.” Or, to put it in slightly more technical fashion, a “cognitive override” option. The human model, it seems, comes with this feature you can use when the dopamine gets out of hand, or when the basal ganglia activity overheats. Every human should learn to use the cognitive override option frequently.

In keeping with the stated purpose of the book, articulated at the outset, The Art of Risk is really a selfhelp volume drawing on the vocabulary of science. Referring to the importance of familiarity and experience in decision-making, Sukel writes, “I know it sounds a bit like good old-fashioned common sense. But it’s good old-fashioned common sense that’s been validated in the laboratory.” This could be said of a great many of Sukel’s points. Certainly Sukel does not wander too far away from interviews with neuroscientists. They are the prefrontal regulators of her book. By contrast she seems to have no interest in literature, although there are novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert and Henry James — not to mention contemporary fiction — that would shed light on Sukel’s theme.

In the meantime we learn from Sukel and her authorities that the successful risk- taker is thoughtful and prepared, that he or she visualizes success and keeps the focus on the big picture and practices deliberately. All of this is delivered in a highly readable style suited to the author’s long experience in science journalism.

If there is any justice in the kingdom of letters, the book should help the author recapture her mojo.