The lure of doors

Can you measure your life by the number of doors you opened?

That may sound good as hand-me-down Internet poetry but practicing it in real terms may not give you the life rewards that you are looking for. A recent New York Times article by John Tierney entitled “The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors” alerted me to this idea. Tierney wrote about one experiment done by a behavioral economist named Dan Ariely. Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, and the main experiment in it, showed how people will keep on opening doors even if they could maximize their “points” by staying on one door (causing other doors to eventually disappear) or even if it will cost them “clicks” that they could have used to maximize “points” on a chosen door. You can play this game yourself (http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=117).

While this gives a bit of insight that the “journey” or even the sense of adventure and newness that comes to opening doors matters as much as the “points” that you get from making choices, I was intrigued by the explanations offered by Ariely.

We always hear the phrase “I just want to keep my options open.” Ariely said that more often, we overbook our own commitments because we do not want to close the possibilities just because they MAY lead to other things we MAY want later. Note, the word is “may.” More often, instead of feeling enriched by engaging in so many things, you end up more harassed and overfatigued by the activities needed just to keep all those doors open. I was expecting that the reason that behavioral economist Ariely would give for this penchant for keeping doors open is our propensity for “risk.” But no, he said it was more of avoiding the pain of seeing a door close. He concluded this because the experiment had offered the subjects the option of having the doors reappear at no cost, yet they still chose to prevent the doors from fading.

When Ariely mentioned “pain,” I wanted to see what neuroscience would have to say about something like this. Since pain is just the other side of the reward or pleasure we feel when we choose, I wanted to find an article that would speak about how we choose and what happens inside our brains when we do. There was one article published in the journal Nature in June 2006 that had to do with animated slot machines and what happens inside the brains of the subjects when they “exploited” one slot machine that they thought yielded the most money and when they “explored” or sought out different machines. It turns out that those who were exploring, had their more “logical” brain regions active while those who were “exploiting” had their “reward” centers glowing.

The results above seemingly put the social sciences and the hard science at odds. The social sciences interpret “exploration” of other doors as the more “irrational” behavior that is turned on more because of the desire to avoid pain elicited by a closed door. On the other hand, the neuroscientists show “exploration” as the more logical activity based on the brain regions activated by such an adventure. Another seeming conflict is that to the neuroscientist, the “reward” areas of the brain lit up upon the “exploitation” of one choice, while to the behavioral economist, “exploitation” is the “rational,” more logical behavior since it clearly maximizes points for the subject.

This clash is not rare. The “soft” social sciences, in this case, behavioral, often clash with the sciences that are “hard” and peer into the anatomy and function of the organ responsible for our behavior which is our brain. But in the sciences, there is always a way to arbitrate, without having to send goons or issue an executive gag order. For starters, the two experiments are not identical so it would probably be good to have an experiment to hook the brains of the gamers on the Predictably Irrational experiment to fMRIs or the appropriate brain scanner to see what really happens when we have humans confronted with doors and the choices of having them disappear. I also think that the neuroscience experiment had a design that had slot machines which overtly dealt with “gambling” and involved “symbolic” wealth (so it would not be a surprise that it will give feelings of reward) and not merely points like the door experiment.

But even without these experiments in behavioral economics and neuroscience, we ordinary mortals are very familiar with the desire to “keep our options open.” Personally, I do not consider it a mantra. I have always treated “having options” as the starting point in anything and have always thought that the more thoughtful strategy was to trim my choices according to what is important to me, what I can do, what I am good at, and how much time I have. I have also learned that when you focus on one door, it naturally opens others that in fact introduces you deeper into the kind of life you want to live or the person you want to become. I have long interpreted the sound of doors closing after I have made any one choice, be it personal or professional, as liberating. I do not mourn it when I close the door on a choice — be it a person, an event or a job. It defines the space of my life moving forward and not being stretched in mere flash presences at multiple doorsteps. But even with that, I still feel overcommitted and I still long for more long weekends of rest.

I do not think these experiments are saying you should just be single-minded in your pursuit of your possibilities. They point to our natural sense of adventure and willingness to risk but perhaps, hints on wise counsel to define the extent of your commitment to each door you open. That way, you can define who you are beyond merely being at the cusp of endless adventures. There is a far more exhilarating feeling when you are able to deeply explore the important choices you have made.

I guess one measure of a life is how much you learned and what you did with what you learned, after you opened each and every door. Maybe the strength of your life’s choices is not measured by how many doors you opened but how you resisted the trapping lure of eternal doors. 

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