Chapter Content
Okay, so, picture this. It's, like, a totally normal night, right? I’m at my house, and one of my kids is bouncing around, you know, jumping on the couch arm, like they do. And he's playing this, uh, this new song he learned on the guitar. And my other kid, bless their heart, is trying to show my grandma, Bev, like, a Lego thing, like right up in her face. I mean, practically poking her eyeball out with these bricks! Dishes are clanging, my phone's blowing up with notifications, and, yeah, I just felt this, like, you know, this tightening feeling? Like being in a cave where the walls are, like, slowly closing in on you.
It's that feeling, you know? The one where you're just trapped between all these trade-offs, having to pick and choose between things that, honestly, all matter in different ways. Like, supporting your coworkers at work or trying to, like, carve out some real family time on the weekend. It just feels like there's never enough "you" to go around to do everything you want to do.
So, on this particular night, I look at Bev, who is, like, seriously one of my favorite people in the world, and I decided, you know what? I'm gonna prioritize some time with her. I grabbed her hand and kind of steered her around all the Lego landmines, past the wreckage of a wooden block tower, and out the door.
And you know, Bev's ninety-nine, her hands are, like, so soft but also surprisingly strong. I always try to, like, really remember how they feel, you know? Like, her skin is so thin, like smooth tissue paper, kind of gripping mine. And outside, I could finally, like, breathe again, you know? I felt that little burst of relief you get when you think you've made, like, the right choice. But, uh, it only lasted a minute. Because Bev turns to me and she says, and I quote, "I like coming to your house and seeing the kids, but we're not really spending time together."
So, I let go of her hand. I was like, "Of course we are!"
And she’s all, “Not really. We *see* each other, sure, but when I come to your house, you're not really paying attention to me.” Which, I knew, she was really saying, without saying it out loud, you know, "I see you *think* we're spending quality time, but we can, like, do better, go deeper, than just a ten-minute walk around the block."
And, ugh, I didn't *want* her to be right, but, honestly, I knew she was. There's always this little voice in the back of my head reminding me to spend more time with her, but it's just, like, a whisper compared to all the other…shouting, you know? And when she suggested that I come to her place instead of her coming to mine, the shouting just got louder, you know? Kids, work, traffic, parking near her apartment… So, there I was, standing under the open sky, feeling like I was back in that cave, you know? Elbows tucked in, shoulders practically up to my ears. How was I supposed to deal with that feeling?
Maybe you've been there, too, right? You know, in a situation where you *know* there’s this important thing you need to do, but you just can’t seem to actually do it. Maybe your doctor's concerned about your health, and you know you need to, like, exercise more, but when you finally have a little free time, it’s just so easy to just, you know, sink into the couch and watch some TV. Or, maybe you've been wanting to, like, mentor someone on your team at work, but, uh, deadlines just keep getting in the way. Or maybe you want to meet new people, but you always end up talking to the same friends or, even worse, just staring at your phone every time you go to a party.
The, uh, the framework of the situation is so familiar, isn’t it? I want to do the thing, and the thing is important to me, but it's also, like, *hard*. For reasons.
I mean, I didn’t really think about it like this back then, but this is basically the same problem I’ve been studying my whole career, you know? How we choose, how we choose to change. Every day, I walk over to the University of Pennsylvania, where I run the Communication Neuroscience Lab. And my team and I design experiments to look at, you know, the connection between what people value, the choices they make, and, really, how that's all affected by the world around them. We use neuroimaging to look at the brain systems involved. And, you know, we’ve even helped figure out how these systems relate to how people spend their time, how they change their behavior, and how they connect with other people. So, you'd think I'd be, like, the expert, right? Bev's, like, one of the most important people in my life. Shouldn't I know how to prioritize time with her? Shouldn't I, like, be in control of what's valuable to me?
Turns out, not so much. It was even hard to just, like, clear out enough space to even, you know, think about what she was saying before I just automatically told her she was wrong. Let alone ask myself, like, "What's going on here? Why am I, like, pushing back so hard against visiting one of my favorite people?"
Why am I making *this* choice?
And, even worse, why do I keep making this choice, over and over again?
If a friend came to me with this, I probably would’ve told them that we're usually so focused on the *results* of a choice that we miss the chance to actually figure out *why* we made it in the first place, which makes changing anything harder. One way to fix that is to understand a system in the brain that's super important for, like, a lot of the choices we make. Neuroscientists like me call it the value system.
Sometimes people are surprised to hear a neuroscientist talk about a "value system" and "what we value." They think of, like, moral values, you know? A code of conduct, a feeling of what's good and right, or just some important principles that we want to live by. Or they might think about economists talking about prices and, you know, getting a good deal. But when *we* talk about value, we mean the amount of reward your brain *expects* you to get from doing something, in that particular moment.
Every time we make a choice, the value system’s job is to, like, weigh all these different things against each other, in what we call the value calculation. And yeah, that includes things like moral values and the actual, you know, economic value, but it also includes the results of your past choices, your mood, what the people around you think, and so much more. A reward can be money, but it can also be, like, friendship, you know? Or seeing something good happen in the world, reaching a small goal, or just having the energy to, like, finally run a marathon. There are a lot of things our brains value, a lot of ways our brains can find reward. But, when we keep making the same choices, it doesn’t always feel that way. Getting takeout wins over saving for retirement, you know? Deadlines win over professional development. And falling down the internet rabbit hole wins over spending time with people we love. That's how the choices our brain makes don't always line up with what we actually think of as what we value the most.
Sometimes, that's because, you know, external expectations are unreasonable. But, sometimes, we *can* actually choose to make a different choice. And the value system is, like, right in the middle of those decisions to change, too. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I started looking at what happens in people’s brains when they choose to change their behavior. In these experiments, my graduate school advisor, Matt Lieberman, another graduate student, Elliot Berkman, and I, like, scanned people’s brains while they were responding to messages about wearing sunscreen and quitting smoking. And after I became a professor, we kept doing similar experiments where we were encouraging people to exercise more and drive safely. We wanted to figure out what was going on inside their brains when they were thinking about how they might change, and then see if they actually *did* change. No one knew if we could actually connect what we saw in the lab to actual, real-life behavior change. But then we started seeing a pattern in the data, and we realized we had found something important. Something we could actually use to help people change.
We found that if certain parts of a person's value system, like this area called the medial prefrontal cortex, showed more activity when they saw a message about, like, sunscreen or smoking or exercise, they were more likely to actually change their behavior based on the message, whether or not they even thought the message was effective. It was, like, our first hint at how the value system was connected to pretty important, real-world choices. And a bunch of other studies, by us and by others, showed similar things when people were deciding what to eat, what to buy, how much to save for retirement, you know?
At first, we were just trying to see if brain activity had anything to do with the choices people were making outside the lab. But once we knew it did, we asked ourselves: How can we, you know, use this to help make change happen? I thought the answer was to somehow make the system more active, but it took, like, a decade of research to figure out how.
During that time, we did all sorts of experiments, like giving people feedback about what others had done, helping them connect with their, like, core values, or comparing how the value system reacts to rewards that are right now versus the ones that are way off in the future. And we saw how these simple things could change value system activity up or down, which could ultimately help someone change their behavior. We found out how changing where people focus their attention, like on different past experiences, current needs, or, you know, their dreams for the future, changes the value calculation. This research also showed that the value system does more than just measure what we think we *should* do or what we *want* to do if we were our best selves. There’s so much more going on than just a simple push and pull between desire and reason. The value system thinks about what we've done before and what happened, what do I need *right now*? So, the answer isn’t just to try harder, to force ourselves to make "good" decisions so that we can control our impulses. When we understand how and why our brains make decisions, we can focus on different things to change the choices we make and how we feel about them. This gives us new places to intervene, and those can be chances for change.
I like to think of understanding the value system as, like, having a flashlight in the cave. You know, it helps us see clearly what's shaping the choices we and others make. My team and others have found that knowing what we want and why is super important for happiness, but people are all over the place on how much they actually know why they’re doing what they’re doing. This knowledge might make us feel more understanding toward ourselves and each other, showing us that there are reasons we make the choices we do, even if we wish we’d done something different. But, even beyond that, this understanding can help us make different choices, maybe make our daily decisions line up better with our big-picture goals. Shining that light around a dark cave might show a pulley that opens a door or a lever that shows a skylight. Sometimes, there are whole new paths we didn't even know were there, they just weren’t lit up. If we know how things work, it’s easier to understand ourselves and others, and, you know, navigate our way through, together.
And me? I kept thinking about what Bev had said. I’d known for a while that I wanted to spend more time with her, and she was right that it’s different when we’re at her house, just the two of us. There, we go for walks, run errands, or go through her clothes like I’m shopping in a fancy thrift store, all while talking and connecting, with very few interruptions. But I also wanted to be seen as, you know, a hardworking lab director, professor, and administrator. And in the middle of all the emails and deadlines, it just felt hard to say that I couldn’t do something because I needed to hang out with my grandma.
Even if my best self wanted to hang with Bev, my value system was also thinking about other urgent things, like my identity and what other people thought. And, maybe even more than I would want it to if I really thought about what was important to me at that moment. That's because the value system doesn’t work alone. It works with other brain systems, including the ones that handle who we think we are and what we think other people think and feel. These were all working hard when I chose other things over Bev. I thought of myself as a hardworking leader in the lab I had started, and I thought of the people around me as also prioritizing work, or maybe parenting, or watching reality TV, but not, you know, hanging out with their grandmas. These systems were making that information more important in my value calculation when I thought about visiting Bev.
But Bev *is* important to me, and after her, you know, little wake-up call, I wanted to change for her. Once I was clear about that goal, I knew I needed a different plan. My research said that the things I was paying attention to in my value system were leading me to answers that didn’t match how I wanted to act. I also knew that one way to change what you think is to change what you think *about*. I had to see the situation differently, to help my value system decide that visiting Bev is the decision that most matches who I am and what I want.
Sometimes it starts with, you know, stepping back, noticing what things we're prioritizing in the value calculation, and asking, what are the other possibilities? And then, we sometimes see something we hadn't seen before, or a new voice changes how we see what was there in the first place. I started looking for a new intervention point, a lever I hadn’t noticed.
And for me, it actually came from a podcast, How to Save a Planet. There was this episode by Kendra Pierre-Louis, encouraging people to ride their bikes more and talking about how joyful it could be. I'd ridden my bike in Philly before, but I always imagined it as, like, speeding around like a bike messenger and getting all sweaty and stressed out weaving through traffic. But, listening to people on the podcast teetering along on bikes, laughing as they went faster, I started to wonder if this was the lever I'd been looking for. If I went at my own pace and used the bike lanes, biking wouldn't just avoid the traffic and the hassle of getting to Bev's house, it could actually make the journey *fun*.
So, one day, it was bright, the sun was warm, and I stood on the pedals and glided from my house to the corner. I sped up onto the new bike lane on Spruce Street, past the frat houses, before the smooth bike lane turned into potholes. I bounced past the hospital complex, towards the Schuylkill River. On the car-free path, the sun was shining on the water, joggers passed dog walkers, and I passed the joggers. On my bike, I could go so fast, faster than running! It felt so free, like the city, and everything it had to offer, was open to me in a whole different way. And it was fun!
When I got to my grandmother's, we went for a walk, picked up what she needed at the drugstore, walked up her favorite street, and said hello to the statue of General Pulaski behind the Art Museum. She thinks he's very handsome.
Doing it once made it easier to imagine doing it again, and this visit led to more. Biking to Bev's helped me feel good about a choice that I had realized was right for me. It, like, tipped the scales of my value calculation by moving the "getting there" part of visiting Bev from the annoying side of the equation to the joyful side, which let me focus on the rest of what I love about those visits. I help her do things around her house, we go for walks, and I hear stories about her childhood, about raising my mom, about what it's like getting older. And that feeling of impossible effort? It doesn’t feel as hard when I focus on what actually matters to me, and the joy of coasting on my bike, and how I never regret having gone.
I still get that feeling of, you know, constriction at work when deadlines pile up, or with friends when I realize it's been years since we really talked. But, these moments of clarity and the changes that come with them can open up a space, a crack for light to shine through, a possibility that wasn’t there before. It starts with being curious about why we do what we do, and then finding ways to change. It can mean trying something new, even if you’re worried you won’t do it right, or listening to someone who's very different from you. Maybe this will let other possibilities grow, and push the crack open a little wider, exploring, reaching out for a new way forward. Maybe you’ll be able to see more as the tiny crack widens. And maybe not just for yourself, but for those around you. It could mean encouraging your kids to try something that seems scary to them, or helping a colleague say no to taking on even more work. These kinds of changes can seem small at first, but sometimes these choices mean a lot. Because, after all, you make yourself with what you choose.