Same old story: you're at a restaurant and you don’t know what to order. After looking at the menu for awhile you don’t know what to order, the steak or burger. In the end, you order the burger, but during your meal, you keep thinking that you should have ordered the steak. Indecisiveness is not being able to make decisions quickly and effectively. Why people are indecisive and how it is studied are related to the reasons of why people can’t seem to make up their minds, the study of indecisiveness on rats, and the brain waves behind indecisiveness.

The first reason is why people can't seem to make up their minds. Amy Rigby talks about the recurring themes in five of the bestselling books on indecisiveness. Only a few of the books will be talked about. The first book Rigby talks about is Algorithms to Live By: The  Computer Science of Human Decisions. The book talks about Last Resource Used (LCU). LCU is getting rid of items that were last used. “Mathematics dictates that you should take 37% of the time or options you have to simply look (you’re not committing yet), and then after that, you should leap, as in, commit to the first option that is better than everything you’ve seen so far.” The second book is Thinking Fast and Slow. The book talks about two systems of the brain. The first system is quick and automatic and the second system is slow and deliberate. Similar to the first book Rigby says that it’s better to trust algorithms than your gut.“While it may feel strange to go against your gut, a body of research assures you this will give you the greatest chance of picking the best option”. The final book is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The book is about how the brain is able to make decisions in the blink of an eye. The phenomenon is called “thin-slicing.” An example is a firefighter that has been in many fires may know when a building is about to explode. Without thinking they will run out of the building knowing that in the next few seconds the building will blow. “Blink has this to say: While snap judgments can be accurate, they can go horribly wrong, especially when we’re under stress.” Rigby also says that the books talk about different things, but they have recurring themes. Some of the themes are algorithms are better at making decisions than the human brain and take your time, but not too much time.     

The next reason is the study of indecisiveness on rats. The study was done by the Journal of Neuroscience. The author of the article is Sofia Deleniv. They did a test where they had a maze and every right or left turn there would be food. The rat was hesitant to turn left or right if the rat went the wrong way it turned back and went the other way. "When rats reached that point of decision-making, the researchers observed activations of so-called place cells, located in a brain region called the hippocampus. These brain cells, which earned their discoverer the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, are thought to create a mental map of an animal’s surroundings. Each of the roughly 1 million place cells found in the hippocampus appears to be associated with a coordinate on this mental map." The next part of the test was injecting the rats with clonidine. Clonidine is an apprehensive drug that is used to help treat hypertension, prevent migraines, and decrease opioid and nicotine withdrawal symptoms. They injected the rats with clonidine and when they ran the tests again the rats were less hesitant with their decisions.

The University of Zurich discovered the brain waves behind indecisiveness. The University says that “some people find it difficult to make decisions. In a new study, neuroeconomists from the University of Zurich now reveal that the intensity of the communication between different regions of the brain dictates whether we are indecisive or not.” The University was successful in their studies and found out how and why people can or are indecisive. They also noticed that the more intense the information flow is the more decisive they are. Professor Christian Ruff, a neuroeconomist at the University says that the researchers discovered that “the precision and stability of preference decisions do not only depend on the strength of the activation of one or more brain regions. Instead, the key for stable preference choices is the intensity of the communication between two areas of the brain which represent our preferences or are involved in spatial orientation and action planning.” This statement shows that the more people are under pressure the faster they make their decisions. This isn’t always the best way because they might not have enough time to think about the question and they might make the wrong decision.

In the end, indecisiveness can be challenging to deal with because is certain situations you might over think and run out of time. I personally procrastinate from time to time while I’m doing my homework. Indecisiveness isn’t a bad thing, it just can affect you when things need to be done. Why people can’t seem to make up their minds, the study of indecisiveness on rats and the brain waves behind indecisiveness are all related to why people are indecisive and how it is studied. People naturally procrastinate from time to time, but, I’ll leave you with the question: Do you know if you are indecisive?