Annie focuses on her pair of tens. She thinks about what she knows and doesn’t know. What Annie likes about poker are the certainties. The trick to this game is making predictions, imagining alternative futures and then calculating which ones are most likely to come true. Statistics make Annie feel in control. She might not know exactly what’s coming, but she knows the precise likelihoods of being right or wrong. The poker table feels serene.
And now the FossilMan has blown that peacefulness to hell by making a bet that doesn’t match any of the scenarios inside Annie’s head. She has no idea how to gauge what is most likely to occur. She’s frozen.
“I’m really sorry,” she says. “I just need a second more.”
Many afternoons during Annie’s childhood, her mother would sit at the kitchen table with a pack of cigarettes, a glass of scotch, and a deck of cards, and play hand after hand of solitaire until the alcohol was gone and the ashtray was full. Then she would stagger to the couch and fall asleep.
Annie’s father was an English teacher at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, a boarding school for the scions of senators and CEOs. Her family lived in a house attached to one of the dorms and so whenever her parents fought about her mom’s drinking or her father’s lack of money—which they did frequently—Annie was sure her classmates could overhear. She often felt like an outcast at the school, too poor to vacation with the rich kids, too smart to bond with the popular girls, too anxious to be comfortable among the hippies, too interested in math and science for student government. For Annie, the key to surviving amid the shifting tectonics of teenage popularity was learning to forecast. If she could predict which students’ social capital was rising or falling, it was easier to avoid the infighting. If she could predict when her parents were arguing or her mom was drinking, she would know if it was safe to bring classmates home.
“When you have an alcoholic parent, you spend a lot of time thinking about what’s coming,” Annie told me. “You never take for granted that you’ll get dinner or that someone will tell you when to go to bed. You’re always waiting for everything to fall apart.”
After graduation, Annie left for college at Columbia and soon discovered the psychology department. Here, at last, was what she had been looking for. There were classes that reduced human behavior to understandable rules and social formulas; teachers who gave lectures on the different categories of personality and why anxieties emerge; studies about the impact of having an alcoholic parent. She felt like she was starting to understand why she sometimes had panic attacks, why it occasionally felt impossible for her to leave her bed, why she carried this dread that something bad might happen at any time.
Psychology, at that moment, was undergoing a transformation brought on by discoveries in cognitive sciences that were bringing a scientific rigor to understanding behaviors that had long seemed immune to methodical analysis. Psychologists and economists were working together to understand the codes that explain why people do what they do. Some of the most exciting research—work that would eventually win a Nobel Prize—was focused on studying how people make decisions. Why, researchers wondered, do some people decide to have children when the costs, in terms of money and hard work, are so obvious, and the payoffs, such as love and contentment, are so hard to calculate? How do people decide to send their kids to expensive private schools instead of free public ones? Why does someone decide to get married after playing the field for years?
Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future. When we send a child to private school, it is, in part, a bet that money spent today on schooling will yield happiness and opportunities in the future. When we decide to have a baby, we’re forecasting that the joy of becoming a parent will outweigh the cost of sleepless nights. When we choose to get married—though it may seem completely unromantic—we are, at some level, calculating that the benefits of settling down are greater than the opportunity of seeing who else comes along. Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.
What fascinated psychologists and economists was how frequently people managed, in the course of their everyday lives, to choose among various futures without becoming paralyzed by the complexities of each choice. What’s more, it appeared that some people were more skilled than others at envisioning various futures and choosing the best ones for themselves. Why were some people able to make better decisions?
When Annie graduated from college, she enrolled in a PhD program in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and began collecting grants and publications. After five years of hard work and a successful run of papers and awards, with only months to go to her doctorate, she was invited to give a series of “job talks” at several universities. If she performed well, she was practically guaranteed a prestigious professorship.
The night before her first speech at New York University, she took the train to Manhattan. She had been feeling anxious all week. At dinner she began throwing up. She waited an hour, drank a glass of water, and threw up again. She couldn’t turn off her anxiety. She couldn’t stop thinking that she was making a mistake, that she didn’t want to be a professor, that she was only doing all this because it had seemed like the safest, most predictable path. She called NYU to postpone her talk. Her fiancé flew to Manhattan and took her back to Philadelphia, where she checked into a hospital. She was discharged weeks later, but even then her anxiety was like a hot stone in her stomach. She went straight from the hospital to a classroom at Penn where she was supposed to teach and somehow made it through the lecture, so nauseous and jumpy she almost fainted. She couldn’t teach another class, she decided. She couldn’t give her job talks. She couldn’t become a professor.
She shoved her research into the trunk of her car, sent a note to her professors saying that she would be hard to reach for a while, and drove west. Her fiancé had found a house that cost $11,000 outside Billings, Montana. When Annie arrived, she determined that, even at that price, they had paid too much. But by then, she was too exhausted to do anything about it. She put her dissertation materials into the closet and settled onto the couch. Her only goal was to think as little as possible.
A few weeks later, her brother, Howard Lederer, called to invite her to Las Vegas for a vacation. Howard was a professional poker player, and every spring for the past few years, he had flown Annie out to sit by the swimming pool of the Golden Nugget while he played in a tournament. Whenever she got bored, she would wander inside to watch him compete or play a few hands of poker herself. When he called this year, however, Annie said she was too sick to make the trip.
Howard was concerned. Annie loved Vegas. She never turned down a trip.
“Why don’t you at least find a local poker game?” he said. “It might help you get out of the house.”