The Human Brain Versus Science, Part Two
Monday, March 31, 2008 at 2:43 pm UTC by David Crotty permalink
Really nice article by Jonah Lehrer on “The Illusion of Streaks” that ties in well both with an earlier post I’d written here, and with an argument I was trying to make in a bar this weekend. The basic premise is that the human brain has evolved in a manner that leads to a distrust of scientific reasoning and a dislike of doing the math in favor of stories. As a species, we tend to impose pattern where there is, in fact, no actual pattern.
Lehrer’s article looks at this year’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, along with several studies on basketball and baseball, and discusses how we perceive players to be having “hot streaks”, when in fact, such things don’t exist. This continues to strike me as a major stumbling block in our scientific educational efforts. Fairy tales and fantasies just seem to work better for the human brain than fact-based reasoning.
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Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 3:05 pm UTC
I think a major problem is that humans deal with a complex world by creating stories. Or we can call them Heuristics since we are scientists. As do many animals, we look for simplifying patterns. Most times this is quite successful and allows us to thrive. Sometimes this gets us confused, so that we see a streak when it is random. Or fail to understand compound interest.
I think this gets to the controversy over at ScienceBlogs about the topic of framing. Many scientists have layered very complex heuristics (i.e. the Scientific Method or even peer review) over the normal ones in most people. This allows us to more accurately describe the natural world we find.
But it often makes it more difficult to tell the important stories of science in ways that match those of others. without a similar overlay. This is important because research has shown that people really only retain information that already fits into their own heuristic patterns and ignore those that don’t.
That is why scientists who can cross this barrier, such as Sagan or Gould or even Myers, are so important. They can help translate the stories of science into those of others without a dramatic loss in the complexity we find.