Scatterbrain by Henning Beck

Author:Henning Beck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The language of the brain

THE BRAIN IS relatively bad in arithmetic but is able to appropriate its numerical regions to construct abstract thought. Mathematics is practical proof that we are much more than accurate calculating machines since machines are quickly able to find the total of 145,099 + 27,845 but are unable to do anything with it.

The fact remains: the language of the brain is full of patterns and emotions. This has practical effects on our behavior because no matter how much you might try to impress others with your numerical facts, you don’t stand a chance against a picture. This is how Apple sells its iPhones. Not by flaunting all the technical details of its hardware (by the way, no one really knows how fast the iPhone processor really is) but by generating the image that if you have an iPhone, you’re hip, you’re connected with your friends, you’re snapping photos of your relatives laughing, and you are able to share ideas with the world. It doesn’t really matter how fast the dumb processor is.

Imagine you have two different options for donating money to a children’s aid foundation in Africa. In the first option, you read that your money will reach a seven-year-old girl named Rokia who lives below the poverty line and who, along with her family, often experiences hunger. Your donation would significantly improve Rokia’s life. In the second option, you read that due to heavy rainfall, the rice production in Zambia has decreased by 42 percent, and there are now three million citizens suffering from hunger. To which cause would you rather donate? If you are like the participants in a study from 2007, you would choose the first case. If one puts a photograph of wide-eyed, sad Rokia next to the written material, participants will donate exactly twice as much as those who only get to read a few numbers and statistics.13 This is true, even though the second group of participants read about the suffering of a much larger group of people, and not only about one individual little girl. But this information was unfortunately abstract and numerical and thus less heartwarming.

We come into the world with a sense for small numbers and amounts but, unfortunately, not for probabilities and statistics. Our modern ability to compute has helped us to master these emotionless percentages that make us believe we can better understand the world, when in fact we forget that every percentage must be painstakingly translated into an image in our brain. And we are very selfish when it comes to this, because our brain is not interested in what is happening to a statistical population, but only in what is happening to ourselves.

Would you bring an umbrella with you if your weather app predicts a 10 percent chance of rain? What this prediction means is that of ten different weather models for a particular period of time, one of them has predicted rain with absolute certainty. If you are unlucky, this is precisely the weather model that is going to find you in the exact moment when you venture outside.

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