Heuristics

One of my three children is a hypochondriac.  (We all know which one I’m talking about.)  Someday I may regret my refusal to go to the Emergency Room over an alleged case of bubonic plague or Ebola. But until we move to Canada or the USA achieves universal healthcare, I can live with that risk. 

In my first blog post about how brains work a couple of months ago, I described the “Roger drinking game” played by colleagues from my first legal job: “identify a conversation topic that would reduce me to silence.” No one ever won.

It turns out don’t have to go to Yale Law School to play the game. According to Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, “The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way.”

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes how our brains rely on two contrasting mental processors, which I've referred to as Thing 1 and Thing 2. The first system is fast and automatic, multi-tasking as it retrieves memories and generates intuitions. In contrast, the second system allocates our brains’ limited conscious attention to effortful mental tasks.

According to Kahneman, one way Thing 1’s automatic system reduces the mental burden on Thing 2 is to “generate intuitive opinions on complex matters.” If the answer to a difficult “target question” doesn’t immediately come to mind, Thing 1 will substitute “a related question that is easier and will answer it” instead of the target question. The substitute question is a “heuristic” – “a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The word comes from the same root as eureka.”

Returning to my hypochondriac daughter: it's hard to predict occurrences of very rare events. But when you haven't had a single vulpine sighting despite numerous cries of wolf, a reasonable heuristic would be to leave your wolf probability forecast set at zero.

The British sitcom The IT Crowd takes place at the London headquarters of fictional corporation. The IT department is housed in a dingy basement office. The team consists of geeky savant Moss; shy Roy; and their ambitious-but-technically-ignorant manager Jen.

Roy’s exasperation and laziness results in a classic IT heuristic. Regardless of their problem, help desk callers all hear the same tape-recorded question: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

One of my all-time favorite television programs is the 1980s British political satire Yes, Minister, along with its sequel Yes, Prime Minister.  The show centers on the dynamic between a career politician and a career civil servant. Jim Hacker MP is named as Minister of the fictional “Department of Administrative Affairs.” His efforts to implement self-promoting new policies are foiled by the department’s bureaucratic Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby. The Minister’s frazzled Principal Private Secretary, Bernard, is whipsawed between his two masters. Occasionally the Minister and Sir Humphrey join forces against common enemies, such as their rivals’ attempts to reduce government efficiency by eliminating the Department. 

All three characters are hilarious, and all three portrayals brilliant. But the highlight of each episode is usually a dazzling speech or colloquy showcasing Sir Humphrey, played by the late gay actor Nigel Hawthorne.

One memorable exchange sums up how bureaucrats evade responsibility for their errors.  Sir Humphey describes this powerful heuristic by cataloging the “Five Standard Excuses” for failure:

Sir Humphrey: First there’s the excuse we used for instance in the Anthony Blunt case. 

Jim: Which was? 

Sir Humphrey: That there is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything, but security forbids its disclosure.

Second, there is the excuse we used for comprehensive schools:  that it has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limits. 

Jim: But that’s not true is it? 

Sir Humphrey: No, but it’s a good excuse.

Then there’s the excuse we used for Concorde: it was a worthwhile experiment, now abandoned, but not before it had provided much valuable data and considerable employment. 

Jim: But that is true isn’t it? Oh no, of course it isn’t. 

Sir Humphrey: The fourth, there’s the excuse we used for the Munich agreement. It occurred before certain important facts were known, and couldn’t happen again. 

Jim: What important facts? 

Sir Humphrey: Well, that Hitler wanted to conquer Europe. 

Jim: I thought everybody knew that. 

Sir Humphrey: Not the Foreign Office. 

Jim: Five? 

Sir Humphrey: Five, there’s the Charge of the Light Brigade excuse. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual, which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures.

I have the opposite of hypochondria – what Mosby’s Medical Dictionary calls “la belle indifference.” I’ve never broken a bone, or been to a hospital other than as a visitor. I can’t imagine being sick enough to go the ER. I wouldn’t want to be a bother.

Nevertheless, in the last couple of years I have gotten to know my excellent Bellingham doctor. I’ve even figured out his heuristic for me. Whenever I show up with some new complaint, he will select from a repertoire of three standard responses:

1. It's just another typical anxiety/PTSD symptom.
2. It’s a common side effect of my medications.
3. It’s what happens when we get older.

Before my next appointment, he might as well prepare a tape recording of each explanation.

Still, I was encouraged by my doctor’s visible excitement when he got to step outside of the box and diagnose me with Tennis Elbow. It’s good to know his whole brain is working.

Thing 1 and Thing 2

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about brains. It’s what you do when you’re unemployed and living with mental illness, and you question whether a human resources human will ever read one of your exquisitely-crafted resumes or cover letters. I hope when my letters start sounding sane it means I’ve recovered enough to interact with other human beings. [Ed. note: He’s joking. Local job leads are always appreciated.]

You become particularly susceptible to obsessing over brains when two decades of crushing reader’s block and writer’s block simultaneously disappear. It’s hard not to wonder which cranny of your skull they’re hiding in. At least for now.

Besides, brains go well with books about Shakespeare, PTSD, memory, writing, golden age television, meditation, and hearing voices. Stay tuned for future book reports.

I'm an English major who used to subscribe to the New Yorker. I’ve read about Freud, Jung, Oliver Sacks, DSM-V, Donald Trump, whatever. But my all-time favorite brain model is the one depicted in Pixar/Disney’s Inside Out.

The film is particularly helpful for explaining the longterm impact of trauma. Experiences create memories. Our brains automatically process, sort, select, and store memories for potential retrieval. The interaction of our feelings, thoughts, and sensory experience constantly updates the webbed association of our memories.

Memories of trauma are so painfully powerful they can be repressed or twisted in ways whose impact may not become apparent until years later. When our brains have a new encounter and associate it with the poorly-processed-and-stored traumatic memory, whole systems can go haywire. (Yes, IT Crowd fans, I’ve already tried turning it off and on.)

Currently I’m poring through Daniel Kahneman’s amazing book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He constructs a persuasive paradigm with smooth arguments and fascinating examples, all skillfully strung together in digestible packets. It’s no wonder Kahneman was the first of his behavioral economics buddies to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The fast and slow thinking in Kahneman’s title refers to the human brain’s revolutionary double processor. What Kahneman calls System 1 is the ultimate in animal brains. It's programmed to perform tasks like initiating a fight or flight, tying shoelaces, and falling in love. System 1 “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” It can conduct numerous tasks simultaneously, including monitoring events, detecting threats and opportunities, retrieving memories, making associations, and leaping to generally correct conclusions.

Human evolution’s big brain breakthrough was integrating System 1 with a second mental processor that is capable of executive function. System 2 “allocates attention to the effortful activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration.” System 2 is very powerful, but it has limited capacity, and rapidly depletes energy.

The purpose of Kahneman’s book is to show how the coordinated functions of two contrasting systems make human brains and minds uniquely powerful. At the same time, each system has both bugs and features. Their interactions can lead us to make predictably bad judgments. Kahneman and other authors offer tools to recognize and avoid common mental pitfalls.

Does anyone else remember when personal computers had just 256 kilobytes of RAM? That can be compared to how far hunter-gatherer human brains developed through millions of years of natural selection, before we began overloading them with this whole misguided civilization thing a few thousand years ago.

Thirty years after buying my first IBM PC knockoff, the iMac I'm currently typing on has 16 gigabytes of operating memory. That's the equivalent of combining 64,000 clones of my first suitcase-sized "portable" computer. My first computer didn't even have a hard drive to store non-operating memory – just a reader for a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk holding only 360 kilobytes of data. Our iMac's fusion drive memory can store 2 terabytes of data, which would fill over three million floppy disks. Meanwhile, during the same three decades my brain's System 2 processing capacity hasn't budged, and my storage space for memories filled up years ago. Darwin never heard of Moore's Law.

Kahneman confesses his story of System 1 and System 2 is only a model of how the mind works. So is my personal computer metaphor. The two psychologists who coined the terms “System 1” and “System 1” to characterize multiple complex brain functions now refer instead to “Type 1” and “Type 2" processes. If old-fashioned words were back in fashion, we’d probably just call the two categories the “Subconscious” and “Conscious.”

I can’t resist naming them “Thing 1” and “Thing 2.” (After a cocktail or two, both are pronounced “thang,” of course.) They're the gay version of Kahneman’s two systems. It’s his own fault, he’s the one who suggested readers should think of his model as a “psychodrama with two characters.” Also notice his gentlemanly use of nonsexist language:

In the unlikely event of this book being made into a film, System 2 would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero. The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often guided by the figure at the center of the story, System 1. However, there are vital tasks that only System 2 can perform because they require effort and acts of self-control in which the intuitions and impulses of System 1 are overcome. 

In Kahneman's film, Thing 1 and Thing 2 are conjoined female fraternal twins who happened to have evolved together a few million years apart. Not such an implausible pitch – Sarah Paulson was nominated for an Emmy after playing conjoined female identical twins in American Horror Story: Freak Show.¹

Further Equivocation

Yesterday I wrote about “equivocation,” and how Jesuit priests like the Elizabethan poet Robert Southwell nudged the meaning of the word from mere ambiguity to “the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself.”

In modern English, the word “equivocation” also is a technical term used in logic.

Regular readers will recall my interest in the power of various types of logical fallacies. The fallacy of “equivocation” is using the same word or expression in multiple senses throughout an argument, resulting in a false conclusion. And confusion.

For example, in Abbot and Costello’s famous "Who's on first?" routine, the source of Costello’s bewilderment is the use of the same word – “Who” – as both the given name of the first baseman, as well as in its ordinary linguistic sense as a pronoun referring to some unnamed noun. 

Words are slippery. But fun. Except when lawyers are involved.

Strange Fruits

This is hell week for Vancouver Men’s Chorus – tech rehearsal yesterday, dress rehearsal tomorrow, opening night Saturday, and two more shows on Sunday. As usual, my goals are (1) don’t catch the annual communal cold; (2) don’t end up standing in the front row; and (3) don’t accidentally sing a loud solo during a silent rest.

This week is also the time for memorizing those last few numbers that haven’t stuck in my brain yet. Fortunately there aren’t any songs in Icelandic this year. And after singing the same African hymn in three different choruses, I finally remember its Yoruba words. Even the French carol is already familiar, although we’re having a dispute over whether to use Parisian or Quebecois pronunciation.

Instead of weird foreign sounds, this year I am struggling with the text of one of the songs from Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. Britten wrote musical settings for eleven early English poems during a transatlantic voyage back to England in 1942. He and his longtime partner/muse Peter Pears were returning home after several years of exile in North America.

We are singing Britten’s sixth movement, “This Little Babe.” The text comes from Robert Southwell’s 1595 poem “Newe Heaven, Newe Warre.” Southwell draws an extended allegorical image of the newborn baby Jesus as a fierce warrior, with alternating descriptions of the nativity and the battle against hell, beginning with:

This little babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake.
Though he himself for cold do shake,
For in this weak unarmèd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise. 

The paradoxical poem is in early modern English, dating from the same time as Shakespeare’s plays and the King James Bible. The archaic language is not the problem, since I studied literature from the period in college and grad school. Instead, I’m frustrated by the tongue-twisting tempo. The song is insanely fast, with the tenors, basses, and baritones racing in a canon to a rousing conclusion:

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

I didn’t remember Robert Southwell’s name from my English major days. When I saw the poem’s publication date on our score, I assumed he was one of the Oxford- and Cambridge-educated “university wits” whose erudition is often contrasted with Shakespeare’s rustic background. However, last week I happened to be reading a book about Britain’s transition from the reign of Elizabeth I to James I.¹ The author included an entire chapter about Southwell, entitled “Equivocation.” It turns out Robert Southwell is an actual saint – canonized by the Pope in 1970.