Image via WikipediaDr. Gird Gigerenzer is a German Psychologist who studies "Bounded rationality" and produces evidence about the human decision making based upon Intuition.
"Gigerenzer, a leading expert and author on heuristics, won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. His books on heuristics include Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics - UCSD
Acccording to the speaker, human beings tend to think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet, he argues, much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. Dr. Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in the human brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. Says Gigerenzer: "More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more."
Image by turtlemom4bacon via FlickrFor a long time we tried to force people think and act in a logical rational manner but it is becoming very clear that humans are anything but rational creatures. We use rational/logical thought processes to plan, design and construct things but we ourselves are not rational beings.
Another picture showing a young primate learning to stand up to his dad
Source: Smithsonian Museum
A video showing a Chimpanzee learning to ride a segway
This shows that learning is an activity practiced by all living creatures. The easiest form of learning is accomplished by "Mimicry" and "Conditioning"
The apes are the closest animals to humans. A Gene Study finds that Chimps, Humans 96 Percent the Same.
A video showing a Chimpanzee at Primate Research Institute located in University at Kypoto University in Japan. The Chimpanzee AI beats all the human contestants in short memory task.
Bonobos are another species of Apes. They are known to solve their conflict by having sex.
The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations--and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobo's rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.
Until now bonobos were thought to be very different, living largely peaceful lives and restricting their meat consumption to small forest antelopes, squirrels and rodents.
But the new research has shown that, like the common chimpanzee, bonobos are not above pursuing, killing and eating their primate cousins.
The Susan Savage-Rumbaugh'stalk at TED goes further and shows Apes that write, start fires
Dominance hierarchies occur in numerous social species, and rank within them can greatly influence the quality of life of an animal. In this review, I consider how rank can also influence physiology and health. I first consider whether it is high- or low-ranking animals that are most stressed in a dominance hierarchy; this turns out to vary as a function of the social organization in different species and populations. I then review how the stressful characteristics of social rank have adverse adrenocortical, cardiovascular, reproductive, immunological, and neurobiological consequences. Finally, I consider how these findings apply to the human realm of health, disease, and socioeconomic status.
What is intereseting is that there are lots of similarities between humans and apes. We have similar genetic make up. We have similar hierarchical social system. We also suffer from similar diseases and have a finite life span.
The major differences between us and them is the use of language that creates a sophisticated cultural environment and extensive use of tools that allows us to create "Engineered Environment" that sets us apart from the nature our source of origin.
The attempt to run away and hide in an "Engineered Environment" supported by inter personal relations mediated through the rules dictated by the prevailing culture, is causing lot of internal conflicts. Where our natural instincts pull us in one direction while the cultural environment pushes us in totally opposite direction.
We are the only species living with an internal conflict on the earth. We can not wish this internal conflict away. No amount of talk about love,peace and compassion will make this conflict go away unless we develop a deeper understanding of this inner conflict and find some creative solution to overcome this inner conflict.
The famous American author Mark Twain, an astute observer of human nature, wrote an essay "What is Man" . He did not publish the essay while he was alive because he thought that that his essay that contained his original insight about the nature of man may not be accepted too well. The essay was published after his death.
O.M. Yes, the half-dozen others are modifications of the extremes. But the law is the same. Where the temperament is two-thirds happy, or two-thirds unhappy, no political or religious beliefs can change the proportions. The vast majority of temperaments are pretty equally balanced; the intensities are absent, and this enables a nation to learn to accommodate itself to its political and religious circumstances and like them, be satisfied with them, at last prefer them. Nations do not THINK, they only FEEL. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought--by force of circumstances, not argument--to reconcile itself to ANY KIND OF GOVERNMENT OR RELIGION THAT CAN BE DEVISED; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later, it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them. As instances, you have all history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks--a thousand wild and tame religions, every kind of government that can be thought of, from tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it, each proud of its fancied supremacy, each perfectly sure it is the pet of God, each without undoubting confidence summoning Him to take command in time of war, each surprised when He goes over to the enemy, but by habit able to excuse it and resume compliments--in a word, the whole human race content, always content, persistently content, indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud, NO MATTER WHAT ITS RELIGION IS, NOR WHETHER ITS MASTER BE TIGER OR HOUSE-CAT. Am I stating facts? You know I am. Is the human race cheerful? You know it is.Considering what it can stand, and be happy, you do me too much honor when you think that can place before it a system of plain cold facts that can take the cheerfulness out of it. Nothing can do that. Everything has been tried. Without success. I beg you not to be troubled.
The long essay was written by Mark Twain around 1900. That shows that even cultural evolution is a slow process. Human nature has remained unchanged despite the changes in the Engineered tools and Environment around them.
Image by azizul hadi via FlickrThe interconnection of Neurons also known as nerve cells creates a massively parallel computer that is responsible for processing all our sensory data. It also holds information in memory cells for later recall.
It is convenient to compare the neural processing of information in the brain to the information processing in a computing device. However, the two of these devices process information in a very different manner. The computer is good at crunching numbers and working with the binary representation of the symbols. The computer can hold massive amount of information on storage devices. Human brain is not very good either at storing vast amount of information or doing quick number crunching. Its main strenght lies in being an excellent pattern recognizer. It can recognize things even if the presented with incomplete information. This observation has lead to the development of an area in computing also known as Neural Computing in which approximate model of neural network are simulated on a computer.
This short video shows a beautiful animation of neurons in the brain. How they are connected and how they function.
presented a talk at Google about his book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions." His main thesis refutes the original assumption that humans are "Homo Economus" i.e. rational human beings who always act in their best interest and who always try to maximize their profits. A youtube description of his talk:
In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities. Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.
and the video His work in the area of behavioral finance continues the work started by Amos Nathan Tversky, who was a cognitive and mathmatical psychologists. He worked very closely with Daniel Kahnemann a Noble Prize winning researcher to show conclusively about the hidden biases in the human decision making process. Their findings in the area of behavioral finance question the assumption of human beings acting totally in a rational manner.
The picture that emerges out of these findings portrays us more like "rationalizing beings" rather then "rational beings" or we could say that we use reason and logic as tools to create new knowledge but the process that leads to rational self consistent knowledge is not rational itself.
These findings of human behavior as non-rational are also being supported by the work in the area of Cognitive, Affective and behavioral Neuroscience.
Recently the existence of freewill has been questioned by Neuroscientists.Benjamin Libet's experiments showed that people's brain started preparing to take actions before they actually became aware of the action they were going to perform.
Implications of Libet's experiments
Libet's experiments suggest unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, therefore, little room remains for the operations of free will. If the brain has already taken steps to initiate an action before we are aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated.
Libet finds room for free will in the interpretation of his results only in the form of 'the power of veto'; conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigationspinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilizing the oscillator must also be considered). of volitional acts, it retains a part to play in the form of suppressing or withholding from certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 50 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the
Wired magazine is reporting a recent study confirming Libet's findings in this article
Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them
An interesting quote from the article:
"Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist.
What are the implication of this research to our most cherished notion of human beings as an independent autonomous agents who act out of their free will?
Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies love: its evolution, its biochemical foundations and its vital importance to human society. She outlines the three stages of love (lust, infatuation and long-term attachment), shedding light on eternal questions like why we love, and why we cheat. She also discusses the natural talents of women, and their new significance in the modern world. She ends with a warning about the widespread use of antidepressants -- and a truly hilarious story of romantic pursuit.
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