More Tools For Thinking

In Tuesday’s column I describe a symposium over at Edge.orgon what scientific concepts everyone’s cognitive toolbox should hold.There were many superb entries in that symposium, and I only had spaceto highlight a few, so I’d like to mention a few more here.

Before I do, let me just recommend that symposium for the followingreasons. First, it will give you a good survey of what many leadingscientists, especially those who study the mind and society, arethinking about right now. You’ll also be struck by the tone. There is anacute awareness, in entry after entry, of how little we know and howcomplicated things are. You’ll come away with a favorable impression ofthe epistemological climate in this subculture.

Here though, are a few more concepts worth using in everyday life:

Clay Shirkey nominates the Pareto Principle. We have the idea in ourheads that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people arein the middle). But this is not how the world is organized in sphereafter sphere. The top 1 percent of the population control 35 percent ofthe wealth. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of themessages. The top 20 percent of workers in any company will produce adisproportionate share of the value. Shirkey points out that thesedistributions are regarded as anomalies. They are not.

Jonathan Haidt writes that “humans are the giraffes of altruism.” Wethink of evolution as a contest for survival among the fittest. Toooften, “any human or animal act that appears altruistic has beenexplained away as selfishness in disguise.” But evolution operates onmultiple levels. We survive because we struggle to be the fittest andalso because we are really good at cooperation.

A few of the physicists mention the concept of duality, the idea thatit is possible to describe the same phenomenon truthfully from twodifferent perspectives. The most famous duality in physics is thewave-particle duality. This one states that matter has both wave-likeand particle-like properties. Stephon Alexander of Haverford says thatthese sorts of dualities are more common than you think, beyond, say theworld of quantum physics.

Douglas T. Kenrick nominates “subselves.” This is the idea that weare not just one personality, but we have many subselves that getaroused by different cues. We use very different mental processes tolearn different things and, I’d add, we have many different learningstyles that change minute by minute.

Helen Fisher, the great researcher into love and romance, has aprovocative entry on “temperament dimensions.” She writes that we havefour broad temperament constellations. One, built around the dopaminesystem, regulates enthusiasm for risk. A second, structured around theserotonin system, regulates sociability. A third, organized around theprenatal testosterone system, regulates attention to detail andaggressiveness. A fourth, organized around the estrogen and oxytocinsystems, regulates empathy and verbal fluency.

This is an interesting schema to explain temperament. It would beinteresting to see others in the field evaluate whether this is the bestway to organize our thinking about our permanent natures.

Finally, Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation nominates “ShiftingBaseline Syndrome.” This one hit home for me because I was just at aMcDonald’s and guiltily ordered a Quarter Pounder With Cheese. Iremember when these sandwiches were first introduced and they lookedhuge at the time. A quarter pound of meat on one sandwich seemedgargantuan. But when my burger arrived and I opened the box, the thinglooked puny. That’s because all the other sandwiches on the menu werethings like double quarter pounders. My baseline of a normal burger hadshifted.  Kedrosky shows how these shifts distort our perceptions in allsorts of spheres.

There are interesting stray sentences throughout the Edge symposium.For example, one writer notes, “Who would be crazy enough to forecast in2000 that by 2010 almost twice as many people in India would haveaccess to cell phones than latrines?”