Translator: Adam Authier Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
Good, good!
So, back in the early 1990s, I was a training commercial pilot
with hair that probably produced more lift than most of the small aircrafts I flew.
(Laughter)
Anyway, one day, my instructor Bob came out,
and he said, "Ash, today, I'm going to instruct you in instrument flying."
This was pretty exciting because there are two flavors of flying.
There's "visual" where you can see
the horizon ahead of you and what's below you,
which is kind of for the rookie pilots and weekend pilots.
Then there's "instrument flying."
Instrument flying is for the professionals.
That's being able to punch into the clouds.
So I was pretty excited about this.
Anyway, we went out, we did our preflight briefing
and grabbed a little Cessna 152,
took off, went out to the southern training area,
got set up at 5,000 feet.
And Bob whacked this on me.
(Laughter)
This little plastic contraption is known as "the hood,"
and it constrains the pilot's view to their six instruments.
Bob said, "Okay, now I want you to fly straight and level
just by instruments."
I did that, it was pretty easy. I was pretty good at this stuff.
(Laughter)
Then he said, "Okay, you did well Ash.
I want you to maintain 5,000 feet and perform a standard right turn."
Now, this was a bit more difficult.
I had to organize to work the pedals and the controls.
At the same time, I was scanning all these instruments
without the wealth of information from the visual sphere outside.
But I got it. It was pretty good. I was feeling pretty cocky.
And he said, "Okay, done well.
Roll out of that into straight and level again."
So I rolled out into straight and level.
But my artificial horizon wasn't quite right.
It was a bit off.
So I looked over at my turn and slip indicator
and the ball was out of it, so I kicked in a bit of rudder.
My directional gyro started moving.
I was flying straight and level, but my instruments were failing.
The altimeter started rising.
Directional gyro was spinning faster.
The artificial horizon just slipped right off,
the whole dial, and Bob whipped my hood off.
I'd entered what is known as "the graveyard spiral."
Now in a recent study,
the average pilot with no instrument flight training,
punching into clouds lasts a mere 178 seconds.
That's two seconds shy of three minutes
before spiraling to their death.
Fair enough, my vestibular senses had tricked me.
The sense that tells me which way is up, had tricked me,
and Bob got me good with it.
Bob taught me a good lesson.
Next time I'll know: trust the instruments.
So we went up for the next lesson,
and I failed,
and the next lesson, and the next lesson.
This was frustrating me.
I considered myself a good, confident pilot.
Yet I couldn't accept the evidence in front of me.
My intuition took over every time.
My brain kept on making up these excuses:
"Oh, this aircraft has a dodgy vacuum pump."
"The static intakes on these little tomahawks
always blocks up, the instruments are failing."
I knew the instruments weren't failing, but I couldn't seem to accept it.
It's amazing where we're often taught or told
how wonderful and powerful
the hundred billion or so neurons that make up our mind are.
Yet, we rarely discuss the cognitive shortcomings that we have.
I mean, at school I was taught how the mind works.
It's very much like a modern laptop computer.
You have your high definition video camera
and your mic that takes in everything around you.
You've got everything then stored to memory, bit for bit,
perfectly written to data on your hard drive.
And our brains process things in a very logical fashion,
like we should all have Intel Inside stickers on our foreheads.
This is the metaphor that's used,
but it's not a very good metaphor.
In fact, it's completely wrong.
You see, our senses aren't like high-def recording equipment.
We only take in snippets of the information,
and our mind fills in the gaps for us.
As a pilot we're taught a whole lot of tips and tricks
to get around human limitations.
Things like when we want to find an aircraft in the sky,
we've got to break it up into quadrants.
You see, our eyes only see this much clearly at any one time.
It's hard to grasp, but this is what we see.
Our eyes dart around at a thousand degrees a second,
that what's called "a saccade."
Our mind fills in the rest of the picture with what it expects to see there.
So if you're looking up at the sky, it expects to see a lot of blue.
You have to actually break up the sky into quadrants
and saccade across until the aircraft lands
within the focus of those saccades, before you'll see the aircraft.
And it's not just our visual senses that work like this.
All of our senses work like this.
Our mind just fills in the gaps for us without us being aware of it.
That's why illusions work.
That's why Simon takes great delight in knowing how your perception works
and being able to fool you, being able to manipulate that.
And up here, it doesn't take in everything.
It doesn't store everything to memory.
It takes snippets, little grabs of feelings,
of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, emotions.
And then it pieces them together when you recall a memory.
When it pieces them together, it makes up the bits in between again.
It creates a movie,
only the movie is based on a true story.
The next time you recall that same event, you're recalling it from that memory,
taking snippets of that memory and piecing it together again.
So next time, it's actually more like a screenplay
based on a book based on a true story.
Each time you remember something, it changes a bit more.
It takes one more step away from reality,
even if it feels like you remember it clear as day.
And our cognitions, the way we think, they're adapted.
We evolved to be really good at surviving in small social groups,
for being able to match patterns,
for being able to keep track of social relationships -
not very good at logic though.
That horrible feeling I experienced
when I couldn't get my instinct
to match up with the evidence in front of me,
that's known as "cognitive dissonance."
Now cognitive dissonance
is when your mind tries to hold two conflicting ideas simultaneously.
It gives you a horrible feeling.
It'll be a negative feeling, it'll be feeling sick.
It'll be feeling anxious or even angry.
Cognitive dissonance is the mechanism
by which we start being able to, I don't know,
account for irrational behaviors like smoking.
I've got a friend Janine, very warm, intelligent lady.
She's very smart. She works as an intensive care nurse.
Everyday, she's looking after people with throat cancer and lung cancer
who are dying from smoking.
She knows the damage that it causes, yet she smokes.
I asked her why, she sat me down and said,
"Ash, I need to explain this to you: I'm a nurse.
I work long irregular hours.
I don't get to exercise. I don't get to eat well.
Smoking helps me keep down my weight!
(Laughter)
You think there are problems with people who have smoked for a long time,
you should see the long-term problems of obesity."
So just like that, she'd rationalized away
her behavior with her knowledge.
Cognitive dissonance does this in a number of ways.
Also, it's a great protector of our self-concept.
What we think of as
"I'm a good, moral, intelligent person," that self-concept,
it protects it for us.
This guy will never admit that he was wrong about invading Iraq,
not because he's evil,
but it's because he really thinks he wasn't wrong about invading Iraq.
He thinks of himself as a good moral Christian.
He was president of the United States.
He was leader of the free world. He was the good guys.
Unfortunately, he also set up the perfect context
for making bad decisions.
You see, George Bush was well-known
to fire or demote anyone who disagreed with his opinions.
So he cocooned himself, surrounded himself with yes-men.
He protected himself from cognitive dissonance.
So when he decided that there must be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
all his cronies went out and scoured the intelligence reports,
picking up the most tenuous little bits of information
and stringing them together to feed his belief
that there were weapons of mass destruction.
That's what is known as "confirmation bias,"
seeking confirming evidence of our beliefs
and disregarding or minimizing the impact of disconfirming evidence.
That's just one of the mechanisms.
It's one of the most common mechanisms that our brain uses
to protect us from cognitive dissonance.
But it's just one of many, many biases that we have.
In fact, you may be experiencing one right now.
Now these biases build up.
(Laughter)
That's why you're meant to be seeing.
These biases build up and attack our ability to reason logically.
And people take advantage of this.
Whole industries, billion-dollar industries,
are wrapped around our faulty reasoning.
Things like cosmetics,
anti-aging creams.
You're right!
Vitamins and supplements, well, you urinate them all out.
They don't boost your immune system.
If they did boost your immune system, you'd have an autoimmune disease.
Alternative health practices, aligning your energies,
we got rid of that concept
when we discovered the central nervous system.
Just the other day, I was on a train in Melbourne
and I spotted a young guy in a suit.
He was wearing one of these, it's a power band bracelet.
The makers of Power Balance claim
that this piece of silicon with a sticker on it
will make you stronger and more flexible.
Now on face value, that is laughable, it's silly,
but he probably didn't come to this belief from a claim like this.
He probably came to it from seeing one of his sports stars wearing it,
and then noticing other top athletes wearing it.
These things have to chip away.
Now Power Balance is smart enough to give away these
to every top athlete they can and sponsor key top athletes to wear them.
So he's had this.
He has formed an idea, and he goes and searches online.
Power Balance has littered YouTube and blogs
with testimonials and demonstrations
much like they have used for years in martial arts
and in applied kinesiology,
a simple trick to show that it makes you more balanced.
So he probably saw this stuff,
and that was the confirmation bias building up the belief,
and then he went out and spent 60 hard dollars
on a rubber band with a sticker on it.
That cemented his belief even further.
People then asked him, "Does that work for you?"
And he would recall a time
when he performed a bit better than normal,
and not recall the times when it was average or below average.
More confirmation bias!
When more people asked him,
he would keep recalling those same events of better performance,
except those events would now get even better, and even better,
making it legendary performance.
So his Power Balance bracelet is working, it is good.
Then someone might come up to him and say,
"You realize that they actually did some scientific tests.
Double blind showed that it's just a rubber band."
"- Science doesn't know everything. Don't be so closed minded.
You got to try it to understand!"
These are the types of things people will come up with
when their mind is painted into a corner.
And it's not just that.
When you come up against a hard or an unwinnable argument,
cognitive dissonance can cause anger.
If that argument is unwinnable on both sides,
it escalates to rage.
It can escalate to ideological wars,
people fighting to the death trying to prove their point,
trying to prove that their imagining frame is the real one, not yours.
It's not all doom and gloom though, there is hope.
Science is testament to that.
Now when you say "science," people have the wrong idea a lot of the times.
Science isn't a person or a thing, an organization.
Science is simply a process.
It's a process that was designed specifically to overcome our biases.
And as well as that process,
it's also the body of knowledge that results from the process.
The process is just known as "scientific method."
It's simply down to making a prediction,
testing that prediction,
and then coming up with your conclusions,
but most importantly being transparent about how you did it all
so other people can pick apart your arguments,
other people can test and see if you reasoned correctly.
It's a very important part of it.
And enough people, like Temple said, enough people are working on this.
They spend their whole lifetimes doing small detailed work,
making tiny little increments in knowledge.
It's none of these eureka moments that you hear about.
It's tiny increments but it all goes into a pool of knowledge.
And because of that pool of knowledge,
in medicine alone, I've never seen a child with smallpox.
I've never seen a child afflicted by polio.
I've never had a loved one die of measles or diptheria.
These killed millions of people until we figured out vaccines for them.
And closer to home, this old fellow, my dad.
I should have lost him, twice in the last 15 years.
He actually had a tube fed through his groin
and a balloon pulled through his heart to flatten the fatty deposits in there,
saving him from having another massive heart attack.
He also had tuberculosis injected into his bladder a number of times
to kill the cancer that was growing there.
just recent advances in science that kept him around with me today.
And it's not just in the area of health
that this way of thinking is useful for us.
Getting rid of these misunderstandings,
actually knowing about your brain and how it's tricking you,
compensating for cognitive dissonance and cognitive biases ;
it's everything, any type of decision making
from deciding on a consumer product,
fighting with your partner, to public policy ;
accounting for all these cognitive biases
and being open about how you reach your conclusions
is a useful and powerful thing, and we should start with the schools.
We should start getting rid of these outdated metaphors for how we think,
and teach kids how we actually do think.
If we can do that, they'll appreciate science more.
Just like when I was a pilot,
it was hard for me to get over this whole thing.
There was many white-knuckled, sweat-soaked flights
for me to be able to get over
my own internal battle and trust my instruments.
We can all actually go through this process.
We can all learn not to start with conclusions and find evidence.
We can learn to start with evidence, evaluate it, and come to a conclusion.
We can all learn to use our brains more effectively
and I think that's an idea worth spreading.
Thanks.
(Applause)