Dang it.
If you played old-school Nintendo, then this has happened to you.
Your game went all crazy, so you blew on the cartridge, and bingo.
Beating a game like Mario Bros. is all about knowing the patterns.
Luckily we're good at that Our brains are nature's most powerful pattern-recognition
devices.
They let us pick out meaning from the chaos: in order to sense danger, so we can see consequences
for our actions.
For our ancestors that could mean the difference between life and death.
You eat the red berries, and you get sick.
Eat the blue ones, and you're fine.
Plant your crops in late summer, you go hungry.
Plant your crops in spring, and you eat like a king.
Since those early days, our brains have kept evolving, but maybe not as fast as the world
in which we live.
And while we keep upgrading the OS, we're operating with pretty much the same hardware
that we had 10,000 years ago.
And that can get us into trouble, because our brains are SO good at picking out patterns,
sometimes they see 'em when they're not there . . .
We can see faces where there's only shadows Or movement in still images
Or even a cause for autism in vaccines
So why are we so good at being wrong?
It might be a flaw in our wiring.
Our pattern-obsessed brains don't like uncertainty.
We badly want to be right about how we see the world, and to do that we look at it through
various filters.
If you start with the conclusion that the moon landing is a hoax or that man-made climate
change isn't real... maybe you can can find some evidence that says you're right, but
you'll have to ignore a whole lot MORE evidence that says you're wrong.
When we filter evidence to support that conclusion and ignore that what disagrees, we're victims
of confirmation bias
When
we assume that thing A caused thing B because thing B happened after thing A, we're victims
of the post hoc fallacy.
When we insist that random events have meaning, you've fallen victim to the Texas sharpshooter
fallacy.
It's easy to hit a bullseye if you paint it on afterwards.
Which brings us to this.
I never asked myself why I was blowing on my video games.
It just worked.
Except that I was wrong.
So were you.
It didn't do a thing.
Our brains were playing tricks on us.
The strangest part about the Nintendo thing is that everyone did it.
In a pre-digital world, it spread like a thought virus.
There was no how-to video on YouTube, it was just . . . common knowledge.
In South Korea, many people still believe that sleeping in a closed room with an electric
fan on can kill you.
They aren't dumb.
We are more likely to believe something if we see that other people believe it.
That's the common belief fallacy.
Which is why when I saw my friends blow on Nintendo games, then I blew on my Nintendo
games.
We thought we were clearing the dust from the cartridge, increasing the conductivity
of the metal connections . . .
All it really did was give us an excuse to take it out and try again.
We saw a reason where there was only randomness.
And that's why science was invented.
A way to fight the human tendency of assuming that what we see is what's true.
Instead of starting with a conclusion, and filtering out all the data that doesn't agree
with it, science starts with an explanation and does everything possible to prove it wrong.
Unfortunately, it's a pretty recent invention.
Only a few hundred years ago lots of very smart people thought lambs grew on bushes,
and mice were spawned from dirty laundry.
We're fighting some very old habits.
The world is complicated, and it doesn't always make sense.
Patterns make it easier to find our way through the maze of randomness.
But if we're not careful they can get us lost.
Science, above all else, requires a desire to disprove ourselves.
It's a sharp tool we use to poke holes in our ideas, so we're sure that they'll float.
And unless we do that on a regular basis, our princess will forever be in another castle.
Stay curious.
Special thanks to David McRaney, without whom I couldn't have done this episode.
To learn more about how your brain is out to trick you, check out David's books, You
Are Not So Smart and You Are Now Less Dumb, links down in the description.