There are big advantages to thinking the way we do.

There are big advantages to thinking the way we do. We don’t think like the logical Vulcan, Mr. Spock, and thank goodness for that. Simplifying the world, scanning for patterns, preferring experience over logic has served us well for the last couple million years.

• Reducing the world to stories and schemas helps us make decisions efficiently, by letting us pay more attention to fewer choices. I went to the doctor a while ago. I’d developed some kind of food allergy, but I was having a heck of a time trying to pinpoint the cause. Right away the doctor reminded me about how vast the number of variables was, and cautioned me against being too careful about eating. After one test (while another was still pending), he told me “I’ve seen two of you today already, and 300 in the past year.” He gave me a name for what I had, and a course of treatment-- then told me to call back in a week for the test results.

Consider how a good doctor operates. She can’t possibly consider in depth all the thousands of afflictions a patient might have, but knows the few most likely possibilities, and the few likeliest sets of diagnostic procedures. Sometimes a rare disease will escape her, but she can appropriately treat the vast majority of her patients.

All of us practice this kind of reduction; otherwise, we couldn’t manage the real complexity of the world. Even though we never have enough information, and couldn’t process it even if we did, we can decide and act because we have developed a “drastically simplified model of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’ of the world . . .” (Jeremy Campbell 98). We use environmental cues to tell us how to act: to make small talk in a cafeteria, for example, and sing hymns in a church. We use one kind of language for toddlers and another for retirees. We break down problems into a few key parts and match them to the closest patterns or prototypes in our limited repertoire. We vote by party when we don’t know anything about the individual candidates.

Using these rules of thumb, we turn out to be right more often than not. Just as important, the quick-and-dirty decisions free up our brains for more intense consideration of a few new and important problems. The very fact that we have already settled so many issues and set them aside, as it were, allows us to focus in depth on new challenges.

Schemata and schematic processing permit us to process an enormous amount of information with great efficiency. Instead of having to perceive and remember all the details of each new object or event, we can simply note that it is like one of our preexisting schemata and encode or remember only its most prominent features. Schematic processing typically occurs rapidly and automatically; usually we are not even aware that any processing of information is taking place at all. . . . Without schemata and schematic processing, we would simply be overwhelmed by the information that inundates us (Atkinson 686).

• Don’t spit into the wind: Our worldly knowledge keeps us on track.
At one time, some dead white guys claimed superiority to other people and animals on the basis of their ability to reason. But as Campbell notes, deductive logic

is a local process, going one short step at a time, using only a tiny fraction of all the information known to the system at each step. . . . This means that very long chains of argument are usually needed in logic in order to prove anything really interesting, and the chains are at liberty to be long, provided consistency can be guaranteed. Natural reason operates in quite a different fashion, holistically, using as much as possible of all the information available in one or two giant leaps. If there is a small amount of bad information, it is ‘put in its place’ by an overwhelming quantity of good information (47).

Research confirms the “common sense” proposition that formal logic is of little use when not coupled to a broad practical knowledge of the world. In one experiment subjects are asked to verify the rule “If there is a vowel on one side of a card, then there is an even number on the other side” by choosing the fewest possible cards marked with letters and numbers. Most people don’t choose the right cards. But the same question can be asked in a practical context of choosing transportation to Miami (Jeremy Campbell 80-82). Most people can easily answer the question in this form, because it’s embedded in a familiar procedural reality.

Apparently some kinds of knowledge are hard-wired into the brain, or acquired at a very early age: the difference between living and non-living things and between moral and social rules; the permanence and impenetrability of solid objects; cause and effect; gravity and inertia (Cummins 161-4). For example, babies infants older than six months hesitate to crawl out on a panel of glass suspended over a pool; they’ve figured out gravity. This knowledge keeps our schemas from straying too far-- “. . . fortunately, our innate knowledge often disciplines our wanton categorization system, drawing our attention to the correlations that matter and away from those that don’t” (Cummins 177).

In addition to these basic rules, we depend on what Campbell calls “worldly knowledge”: our accumulated experience of how the world works. Most of us know, from hearsay or personal experience, that it’s stupid to scream at a traffic cop, smoke a joint at work, invest in land we haven’t seen, believe politicians’ campaign promises. If we turned on the TV and saw a monkey driving a bus, we’d know right away it wasn’t a news program, and we might even make surprisingly accurate assumptions about the tone and content of the show. We know that tinny whispers on the phone line aren’t ghosts and that it’s not so easy to overthrow the government. I know that the Apollo moon landings did not take place in a movie studio, not because the technology would not permit, but because, by virtue of my time on this planet, I know quite a bit about how people operate, how organizations work, how money and information flow. I didn’t see the astronauts with my own eyes, but the considerable knowledge I do have makes the hoax scenario very unlikely. From this same database I conclude that Halliburton’s war was probably a hoax from the get-go.

Rather than considering every possible choice (taking a lifetime to decide on breakfast cereal) or going step by step from one true fact to another (also impossible, because we don’t have enough information), we depend on our lifetime’s experience to point us in the right direction. We use prior knowledge to clean up confusing or incomplete signals, to fill in the gaps and rule out the least likely interpretations. "Deductive logic leaves no gaps, makes no leaps, but the mind thrives and flourishes on gaps; it tolerates great gaping holes in what it hears and reads, because it is so adept at filling in the holes with what it knows" (Jeremy Campbell 49).

What’s more, we are normally subject to daily “reality checks” that keep our ideas on track. The world gives us constant feedback-- if we misstep, we twist an ankle; if we overshoot the rabbit, we go hungry; if we say something stupid we can see it in the faces of our friends. Our knowledge covers only a small part of the world, but that part is real and can kick us in the ass when we make mistakes. We don’t need to be geniuses to navigate the world because it often lets us know when we’re headed in the right or wrong direction; and we can adjust course at these cues. Rather than making giant leaps into the unknown, most of us, most of the time, make continual small changes depending on today’s winds and tides.

The feedback we get from the world doesn't help if we don't know what we want, if we don't have a direction to begin with. Daily pangs of hunger can ensure we look for food on a regular basis, but don't by themselves show us how to build a granary to store food for the winter. So we need material goals to measure our progress against.

Of course, if you’re really smart like Halliburton, you don’t need to bother with reality checks.


• Our skill at seeing and matching even incomplete patterns lets us develop new combinations.
Some people may have the idea that science advances solely by logic, stepping from one fact to another like stones in a stream, but of course scientists often work the way the rest of us do: taking problems and turning them this way and that, reshaping them, until they remind us of something we already know. " . . . the question still remains how great minds such as Galileo, Curie, and Einstein made their startling discoveries. As a clue, consider the fact that Einstein is said to have developed his theory of relativity by imagining himself riding on a light beam as though it were a streetcar. As this anecdote illustrates, what we normally think of as creativity and insight are really just our old friends pattern recognition and categorization in disguise" (Cummins 181). That’s not the whole of science, of course; it may take years of painstaking research to test these insights. But coming up with testable models in the first place often has more to do with finding the right analogy than with formal logic.

I remember that for my GED class I wanted to know where Darwin came up with this evolution idea. Apparently, “natural selection” came in large part from Malthus’ earlier, pessimistic conclusion of inevitable overpopulation, which in turn derived partly from political economist Adam Smith’s observation that “The demand for men, like that for any other commodity, regulates the production of men.” I was struck by the way an insight in one field could spur understanding in another.

We can even use analogies to leap from false premises to correct conclusions, as when early scientists began to string together another strand of the theory of evolution: “In this case, an incorrect theory, the chain of being, led Linnaeus to expect intermediate forms between apes and humans” (Gould 1985 p. 264). Pioneer economists borrowed ideas from mistaken theories of physics (Nadeau). The trick is to have a story that prompts us to look for information without predetermining what we’ll find. Even earlier, the late Renaissance fascination with sun-centered Hermetic magic may have paved the way for many people to accept Copernicus’ theory that the Earth revolves around the sun (Yates 152).

I think of politics in terms of analogies all the time. Recalling the “threshold effects” lesson in my environment classes in college --itself an analogy to natural processes like boiling water-- I’ve often asked organizers if they’ve developed a “critical mass” of activists to sustain their group. Bullshit artist Walt Rostow (you may remember him from the time he helped plan the murder of a million Vietnamese) must have been thinking of something similar when he proposed that developing economies reach a self-sustaining “take-off” stage. I’ll argue below that each of us has a repertoire of stories from which we can select those most appropriate to solving the problems we face at any given time; I may have drawn the idea from my understanding of the overwhelming redundancies of nature-- our double sets of organs, the ability of different parts of the brain to take over functions from an injured part, the birth of ten thousand sea turtles, only a few of whom will make it to adulthood; the like fate of millions of spermatazoa.