Thinking, And Why We Don’t

by Bill Kinnersley

Free will? Sure there's free will. We "think" there is, anyway, and as thinking beings, free will is what we're about. All day long, everything we do: just one voluntary decision after another. We call our conscious self a "personality." We think and move and see and hear. We get up and brush our teeth and read the morning newspaper, then go out the door and drive to work. Who decided to do that. Us, right? We imagine ourselves sitting up there in the cockpit, looking out through our eyeballs, pulling levers, causing things to happen.

But we delude ourselves about being in control. The truth is, our conscious self is assigned a minor role, with limited responsibilities. We've been placed behind the wheel of a machine we don't understand and told, "Here kid, drive this thing." We do our best to contribute, but mostly we're just along for the ride. As we grow up, we learn the ropes of being an animal. We learn to move the arms and legs and aim the viewing apparatus. And we learn to fake the rest of it, because pretty much everything else is done for us, and to us.

We obey our instincts. Humans have a script to follow, a narrow path in life, and rare is the person who does not follow it. We all have the same weaknesses. Is there a bad habit you'd like to break? Do you bite your nails, eat too much, want to give up smoking? Well why don't you, who is resisting your conscious efforts? Who is really in control? We're animals, and at the heart of things, an animal is a form of organic robot.

Consciousness

We think we're in control because we have this thing called consciousness. We're "self-aware." But consciousness is overrated. We could get along without it. In fact if we didn't have it, we'd hardly miss it. It's just a superficial part of what goes on in our minds. All of the important mental processes take place at a subconscious level. Neurons fire, facts are recalled, patterns recognized, conclusions reached, and we have no awareness of it, and limited influence over it. The ideas our mind comes up with are spoonfed to us by subconscious processes, which we then take credit for and say we "thought" of them ourselves.

The mental activity that we're consciously aware of is just a side effect – a trickle of unspoken words our mind produces throughout the day. Talking to ourself is a large part of what we regard as thinking. It happens because brains are I/O oriented, and once our mind has been trained to form words into sentences it becomes a habit. For some, an addiction. But like the announcers' commentary on Monday Night Football, the words bear scant relevance to what is going on down on the field.

Intelligence

Intelligence is supposed to be what distinguishes human beings from the lesser animals. Animals, according to this point of view, are fundamentally different from us in that their actions are guided by instinct. But animals deserve more credit than this, and we deserve less. To a varying degree, animals do exhibit the same kind of intelligence that we possess. They formulate complex plans and carry them out. They recognize patterns, assimilate facts, learn from experience, and so on. In a human being these activities would be regarded as signs of intelligence. Instinct often provides an animal with the high level motivation required to initiate an action, and a general pattern to follow. Carrying it out requires what we call intelligence.

That much is fine. But intelligence is one thing and rational thought quite another. Lower animals lack the ability to think rationally. So do we. Rational behavior is not to be found in the animal kingdom. Over millions of years, species evolve to best adapt themselves to their environment. Random genetic variations produce many slightly different characteristics, and among them the ones that serve best to increase the chances of survival are preserved. Rationality never made the cut. If it was ever attempted, it was a failure and did not survive the process of Darwinian selection. This happened because the ability to think clearly is not a useful trait. An animal that possessed this tendency would find it an encumbrance, and would as a result be less likely to survive. Animals, ourselves included, do as little thinking as possible.

Logic

Why should we even be concerned with thinking? Despite the pride we humans profess in our mental powers, we are not very good at thinking and do not put the results of it to good use. Although capable of short bursts of logic when pressed, it is not something that comes naturally. We must be taught the concept in high school. "Start with a set of premises and advance stepwise toward a sound conclusion." But as is the case with many other high school subjects, exposing students to logic is largely a wasted effort, and once they leave the classroom the experience is quickly forgotten. Instead of being a method to guide us throughout life, logical reasoning to humans is an esoteric subject.

Fortunately for the high school students, while the math teacher is attempting to teach them logic, other teachers are doing quite the opposite. Logic tells us to make our words precise and our arguments clear. But as we find out in English class, a more useful technique is to make them ambiguous. Human beings are easily distracted and misled, and deception is more effective in dealing with them than sound reasoning.

Opinions

When questioned, most people claim to understand the basic principle. First examine the facts. Then afterwards base your opinions on what those facts have indicated. But faced with the opportunity, they don't apply it. Opinions originate independently from facts, and once originated, tend to persist in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. For every fact, no matter how well founded, you'll find people who disbelieve it, either on political grounds, or religious grounds, or suspicions about the people who do believe it. There are people who believe the Earth is flat; that HIV is a plot of the Central Intelligence Agency; that Einstein is wrong about the speed of light; and that space aliens walk among us. Some refuse to accept evolution and global warming. Granted, these are extreme positions, and we call such people nut cases; but the rest of us are that way too, it's just a matter of degree.

And the topics that we find endlessly fascinating, the ones that everyone feels compelled to discuss, are the ones where logic has no role, where facts are either absent or hopelessly complex. Where opinions can neither be substantiated nor refuted, and therefore everyone feels compelled to have one and impose it on others. For hours on end, kids submerge themselves in role-playing games, trying to determine the best approach to dragon slaying. Women discuss social relationships: what someone said, what someone meant, what someone should have done. Men discuss sports, politics, religion, and economics. They weigh the relative merits of different teams, different players, different strategies. They argue ad infinitum the benefits of a tax increase or decrease, of more government spending as compared to less, and what effect that will have on the poor and the homeless.

Why do we devote so much effort to seemingly pointless and unproductive pastimes? To hone our intuition.

Intuition

When people arrive at conclusions based on inadequate facts, it is called "intuition" or "common sense." Subsequently, when facts are encountered, they go to great lengths devising intricate arguments to make those conclusions seem plausible. This characteristic of human beings is universal, but becomes especially apparent when someone disagrees with us. We point out the gaps in his reasoning, and we're amazed at the stubborn persistence in his beliefs despite being proved wrong. But that's the way we are, all of us. And illogicality is a fine thing, we shouldn't knock it. We are that way on purpose, because it works better. Being unreasonable in an adequate fashion takes practice, and so we rehearse it diligently.

Without realizing what they do, schools embrace the practice and encourage it every way they can. When students leap to express their opinions the moment a question is posed – on a topic about which they know absolutely nothing – the teacher proudly says, "I am teaching them to think!" Indeed she is teaching them something, but thinking it is not.

Brains

Thinking is done with brains. Physically, the brain has evolved as animals have evolved. Primitive animals have primitive-looking brains. But physical characteristics of the brain are not an indication of its thinking ability.

Consider its structure. The surface of the cerebral cortex is sometimes cited as an indicator of intelligence. More wrinkles and convolutions on the cortex, it is said, indicates greater intelligence. But this is not so. The hemispheres of the Capuchin monkey are perfectly smooth, while the whale’s cerebral cortex has more wrinkles than that of any other species.

Consider its size. "You birdbrain," we say, alluding to the fact that the brain of a hummingbird weighs only a gram. A human brain is about three pounds, whereas that of a whale is fifteen pounds. Yet the whale is not five times as smart as we are. And the hummingbird shows no lack of intelligence, engaging in nest building and other complex tasks.

Other animals are also remarkably small. The world's smallest bird is the Bee hummingbird Mellisuga helenae, about 5 cm long. The smallest mammal is the Pygmy shrew Suncus etruscus about 4 cm. The Bumblebee bat Craseonycteris thonglongyai is about 3 cm. The lizard Sphaerodactylus ariasae only 1.6 cm. The frogs Eleutherodactylus iberia and Psyllophryne didactyla less than 1 cm long. None of these very small animals with their proportionately very small brains show any degree of mental impairment.

Being an animal does not take much brains.

Brain Function

How does the brain work? A popular belief is that the brain is organized like a general-purpose computer, namely a big storage area with a thinker attached. The storage area starts off empty when we are born, and as we mature the thinker saves some of our experiences and indexes them so they can be recalled later. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even though we don't completely understand how it works, it is clear that the brain is not a general-purpose computer. Dissect one and you will find many distinct structures. A brain is manifestly designed for teamwork. It's a collection of special-purpose processors, each one hard-wired and pre-programmed, and dedicated to the performance of a specific task. Each processor is there to provide us with an important skill, something that human beings and other animals are really good at. We underappreciate these skills, for they seem natural to us. Instinctive. We employ them subconsciously, "without thinking about it." Yet they are things that computers find difficult. What the brain is designed to do, it does well.

Perception

And after all, the brain has more important things to do than think. Much of the brain simply keeps us alive, controlling heartbeat, body temperature and digestion. Other parts of it exert regulatory control, including mood and wakefulness. Most of the brain is there to handle I/O. Brain size depends more than anything else on the number of muscles that must be moved and the amount of sensory information that needs to be processed. By the time it reaches our awareness, incoming sensory information has already been highly modified. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Hearing. Out of a myriad of incoming sound waves, we are able without thinking to pick out ones coming from a single source, identifying its nature and location. Spoken sounds are recognized as phonemes, assembled into words and analyzed for their syntax and semantic content. Speech by different persons produces sounds that vary in complex ways, but we simultaneously decipher the meaning of the speech, and who is speaking, and clues as to their emotional state.

Vision. Eyesight is an optical illusion, an elaborate hoax played on us by our nervous system. As we glance around, scattered bits of visual information are automatically combined by our mental circuitry to form a stable two-dimensional image. High resolution is only available in the center of our vision field, the image formed on a small spot on the retina called the fovea, but we trick ourselves into believing that everything else is seen this way too. Peripheral vision is indistinct and dedicated to detecting motion. I see something moving "out of the corner of my eye," and the wiring in the corner of my eyeball calls it to my attention. The third dimension is added: an object's distance deduced from parallax, its shape deduced from shading. Ultimately a three-dimensional map of our surroundings is built and maintained for us by our vision circuitry.

As evening approaches, rods take over from cones, but we are not aware of it. Rods are distributed evenly across the retina, much more numerous than cones and a thousand times more sensitive, although not as much to red. Cones provide daytime color vision and come in three types. Those that respond to red and green are concentrated in the fovea, but those for blue are not. It would not be particularly useful to have blue cones there: due to chromatic aberration in the lens, the image on the retina formed by blue light is always somewhat out of focus. Outside the fovea all the cones are blue. Somehow, blue cones manage to synthesize peripheral three-color vision all by themselves, but no one knows how this is done.

Senses

Sensory perception is an intrinsic part of our mental life. We believe that what we perceive reflects reality – that by some definition the world really is the way we see it. But there is only one reality, and species differ in what they can perceive.

Vision. Horses' eyes protrude, giving them a 350° field of view. Cats see light six times as faint as we can. The eyes of both dogs and cats are better equipped for motion detection at a distance. In most mammals, color vision is dichromatic, supported by only two types of cones. They see color to the same extent a color-blind person does. Bees are trichromatic like us; but they can see ultraviolet light and are blind to red. Birds, along with fish and turtles, have tetrachromatic vision. Some birds and butterflies are even pentachromatic.

Sound. The two large concave areas on the face of an owl are parabolic antennas that focus faint sounds to their ears. Elephants communicate with each other over distances of several miles with rumbling infrasound, much of it transmitted through the ground. Bats and killer whales use clicks of ultrasound for echolocation.

Smell. Olfactory ability in primates is so poor that we often forget its importance to other species. We regard all odors not associated with food or flowers as "bad." We even confuse smell with taste. But in the jungle out there, smell is an essential tool. It's a weapon in the battle between prey and predator. It guides insects to find others of the same species, helping them overcome small size and large distances. Using it, elephants can recognize other individuals "with their eyes closed." And salmon use it to find their way back to the stream where they were spawned.

Other animals have senses that do not correspond at all to ours. Pit vipers detect the infrared given off by warm-blooded animals. Fish have nostrils to do their smelling with, but in addition their bodies are covered with taste buds. Their lateral line detects water currents caused by the presence of nearby objects. Their swim bladder detects and emits acoustic vibrations. The rubbery bill of the platypus is electroreceptive: he uses it to locate prey buried under the sand, guided by the tiny electric fields produced by their muscular contractions. The bizarre hammerhead of the hammerhead shark is an electroreceptive directional antenna. The electric eel surrounds itself with an AC dipole electric field. The electrical conductivity of a nearby fish, being different from that of water, causes a disturbance in the field. The eyes of pigeons can detect the polarization of light, and thus they are able to locate the sun even on an overcast day. They find their way home aided by the interaction of the Earth's magnetic field with small permanent magnets embedded in their brain.

Senses shape our perception of the world. What the world looks like to a creature with five primary colors available is beyond our imagination. What does polarized light look like? How does the world appear using echolocation, or electric or magnetic fields? And frankly, to us, all elephants smell pretty much alike.

Memory

Our brains were designed with one thing in mind: the processing of sensory data. Everything we remember is stored in the form of sensory input. Most of us memorize things as a sequence of sounds. Somewhere in the brain there is a little tape recorder. Suppose someone tells you a number, "1376203," and a few moments later asks you what it was. If you're normal, your brain did not store the number in binary format, nor as a photographic image of its digits. What you remembered was the sequence of sounds you heard as the digits were spoken, and that's what you recited back. This is not limited to short term memory. A sound sequence is certainly the way you remember your own Social Security number.

But we can remember other things too which are not sequential, such as positional information. Where is the 7 on a touchtone keypad? Which aisle is the vegetable soup in? And we can just as easily forget it. Have you seen my slippers?

Music

Particularly important is the sensory input we call music. We have a processor in our brain dedicated to memorization of note sequences. We enjoy listening to a song, even though we've heard it many times before. Why? To reinforce the memory. The same processor plays tunes back, and frequently when nothing else is happening we hear an internal Muzak. Sometimes the playback mechanism gets stuck, and a tune will loop through your conscious over and over again, interfering with everything else.

The music processor has a prominent role to play during youth. The sexual urge we experience upon reaching puberty is accompanied by an equally strong need for music. Like humpback whales, teenagers employ songs to communicate mood, and availability, and social identification. Each year, new pop tunes are written to replace old ones. By socializing with others who have the same tunes stored, we increase our odds of finding a compatible mate.

Forgetfulness

Sometimes a name or number slips your mind, and the mental tape recorder needs a little help to get it started. Suppose you can't remember the name of the restaurant you ate at last week. You have a picture of where you sat, and what that obnoxious customer at the next table said, but you can't quite come up with the name of the place. You try to sound it out – maybe it started with an "R." "Rib.." or "Rip.." or something like that. You give up for the time being, and your attention drifts elsewhere, but within a few minutes the name pops into your head. Given enough time, one of those little processors found it for you. This experience is universal. It demonstrates that names are stored by sound. And it demonstrates that the process of recall, although consciously initiated, is unconsciously executed.

Why are our mental processes so deficient? Our memories are shadowy, incomplete and full of holes. We forget virtually everything that happens to us. If we remember a phone number, it is only for as long as we use it on a regular basis. No longer refreshed, it will be promptly forgotten. We recognize someone's face, and yet do not remember its features well enough to draw it. We read a novel or watch a movie, and afterwards can recall it only in the vaguest terms. We daydream through important lectures, missing most of what is said. Although we know we'll be tested on all that stuff, we sit there thinking about the wood paneling on the wall.

Savants

Before jumping to the conclusion that these mental shortcomings of ours are fundamental, we must recognize that some people are not this way. Some people, called savants, are capable of feats impossible for the rest of us. They can perform large mathematical calculations, recite back long passages after a single hearing, reproduce in intricate detail scenes seen long ago. While many savants are autistic, others have normal behavior except for their remarkable talent. And while some have had the ability since birth, others have suddenly acquired it, perhaps from a head injury. It may be that in savants, the topmost conceptual layer has been stripped away, giving them direct conscious access to the underlying unprocessed details. Savants are regarded as "defective," but they have amazing computerlike abilities not available to the rest of us.

You see, our brains are wired to handle routine tasks, processing voluminous information and discarding most of it as irrelevant. Our conscious is like an executive sitting before an empty desk, who occasionally gets a phone call. Our subconscious staff does all the grunt work, and only alerts the boss when absolutely necessary. Because he's got a tremendous amount of responsibilities. And, well... you know (wink, nudge) he's not too bright...

So Why Don't We Think?

I don't know. What's your opinion? You should have enough of the facts by now. Think about it.