The Logic of Intuition
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer. Viking, 2007 ($25.95)
How does an outfielder catch a baseball? It’s amazing, really. A ball’s trajectory is described by a complicated set of mathematical equations, but the human brain has evolved a simple way to solve the problem: watch the ball and move such that the angle between your eyes and the ball stays constant. Kids automatically follow this “gaze heuristic” in their first game of catch, even though no one has explained it to them.
Our brains have developed simple guidelines such as the gaze heuristic to let us function in a complicated world. These rules form the basis of our intuition, writes Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Despite what philosophers and economists have believed for centuries, reason may not be the best decisionmaking tool we have at our disposal. Intuition, he asserts, can be better. (For more about the science behind intuition, see “The Powers and Perils of Intuition,” by David G. Myers; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2007.)
Gigerenzer, whose research informed Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Blink (Little, Brown, 2005), provides fascinating examples of situations in which intuition is accurate, and he goes one step further to explain why intuition is so frequently correct. Contrary to popular belief, he argues, intuition is not based solely on impulse—it has its own rationale rooted in brain capacities that have developed over evolutionary time. And although the rules of thumb that guide intuition are surprisingly unsophisticated, they are also astonishingly accurate. These principles can guide people who know very little about a topic to make choices as good as those made by people who know a lot.
For example, most people subconsciously assign a greater value to something they recognize (such as a celebrity, a famous city or a brand name) than to something unfamiliar. People who know little about tennis but recognize the names of a few famous players will predict tennis match outcomes nearly as well as tennis aficionados will. We naturally assume that the players whose names we recognize are more likely to win—and indeed, they usually do.
Gigerenzer supports his arguments with upbeat and entertaining examples that, as an added bonus, are directly applicable to our lives. We use our intuition every day to make decisions—from how we answer trivia questions to whom we date. In Gut Feelings, Gigerenzer argues compellingly that what we feel in our gut is informed by our brain—and thousands of years of experience. It’s time we gave those feelings some credence. —Melinda Wenner
Unintelligent Quotient
IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea by Stephen Murdoch. John Wiley & Sons, 2007 ($24.95)
In the early morning hours of August 17, 1996, Daryl Atkins shot a man at close range, killing him. While Atkins was on trial, his IQ was determined to be 59, well below most states’ cutoff of 70 for mental retardation—and for the death penalty. After several appeals, Atkins’s IQ was tested again in 2005, and the results were similar. But when the prosecution demanded a third IQ test two days later, Atkins scored a 76. Within 48 hours Atkins had gone from being considered too stupid to plan a murder to being a candidate for the death penalty.
Atkins’s case is one of the many compelling examples that journalist Stephen Murdoch describes to illustrate the momentous impact that IQ tests have on public policy and private lives and the shaky grounds on which these exams stand. IQ is a journey through the history of intelligence testing, revealing it to be “full of abuses” and plagued by “catastrophically terrible policy ideas.” Murdoch cites evidence that intelligence testing has served as a justifi cation for atrocities ranging from forced sterilization in the U.S. to horrors in Nazi Germany.
Murdoch shows how intelligence tests grew out of practical and historical necessity—for example, to let overwhelmed military personnel quickly sort through large numbers of possible recruits—rather than from agreement about what intelligence actually is. And instead of assessing innate intelligence, IQ tests measure knowledge and problem-solving abilities. Moreover, in the 100 years since the first intelligence test was published, IQ test questions have changed startlingly little.
Despite intelligence testing’s troubled history, many psychologists believe that IQ tests are useful. Some research has shown that IQ tests reliably predict an individual’s performance at school or on the job. In IQ, however, Murdoch presents a provocative and compelling account of the severe shortcomings of these tests, making a convincing argument for their abolishment.
Murdoch concludes that “it’s time for psychologists and other intelligence experts to devise better tools. In the interim, they should stop trying to persuade the rest of us that they can test intelligence, because they can’t, and such claims are dangerous.” —Nicole Branan
People as Particles
The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You by Mark Buchanan. Bloomsbury, 2007 ($24.95)
From hurricanes to supernovae, scientists have employed the laws of physics to explain the behavior of everything in nature—except humans. But that’s about to change, claims journalist and theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan, who says that we are currently witnessing something “akin to a quantum revolution” in the social sciences. On a grand scale, people may be as predictable as particles.
In The Social Atom, Buchanan offers a glimpse into a new research frontier that applies the principles of physics to the study of human social behavior. Just as physicists decipher the forces that govern the organization of individual atoms into different materials, Buchanan says, it is possible to fi gure out the physical laws of the human world if we treat people as “social atoms” forming “social matter.” He disputes the long-held notion that the fact that free individuals can do whatever they please makes any predictions about their behavior impossible. Buchanan argues that when we look at patterns rather than people, the impact of our individuality dwindles, much like in physics where “atomic-level chaos gives way to the clockwork precision of … planetary motion.”
Buchanan presents a few of the social atom’s basic properties and asserts that learning what happens when many of these particles interact will enable us to explain scenarios ranging from stock market fl uctuations to mass genocide. His characterization of social atoms is neither new nor surprising: they tend to imitate one another, organize themselves in groups with atoms similar to themselves, and let emotions influence their thinking and decision making. But Buchanan presents these old ideas in a new and unusual light. For example, in the same way that individual microscopic atomic magnets in a chunk of iron tend to line up even in the absence of an external magnetic field, social atoms coerce their immediate neighbors into adopting opinions and behaviors similar to their own, he explains. Such social forces can eventually lead to outcomes that few individuals ever intended, such as ethnic and gang warfare.
The underlying idea of The Social Atom is compelling, and Buchanan succeeds in whetting the appetite for future findings from the nascent fi eld of social physics. He admits that any great discoveries about the inner workings of social matter are unlikely to solve global society’s myriad problems. Instead, Buchanan believes, we will continue “muddling through,” but “our muddling skills will greatly be enhanced by a proper appreciation of the hidden forces that drive the world.” —Nicole Branan
Nietzsche’s Brain
The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief by Michael R. Trimble. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007 ($35)
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche invoked the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus to represent two contrasting tendencies of the human mind—the Apollonian focus on logic and order and the Dionysian mode of intuition and emotion.
Drawing on this dichotomy, behavioral neurologist Michael R. Trimble of the University of London delves into the neurobiological roots of human culture in The Soul in the Brain. Trimble’s emphasis is on music, poetry and religion—in short, culture’s more Dionysian elements—which he argues are all closely related to one another and strongly shaped by the brain’s right hemisphere.
Much as Nietzsche regarded Socrates and his philosophical followers as too narrowly Apollonian, Trimble criticizes his fellow neuroscientists as overly focused on the left hemisphere, which is traditionally thought to be dominant for language skills. Citing the linguistic effects of various forms of brain damage and dysfunction, he contends persuasively that the right hemisphere plays a key role in language elements such as tone, timing and the use of metaphor—the stuff of poetry but crucial even in everyday prose.
Musical skills and perceptions also depend heavily on the right hemisphere, as evidenced by brain scans and other data; the right frontal cortex, for instance, is involved in memory for pitch, and the right temporal lobe handles timbre perception. Music and poetry share a reliance on rhythm, an ability to evoke strong emotions and an important presence in religious ceremonies. The neural circuits underlying music, poetry and religion, in Trimble’s view, probably have extensive overlap in the right hemisphere, a possible linkage that neuroscience has only begun to explore.
Why do poems, songs and rituals touch people so deeply? Trimble’s plausible speculation is that such activities tap the right cerebrum’s connections to evolutionarily older parts of the brain, including the emotion-laden limbic system. Discussing why people love to cry at the theater, he suggests that such crying is a bridge back to a more primordial state of mind. Echoing Nietzsche’s view that great tragic art requires a melding of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Trimble asserts that creativity and a full mental life depend on interaction between the left and right hemispheres.
Curiously, while celebrating Dionysus, The Soul in the Brain maintains a distinctly Apollonian tone; Trimble’s writing style is a bit dry, and he says little about his own experiences with patients, relying instead on published literature. Still, the book is a highly thoughtprovoking excursion through neuroscience, philosophy and culture. —Kenneth Silber
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer. Viking, 2007 ($25.95)
How does an outfielder catch a baseball? It’s amazing, really. A ball’s trajectory is described by a complicated set of mathematical equations, but the human brain has evolved a simple way to solve the problem: watch the ball and move such that the angle between your eyes and the ball stays constant. Kids automatically follow this “gaze heuristic” in their first game of catch, even though no one has explained it to them.
Our brains have developed simple guidelines such as the gaze heuristic to let us function in a complicated world. These rules form the basis of our intuition, writes Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Despite what philosophers and economists have believed for centuries, reason may not be the best decisionmaking tool we have at our disposal. Intuition, he asserts, can be better. (For more about the science behind intuition, see “The Powers and Perils of Intuition,” by David G. Myers; Scientific American Mind, June/July 2007.)
Gigerenzer, whose research informed Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book Blink (Little, Brown, 2005), provides fascinating examples of situations in which intuition is accurate, and he goes one step further to explain why intuition is so frequently correct. Contrary to popular belief, he argues, intuition is not based solely on impulse—it has its own rationale rooted in brain capacities that have developed over evolutionary time. And although the rules of thumb that guide intuition are surprisingly unsophisticated, they are also astonishingly accurate. These principles can guide people who know very little about a topic to make choices as good as those made by people who know a lot.
For example, most people subconsciously assign a greater value to something they recognize (such as a celebrity, a famous city or a brand name) than to something unfamiliar. People who know little about tennis but recognize the names of a few famous players will predict tennis match outcomes nearly as well as tennis aficionados will. We naturally assume that the players whose names we recognize are more likely to win—and indeed, they usually do.
Gigerenzer supports his arguments with upbeat and entertaining examples that, as an added bonus, are directly applicable to our lives. We use our intuition every day to make decisions—from how we answer trivia questions to whom we date. In Gut Feelings, Gigerenzer argues compellingly that what we feel in our gut is informed by our brain—and thousands of years of experience. It’s time we gave those feelings some credence. —Melinda Wenner
Unintelligent Quotient
IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea by Stephen Murdoch. John Wiley & Sons, 2007 ($24.95)
In the early morning hours of August 17, 1996, Daryl Atkins shot a man at close range, killing him. While Atkins was on trial, his IQ was determined to be 59, well below most states’ cutoff of 70 for mental retardation—and for the death penalty. After several appeals, Atkins’s IQ was tested again in 2005, and the results were similar. But when the prosecution demanded a third IQ test two days later, Atkins scored a 76. Within 48 hours Atkins had gone from being considered too stupid to plan a murder to being a candidate for the death penalty.
Atkins’s case is one of the many compelling examples that journalist Stephen Murdoch describes to illustrate the momentous impact that IQ tests have on public policy and private lives and the shaky grounds on which these exams stand. IQ is a journey through the history of intelligence testing, revealing it to be “full of abuses” and plagued by “catastrophically terrible policy ideas.” Murdoch cites evidence that intelligence testing has served as a justifi cation for atrocities ranging from forced sterilization in the U.S. to horrors in Nazi Germany.
Murdoch shows how intelligence tests grew out of practical and historical necessity—for example, to let overwhelmed military personnel quickly sort through large numbers of possible recruits—rather than from agreement about what intelligence actually is. And instead of assessing innate intelligence, IQ tests measure knowledge and problem-solving abilities. Moreover, in the 100 years since the first intelligence test was published, IQ test questions have changed startlingly little.
Despite intelligence testing’s troubled history, many psychologists believe that IQ tests are useful. Some research has shown that IQ tests reliably predict an individual’s performance at school or on the job. In IQ, however, Murdoch presents a provocative and compelling account of the severe shortcomings of these tests, making a convincing argument for their abolishment.
Murdoch concludes that “it’s time for psychologists and other intelligence experts to devise better tools. In the interim, they should stop trying to persuade the rest of us that they can test intelligence, because they can’t, and such claims are dangerous.” —Nicole Branan
People as Particles
The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You by Mark Buchanan. Bloomsbury, 2007 ($24.95)
From hurricanes to supernovae, scientists have employed the laws of physics to explain the behavior of everything in nature—except humans. But that’s about to change, claims journalist and theoretical physicist Mark Buchanan, who says that we are currently witnessing something “akin to a quantum revolution” in the social sciences. On a grand scale, people may be as predictable as particles.
In The Social Atom, Buchanan offers a glimpse into a new research frontier that applies the principles of physics to the study of human social behavior. Just as physicists decipher the forces that govern the organization of individual atoms into different materials, Buchanan says, it is possible to fi gure out the physical laws of the human world if we treat people as “social atoms” forming “social matter.” He disputes the long-held notion that the fact that free individuals can do whatever they please makes any predictions about their behavior impossible. Buchanan argues that when we look at patterns rather than people, the impact of our individuality dwindles, much like in physics where “atomic-level chaos gives way to the clockwork precision of … planetary motion.”
Buchanan presents a few of the social atom’s basic properties and asserts that learning what happens when many of these particles interact will enable us to explain scenarios ranging from stock market fl uctuations to mass genocide. His characterization of social atoms is neither new nor surprising: they tend to imitate one another, organize themselves in groups with atoms similar to themselves, and let emotions influence their thinking and decision making. But Buchanan presents these old ideas in a new and unusual light. For example, in the same way that individual microscopic atomic magnets in a chunk of iron tend to line up even in the absence of an external magnetic field, social atoms coerce their immediate neighbors into adopting opinions and behaviors similar to their own, he explains. Such social forces can eventually lead to outcomes that few individuals ever intended, such as ethnic and gang warfare.
The underlying idea of The Social Atom is compelling, and Buchanan succeeds in whetting the appetite for future findings from the nascent fi eld of social physics. He admits that any great discoveries about the inner workings of social matter are unlikely to solve global society’s myriad problems. Instead, Buchanan believes, we will continue “muddling through,” but “our muddling skills will greatly be enhanced by a proper appreciation of the hidden forces that drive the world.” —Nicole Branan
Nietzsche’s Brain
The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief by Michael R. Trimble. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007 ($35)
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche invoked the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus to represent two contrasting tendencies of the human mind—the Apollonian focus on logic and order and the Dionysian mode of intuition and emotion.
Drawing on this dichotomy, behavioral neurologist Michael R. Trimble of the University of London delves into the neurobiological roots of human culture in The Soul in the Brain. Trimble’s emphasis is on music, poetry and religion—in short, culture’s more Dionysian elements—which he argues are all closely related to one another and strongly shaped by the brain’s right hemisphere.
Much as Nietzsche regarded Socrates and his philosophical followers as too narrowly Apollonian, Trimble criticizes his fellow neuroscientists as overly focused on the left hemisphere, which is traditionally thought to be dominant for language skills. Citing the linguistic effects of various forms of brain damage and dysfunction, he contends persuasively that the right hemisphere plays a key role in language elements such as tone, timing and the use of metaphor—the stuff of poetry but crucial even in everyday prose.
Musical skills and perceptions also depend heavily on the right hemisphere, as evidenced by brain scans and other data; the right frontal cortex, for instance, is involved in memory for pitch, and the right temporal lobe handles timbre perception. Music and poetry share a reliance on rhythm, an ability to evoke strong emotions and an important presence in religious ceremonies. The neural circuits underlying music, poetry and religion, in Trimble’s view, probably have extensive overlap in the right hemisphere, a possible linkage that neuroscience has only begun to explore.
Why do poems, songs and rituals touch people so deeply? Trimble’s plausible speculation is that such activities tap the right cerebrum’s connections to evolutionarily older parts of the brain, including the emotion-laden limbic system. Discussing why people love to cry at the theater, he suggests that such crying is a bridge back to a more primordial state of mind. Echoing Nietzsche’s view that great tragic art requires a melding of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Trimble asserts that creativity and a full mental life depend on interaction between the left and right hemispheres.
Curiously, while celebrating Dionysus, The Soul in the Brain maintains a distinctly Apollonian tone; Trimble’s writing style is a bit dry, and he says little about his own experiences with patients, relying instead on published literature. Still, the book is a highly thoughtprovoking excursion through neuroscience, philosophy and culture. —Kenneth Silber
