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When Instinct Fails
Why we can’t trust our intuition to guide us
Imagine an animal that lives in a world of movable squares. Some squares are black and some are white. As the animal moves across the squares its brain begins to register a pattern. Most of the time, when two black squares appear one after the other followed by a white square, underneath the white square is a pellet of food. So the pattern is: B->B->W = food (most of the time).
Any animal with a brain that’s hardwired to detect patterns will benefit from this situation because it will begin to form a heuristic: when hungry, look for two contiguous black squares followed by a white square. Any animal with a brain that’s not hardwired to detect patterns will be unable to benefit from the seeming regularity of this somewhat regular environment and will likely fare poorly. Ultimately only the animals with brains capable of intuitively recognizing simple patterns will survive and pass on their genes to their descendants.
As we’d expect, because all creatures live within ecosystems that necessarily contain elements of order, all animals with central nervous systems have brains that have evolved to perform pattern recognition. Thus the human brain, like the brains of corvids and of all mammals, is a highly sophisticated pattern recognition machines. Provided we’re operating within environments for which we’re adapted…
