In his excellent book How the Mind Works, Stephen Pinker lays out everything we know about how humans navigate the world. His descriptions are accessible, if a bit complicated by virtue of their topic.
I’ve always been fascinated by the brain, and this book is a great starting point to learn more. One topic Pinker covers is how we manage to see in such a complex world. All the tasks that vision completes are difficult. One small example is perspective. One problem with perspective is that an image on your retina could be big or small either because it is close to your face, like a finger, or because it is far away but very big, like a giant statue of a finger.
Solving this problem seems simple to us because we see naturally. We aren’t privy to the behind the scenes work that our brain puts the world through before presenting it to us for scrutiny. In fact we don’t actually see the world as it is, we see something that is processed by our brain to pick out the important features to allow us to get around.
‘We see the world not as it is, but as we are’ – Anais Nin
The tasks our brain completes are too complex to have a jack-of-all-trades do. Instead we have a team of experts who solve problems using specific skills sets and specific types of information. The problem with these experts is that if they are left to their own devices - that is if you leave them in isolation to solve problems like vision - then they will come up with all sorts of outlandish ideas about how the world must be working.
I once met a woman who was just getting into the Secret, the book/DVD about how you can manifest what you want by thinking about it. She explained everything in life as a result of the secret. She was like the expert that couldn’t see outside of their own field.
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” – Abraham Maslow
They way the brain solves the problem of the experts is to have some form of co-ordination that drives the experts to take the most likely option in the world that we live in.
This is a great model developed by natural selection, the best engineer we’ve got. It would be a good idea to consider this in our everyday lives, that taking expertise too far can lead us to make false explanations about the world. It doesn’t mean that expertise is bad. We need all the experts in the brain because the problems we face are too difficult and different to be done by an all in one system. But we need to keep Occam’s Razor in mind. That is the principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” and the conclusion that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one.
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