![]() ![]() What’s going on? What does it mean? What should I do about it? Novel-random, unpredictable-events alert the brain by activating the amygdala and the reward system. (The further into the future the brain tries to project its predictions, the less accurate they’re likely to be because the world we live in is not linear but a complex adaptive system containing multiple other complex adaptive systems. The brain can’t pay attention to everything, so it focuses on what seems important in the moment in order to predict what’s going to happen next and prepare a response. ![]() We try to make sense of the events we experience so we will know what to do the next time we encounter a similar situation. Hindsight bias is an unintended by-product of an otherwise adaptive process for selecting and processing information as we try to make sense of the events that we experience. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan We Can’t Stop Making Sense Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the “I knew it all along” effect. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. The hindsight bias makes the past seem more predictable than it actually was-and also more consistent with the present. It’s much harder to sort things out when you don’t know what to sort for. ![]() But we only know what was relevant because we know the outcome. In hindsight, we can separate the relevant signals from the irrelevant signals to reveal a clear and inevitable path to an obvious conclusion. So we convince ourselves that random events were actually foreseeable.Īfter an event occurs it’s easy to believe that we-or others-either knew it would happen or should have known it would happen. Our belief in a linear, cause-and-effect world leads us to think that everything can be explained and, therefore, everything is predictable-or at least it should have been-after the fact. If the brain actually liked novelty, then it (and we) would revel in the surprise of all the random and unpredictable events that occur in our lives instead of employing the hindsight bias to try to explain them. What if the brain really liked novelty instead of just having a strong response to it? ![]()
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