In most real-world biological ecosystems where stimuli are often riddled with ambiguity, predictions are inherently probabilistic, and resources are time and computation constrained, organisms are forced to navigate the trade-offs between false-positives and false-negatives and the opportunity costs of (in)action. For example, if a feeding animal senses the presence of a possible predator, at the… Continue reading Drowned in (False) Positives
Essays
Death by Dashboards
Due to the glacial pace of evolutionary adaptation in many if not most ways, the genome could be considered a lagging indicator. It is tuned to invariants of a bygone regime - the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). Life would probably be not as robust and diversified if it had to solely rely on a… Continue reading Death by Dashboards
Fluency and Its Illusions
Although we think of information overload as a contemporary phenomenon, throughout evolutionary history organisms have always had to grapple with a world brimming with noisy data. Ever present and life threatening features such as camouflaged prey, lurking predators, strategizing competitors, invasive species, weather changes, and insecure food supply have always been part of the challenges… Continue reading Fluency and Its Illusions
Plastic Brains
To qualify as a licensed London taxi driver, trainees require comprehensive training and testing that typically takes three to four years. Drivers need to commit to memory and learn the mishmashed layout of approximately 25,000 streets, the location of thousands of landmarks, and the quickest way to navigate between any points in the city. In… Continue reading Plastic Brains
(Mis)matched
The 300,000 year old history of our species is one of migrations made possible by our biological and cultural adaptations. From their East African cradle, homo sapiens now occupy every longitude and latitude of the world. As a generalist species with a penchant for story-telling, socializing, teaching, learning, technology, and engineering, we have transformed our… Continue reading (Mis)matched
The Study of Others
As fundamentally social primates living in and dependent on exceptionally large and heterogeneous groups, other humans are among the most important features of the environment for humans. For humans, having the capacity to infer the intentions, goals, and feelings of others is essential for the Darwinian goals of survival and reproduction. In fact, the networked… Continue reading The Study of Others
The Study of Self
Cover: Strangers to Ourselves The philosopher Karl Jaspers introduced the concept of the Axial Age to describe convergent movements in thought that occurred across the Old World from the Greco-Roman to the Indian and Chinese. This period from approximately 8th century to the 3rd century BCE was the documented birth of the study of self.… Continue reading The Study of Self
The Foggy Road
In his book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, Andy Clark used the metaphor of driving on a foggy but familiar road versus driving on a similarly foggy but unfamiliar road, to highlight the dynamism between the “top-down” predictions and “bottom-up” sensory data in perception. When navigating the familiar but foggy road, memory… Continue reading The Foggy Road
Great Expectations
Visual illusions (see below) provide unique insights into the generative aspects of perceptions and the gaps between perception and reality. They not only illustrate the disproportionate impact our learned and innate knowledge of the world - our priors - have on our perceptions, but also that perception is not a direct reflection of the world… Continue reading Great Expectations
Feelings Felt
We learn early in our education about the five senses - visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, and olfactory. This processing of information from the “external environment” is termed exteroception. Intermittently, salient sights, sounds, tastes, smells, or touches enter our awareness but for the most part exteroception happens subconsciously. However, the brain not only monitors the external… Continue reading Feelings Felt
Language and Its Discontents
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Fortunately, human communication carries multiple layers of signals - verbal and non-verbal, conscious and subconscious - with language or consciousness representing summarizations of all those signals. Similarly, the patient-physician interaction also is laden with signals. Even without considering the vagaries of… Continue reading Language and Its Discontents
Worlds Far and Wide, Near and Close
Who we are emerges out of the dynamic interplay of what we are (the person), where we are (the situation), what we say we will do (intentions), and what we do (actions). Medicine has built a model of disease with a focus on the person in a hospital or a clinic and their intentions. In… Continue reading Worlds Far and Wide, Near and Close
The Person and the Situation
It has almost become a truism to attribute the causes of diseases to social determinants of health (SDOH). By one estimate, SDOH account for 60% of premature death in the United States. According to the CDC, SDOH are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age. While… Continue reading The Person and the Situation
The Wanderer
A core functionality of biological organisms is to track regularities in the environment and utilize those regularities as a substrate for predictions. In general, organisms that can identify markers of risk, danger, and safety and respond appropriately to those markers are better adapted than organisms that lack this functionality. Thus, the largely reflexive fight-flight-freeze responses… Continue reading The Wanderer
Steep Hills
As I discussed in my last essay, social relationships - the types, the numbers, and the nature - constitute a major risk factor for health. It rivals well established medical risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obesity, and physical fitness. In fact, by one estimate nearly 60% of the variation in health outcomes is caused… Continue reading Steep Hills
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