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
Category: Emergency Care
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 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
Intuitions in the Wild
In reality, there are probably no wild places remaining. The watering hole has a water tank and fences, the lions have identification tags, and are largely habituated to the gawking tourists with binoculars. Analogously, the emergency department has protocols, clinical guidelines, and triage scores. Both environments are semi-wild; neither completely open and wild nor fully closed… Continue reading Intuitions in the Wild
Wild Places
In the Tale of a Springbok, I narrated the story of a springbok approaching an empty but hot desert watering hole in Etosha National Park, unaware of the two lionesses sitting underneath the bush in the periphery. As the scene unfolded, I anthropomorphized and looked on with mixed feelings vacillating from suspense and excitement to… Continue reading Wild Places
Fisheries, forests, & emergency care
In my last essay, I made the case that emergency care in the United States is better classified as a common rather than a public good. Due to the passage of the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), emergency care became non-excludable and because it is resource constrained, it is rival. Patients are streaming… Continue reading Fisheries, forests, & emergency care
Tragedy of the ED Commons
In his landmark article, Tragedy of Commons (1968), Garrett Hardin asks, “Is ours a finite world? [If so], a finite world can only support a finite population.” In Hardin’s parable, a single group of herders shares a common pasture. The pasture is large enough to support many animals, but not infinitely many. Rationally, each herdsman… Continue reading Tragedy of the ED Commons
The Map is not the Territory
It is hard to even fathom let alone comprehend the size, scale, and complexity of the universe. It takes light 91 billion years to traverse the diameter of the observable universe. That is approximately six times longer than the age of the universe itself. Similarly, the amount of information in the world vastly overwhelms the… Continue reading The Map is not the Territory
The Suitcase of Empathy
Marvin Minsky called words that carry a variety of meanings "suitcase words." Empathy is such a word. Over the last ten years, research into empathy has exploded. The number of research papers in psychological journals, on the topic, has increased dramatically and popular interest in the concept matches what is found in these journals. A… Continue reading The Suitcase of Empathy
Stereotypes
Humans are natural pattern recognition machines. We have an evolved instinct not only to recognize different patterns but also to categorize and store these patterns in order to make future predictions. In fact, this ability to recognize and represent patterns to draw a variety of intuitive inferences could be the defining and most original characteristic… Continue reading Stereotypes
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