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
Tag: Decision Making
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
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
A Tale of a Springbok
In my last essay, I wrote about the bold (if foolish) springbok who left the safety of the herd and made his way to the watering hole on a sweltering Namibian day. Although he seemed to be aware and on the lookout for theoretical lions as he episodically and intently scanned the periphery, he was… Continue reading A Tale of a Springbok
The Present of Things Past
As stated in one of Zeno’s nine paradoxes, an arrow in flight is “somewhere” and “somewhere in transit”, implying the flow of time as a continuum. Thereafter, approximately a thousand years after Zeno, the theologian Augustine of Hippo attempted to categorize time by writing, “perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times -… Continue reading The Present of Things Past
I err, therefore I am
When talking about the human mental capabilities, in The Symbolic Species, Terrence Deacon stated that “biologically, we are just another ape. Mentally, we are new phylum of organism.” This wondrous and unfathomably complex organ - the brain - has enabled us to become the most dominant species of the planet. With a unique capacity to… Continue reading I err, therefore I am
The Zombie Zone
The term circadian is derived from Latin to mean “about a day.” Organisms ranging from single-cell organisms and plants to sea slugs and humans demonstrate circadian rhythms near twenty-hour patterns. In humans, numerous physiological and behavioral processes demonstrate circadian rhythms but the sleep-wake rhythm is one of the most important and observable cyclical rhythms. The… Continue reading The Zombie Zone
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
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
Truth Springs from Arguments
Nature is saturated with feedback mechanisms ranging in scale from the molecular to the macroscopic. Feedback is defined as the process of mutual causal interaction: where A affects B and B affects A. This interaction creates a circuit of effects, so any change in A, causes a change in B, which in turn causes a… Continue reading Truth Springs from Arguments
Tail Events
The human brain (like any other organ) has evolved for specific environments and is constrained by its chemistry and historical contingencies. In my last post, I discussed the cognitive blind spots that play a role in the epidemic of over-testing and over-treating in medicine. Human decision making is notoriously ill-equipped to distinguish between low probability… Continue reading Tail Events
Medicine, the science of uncertainty
In a recent article, it was estimated that at least $200 billion is wasted annually on excessive testing and treatment. The impact of the overly aggressive, extraneous care is not only financial in nature but also generates mistakes and injuries believed to cause 30,000 deaths each year. In 1979 the founders of the field of behavioral… Continue reading Medicine, the science of uncertainty
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