The Analog Mind

The Analog Mind

The reason biases can so easily lead us astray is that the mind doesn’t rigorously test the logic of every new piece of information it receives. If it did, our mental processes would grind to a halt, and the mind—and we—would be dysfunctional. Instead, the mind takes a shortcut by patterning: treating the new information as it did the old, drawing the same conclusions, experiencing the same feelings, taking the same actions. Thus, the mind operates analogically, not logically.

In The Universe Within, in a section entitled “A Flunking Grade in Logic for the World’s Only Logical Animal,” Morton Hunt writes:

Most human beings earn a failing grade in elementary logic…. We’re not just frequently incompetent [in thinking logically], we’re also willfully and skillfully illogical. When a piece of deductive reasoning leads to a conclusion we don’t like, we often rebut it with irrelevancies and sophistries of which, instead of being ashamed, we act proud.

(This brings to mind the emphatic denial by the two interviewers in ABC’s experiment that they had been guilty of age discrimination.)

Jeremy Campbell, an Oxford-educated Washington correspondent of the London Standard newspaper, in his book about the human mind, The Improbable Machine, agrees with Hunt’s observation:

Compelling research in cognitive psychology has shown that we are logical only in a superficial sense; at a deeper level we are systematically illogical and biased…. Highly intelligent people, asked to solve a simple problem calling for the use of elementary logic, are likely to behave like dunderheads…. If we want to get to know the mind, logic is the wrong place to start. There is no innate device in the head for doing logic.

A prime illustration of how innately illogical most of us are is how people rush to buy tickets in a multimillion-dollar lottery in the days preceding the drawing, knowing their chances of winning are less than their chance of being struck twice by lightning in bed on the same night. They justify their illogical behavior with a variety of silly statements such as “Someone is going to win, and it might as well be me” and that all-time winner “I have as good a chance as anyone.”

As Hunt says, “Despite the uncertainties [of our analogical approach to problem solving], it seems over the millennia to have been fixed in us … by success; the errors we make are small in comparison to our gain in coping with the world.” People who place great stock in logical thinking may look down upon human analogical reasoning, but, as Hunt observes, we humans could not survive without it.

Recall my example of entering a darkened room. I didn’t have to go step by step through a logical sequence of thoughts to decide to reach out and flip the light switch. My mind, comparing this situation with others I had encountered and finding a matching pattern, retrieved from memory what action I had taken previously. My mind thus leapfrogged (took a shortcut) over an otherwise complex logical sequence and directed me to flip the switch. This is the principal way in which we interpret and deal with the physical world around us: we interpret new experiences in light of old ones and make inferences based on similarities.

One of the inferences we routinely and unconsciously make is detecting when something is “illogical.” What if someone asks, “How high can a giraffe fly?” Instantly our mind tells us the question is “illogical.” We don’t have to think about it; we instantly know. Yet how do we know? An educated guess is that the mind compares the new information about the giraffe with the old information the mind has stored away about the animal. Not only does the new information not match the old, it clashes violently, and the mind tells us it doesn’t match, meaning it doesn’t make sense. This is a far cry from reasoning or rational thinking, and it’s certainly light-years away from formal logic. Formal logic would address the question in something like the following syllogism:

A giraffe is an animal.

Only animals that have wings can fly.

A giraffe does not have wings.

A giraffe cannot fly.

It goes without saying that the human mind does not think by means of syllogisms. We all know this because we know how we think. Thinking via syllogisms, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to study formal logic will agree, is as unnatural as a three-legged chicken wearing combat boots. Thinking in terms of syllogisms is awkward, difficult, and frustrating and strains the intellect of even the most intelligent members of our species.

It stands to reason that, given early humans’ acquisition of a giant brain of immense intellectual potential, some members of the species may have experimented with logical thinking. I can visualize Rodin’s statue of The Thinker as an early human sitting naked on a boulder outside his cave, head down, chin in hand, formulating syllogisms to explain the nature of existence. (Don’t laugh!) If logical thinking was ever seriously toyed with by early humans, it was quickly extinguished as an evolving human trait, for not only did it offer no redeeming advantage, it was downright dangerous.

Imagine two early humans—A and B—walking together across the ancient savanna. It is the close of the day, and the sun is low on the horizon. A gentle breeze is cooling the hot, dry air. Suddenly, the pair catch sight of a shadow moving nearby in the tall grass. Early Human A stops to ponder logically what the shadow might be. A gazelle? A water buffalo? A chimpanzee? Perhaps a wild boar? Perhaps a lion? Meanwhile, Early Human B has run off to find safe refuge in a tall tree or a cave. Those early humans represented by A, who analyzed the situation logically to determine what steps to take, were, as modern-day Darwinian personnel managers would say, “selected out,” while early humans of the B type, who instead applied what cognitive scientists call “plausible reasoning,” survived to plausibly reason another day. Over time it was the B types that populated the earth.

What is plausible reasoning? “Plausible” means “seemingly true at first glance.” Plausible reasoning (also referred to as “natural” reasoning) is our practice of leaping to a conclusion that is probably correct based on the recognition of similarities between the situation confronting us at the moment and one that confronted us in the past. This is analogical thinking—patterning. We infer from the similarities that the two situations are probably alike. In the case of Early Human B spotting a shadow in the grass and recalling an earlier occasion when the shadow was a lion, B could plausibly conclude that it would be in his or her best interest in the present situation to get the hell out of there.

As Morton Hunt put it, “Natural [plausible] reasoning often succeeds even when it violates laws of logic. What laws then does natural reasoning obey?” He cited two: plausibility and probability. “In contrast to logical reasoning,” said Hunt, “natural reasoning proceeds by steps that are credible [plausible] but not rigorous and arrives at conclusions that are likely [probable] but not certain.”

Because logic, to be effective, requires total consistency and total certainty, logical thinking is unsuited for dealing with the real world in which the only certainty (other than taxes and TV commercials) is ultimate death. But plausible reasoning requires neither consistency nor certainty. If we had to be wholly consistent and certain, we could hardly think at all, for most of our thinking, as Hunt astutely observed, is as imperfect as it is functional.

Thus, when early Homo sapiens was confronted with potential threats, plausible reasoning traded an uncertain probability of risk for the certainty of survival. If there were only a 1 percent chance that the shadow moving in the grass was a carnivore, then, on average, one out of every umpteen times a human stuck around to find out what the shadow was, the human would get eaten. But if the human ran away whenever a shadow moved in the grass, that human survived 100 percent of the time. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in formal logic to figure out which course of action was more beneficial to survival. Plausible reasoning ensured survival; logical reasoning didn’t. Logical reasoners were penalized (weeded out over time); plausible reasoners were rewarded (proliferated over time). We therefore can confidently conclude, without need of extensive confirmatory studies through congressionally funded federal grants, that thinking logically (logical thinking), was not only not a prerequisite for our survival as a species but was, in fact, a liability.