Your Brain: The Missing Manual

Statistical Blunders

Statistics is about as far as you can get from the brain's common sense thinking. As you probably know, statistics is a set of mathematical techniques that draws certain types of conclusions from huge quantities of information. These days, we use statistics to inform everything from what shows we put on television to what medicines we put in our bodies.

Unfortunately, the human brain is embarrassingly bad at thinking statistically. Your brain is far happier relying on a hodgepodge of hunches, best guesses, and personal experience than it is analyzing numbers and trends. As a result, we're often unable to take full advantage of the best information we have about the world around us.

The brain's preference for instinct over statistics makes perfect sense. For millions of years, humans had no need to think statistically because there were no statistics. Furthermore, if one of our distant ancestors had taken a day off to invent statistics, it would have been profoundly useless, simply because there would have been no way to gather the huge amounts of information needed to make statistical conclusions. In other words, humans are experts in making calculated assumptions based on limited information because we need to be. It's only in the last few hundred years that we learned how to nose into millions of other people's lives to help make decisions about our own.

Small Samples

Today is a special day in Ted's life. After a protracted struggle with a nasty smoking addiction, ...