<story><title>Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions</title><url>http://www.neuroscientistnews.com/research-news/our-brain-uses-statistics-calculate-confidence-make-decisions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>haberman</author><text>&amp;gt; What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them.&lt;p&gt;Exactly.  I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical.  They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support.&lt;p&gt;What experiment would convince you that statistics is not &amp;quot;the ultimate language of the brain?&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>steego</author><text>&amp;gt; For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people. How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s actually a really good example of statistics deciding a course of action.&lt;p&gt;Ask yourself this?  Why did they believe it?  It&amp;#x27;s most likely that group of people were repeatedly told stories that belongs to a larger framework of belief.  What you might not understand is good literature has a tendency to fire parts of the brain related to sight, sound and touch in an fMRI.  For so many people, a good story creates a parallel quasi-reality, and I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised their brain is basically chalking up those stories as real experiences.&lt;p&gt;I was just listening to a story on This American Life about some kids whose prom was interrupted by a tornado.  What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them.  If you think about the garbage plot lines and religious upbringing people absorb, this sort of narcissistic outlook makes a tremendous amount of sense.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll add this one point.  Modern public relations and politics feeds on the principle that you can manufacture reality by constantly bombarding people with the same shallow message.  It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter what you say as much as how loud and frequent you&amp;#x27;re saying it.</text></item><item><author>haberman</author><text>&amp;gt; It is Kepecs&amp;#x27; thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain.&lt;p&gt;Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition.&lt;p&gt;I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researcher conducts some experiment that shows some result.  But listening to that person talk about their work, it becomes clear that this has become their pet theory that they want to be capable of explaining &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt;.  As if everything we know about some system will someday be shown to be reducible to one clean, beautiful idea.&lt;p&gt;Here are a few quick reasons why I find this idea to be highly implausible:&lt;p&gt;- There are a dizzying number of documented cognitive biases in humans.  If statistics is the ultimate language of the brain, our software is pretty thoroughly buggy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- Belief motivates people to do things that have absolutely no statistical justification. For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people.  How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action?  &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;persistentfrontiers.com&amp;#x2F;xhosacattlekilling&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;persistentfrontiers.com&amp;#x2F;xhosacattlekilling&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Several people are replying with some form of: &amp;quot;your examples can still show that the mind is inherently built on statistics if you think about it in way X.&amp;quot;  Let&amp;#x27;s do a quick experiment to see if this theory is actually falsifiable.  What experiment&amp;#x2F;result would convince you that statistics is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;the ultimate language of the brain?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notahacker</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure I&amp;#x27;m convinced that statistics is the language of the brain, but I am convinced that statistical inference is one of the main reasons why individuals (and later, populations) come to believe in some highly irrational superstitions - the ones where there&amp;#x27;s no reason to assume causality at all save for correlation of rare events (particularly if we&amp;#x27;re assuming &lt;i&gt;imperfect&lt;/i&gt; use of statistics influenced by our cognitive biases rather than &amp;quot;the scientific method is the language of the brain)&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events the probability of her being an actual prophet is pretty high, given the existence of prophets is not inherently improbable&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;my odds of survival are better if I follow this stupid recommendation than if I&amp;#x27;m lynched by my fellow countrymen for ignoring it&amp;quot; are both statistically valid conclusions in favour of following some ridiculous food-source-decimating millenialist prophecy in certain circumstances.</text></comment>
<story><title>Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions</title><url>http://www.neuroscientistnews.com/research-news/our-brain-uses-statistics-calculate-confidence-make-decisions</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>haberman</author><text>&amp;gt; What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them.&lt;p&gt;Exactly.  I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical.  They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support.&lt;p&gt;What experiment would convince you that statistics is not &amp;quot;the ultimate language of the brain?&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>steego</author><text>&amp;gt; For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people. How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action?&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s actually a really good example of statistics deciding a course of action.&lt;p&gt;Ask yourself this?  Why did they believe it?  It&amp;#x27;s most likely that group of people were repeatedly told stories that belongs to a larger framework of belief.  What you might not understand is good literature has a tendency to fire parts of the brain related to sight, sound and touch in an fMRI.  For so many people, a good story creates a parallel quasi-reality, and I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised their brain is basically chalking up those stories as real experiences.&lt;p&gt;I was just listening to a story on This American Life about some kids whose prom was interrupted by a tornado.  What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them.  If you think about the garbage plot lines and religious upbringing people absorb, this sort of narcissistic outlook makes a tremendous amount of sense.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll add this one point.  Modern public relations and politics feeds on the principle that you can manufacture reality by constantly bombarding people with the same shallow message.  It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter what you say as much as how loud and frequent you&amp;#x27;re saying it.</text></item><item><author>haberman</author><text>&amp;gt; It is Kepecs&amp;#x27; thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain.&lt;p&gt;Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition.&lt;p&gt;I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researcher conducts some experiment that shows some result.  But listening to that person talk about their work, it becomes clear that this has become their pet theory that they want to be capable of explaining &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt;.  As if everything we know about some system will someday be shown to be reducible to one clean, beautiful idea.&lt;p&gt;Here are a few quick reasons why I find this idea to be highly implausible:&lt;p&gt;- There are a dizzying number of documented cognitive biases in humans.  If statistics is the ultimate language of the brain, our software is pretty thoroughly buggy: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;- Belief motivates people to do things that have absolutely no statistical justification. For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people.  How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action?  &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;persistentfrontiers.com&amp;#x2F;xhosacattlekilling&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;persistentfrontiers.com&amp;#x2F;xhosacattlekilling&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Several people are replying with some form of: &amp;quot;your examples can still show that the mind is inherently built on statistics if you think about it in way X.&amp;quot;  Let&amp;#x27;s do a quick experiment to see if this theory is actually falsifiable.  What experiment&amp;#x2F;result would convince you that statistics is &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;the ultimate language of the brain?&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>If you set your internal P value at say .01 that seems great.  Except your conducting lot&amp;#x27;s of experiments constantly.   &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xkcd.com&amp;#x2F;882&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;xkcd.com&amp;#x2F;882&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; And when you do that you regularly show correlation when none exists.&lt;p&gt;Considering how many things used to be deadly, I can see people living with fairly low P values because false positives only need to be less deadly than false negatives for things to work out.&lt;p&gt;IMO, this also explains why people are risk averse.  Generally, survival is more about avoid a few low probability bad events than having a long string of extra special awesome days.</text></comment>