MORE BRAIN TALK
Always interesting to persons with Moebius.  Today--how our brains on the one hand are not "wired" for the 21st century and yet, how they can do so much more than can a computer:
"Even the best computer system is prone to glitches. So is the human brain. But while we can easily fix and update those digital annoyances, the human brain and its complex neural web can’t be deleted and upgraded. In his new book, "Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives", UCLA neuroscientist Dean Buonomano tells us how our brain’s shortcomings impact many of our everyday decisions.
Q: You say that our brains aren’t “programmed” to live in the 21^st century. What do you mean?
A: Think of a moth flying into a candle flame. Clearly, the moth didn’t evolve to deal with light sources up close, whether that’s candles or artificial lights. Our brains were optimized to live in a world in which we dealt with finding food and shelter. Now, our brains have to deal with a world in which we plan decades into the future, have abundant food, and know a thousand different people.
Q: In your book you talk about how easily humans are swayed by marketing and propaganda. Why is that?
A: Our ability to process context can be used against us. A classic example is the “framing” effect. If you hear that you have two options for a medical treatment and one has a 95 percent survival rate and the other has a 5 percent mortality rate, people are biased toward the treatment with a positive association -- even though both are mathematically the same. Marketers take advantage of this because of our positive biases.
Q: I have a lot of bugs in my computer. But I never thought of my brain as having "bugs."
A: I obviously borrowed the term from the computer lexicon. Compared to the computer, the brain has a lot more cool things like consciousness, awareness and creativity. But as an information device, the brain does some things well, and some things very poorly due to “bugs,” which affects things like forming false memories, making irrational financial decisions and problems with remembering names and dates.
Q: Despite its glitches, the brain is clearly better than a computer at certain things, right?
A: A computer is better at figuring out a logarithm at eight digits. Its “switches” are very fast, very discrete. The building blocks of the brain, our neurons, are very noisy, because they’re very social and communicate with each other. Let’s say you turn your TV on, and you hear a person talking about "valves."  If that person has a medical coat on, you’ll interpret the valve comment in the context of the heart. If the person has a mechanic’s uniform on, you’ll think car. The brain is exquisitely capable of picking up context that a computer can’t."

"In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect,
and no more of it than we had earned." -Jane Haddam