Challenging the brain's canon

The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self
Peggy La Cerra and Roger Bingham
Harmony Books: 248 pp., $22.95
Reviewed by Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer is the author of numerous books, including "In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace."

Alfred North Whitehead famously quipped that all Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Although Aristotelians would beg to differ, a similar observation may be made that modern theories of the mind are footnotes to Charles Darwin.
      Unfortunately, for more than a century, many psychologists were sidetracked by the blank slate theory of the mind that eschewed the facts that humans are animals subject to the same forces of natural selection as other animals and that 99% of the history of our species involved hierarchical social primates living in small hunter-gatherer bands of 150 to 200 individuals, struggling to survive in a harsh and pitiless physical environment and a complex and confusing social environment.
      In 1975, psychology was brought back into the Darwinian fold when evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson penned a work, "Sociobiology," that launched a new science. By the 1990s, sociobiology had mutated into evolutionary psychology, now a vibrant field replete with its own journals, textbooks, conferences, departments, professorships, graduate students and all the trappings of a science in full bloom.
    According to the EP-ers, the mind is like a Swiss Army knife, sated with specialized tools that evolved in our Paleolithic past to solve specific problems of survival, such as face recognition, language acquisition, mate selection and deception detection. In this reductionist model, the brain is represented as a host of modules, or bundles of neurons, some in a single spot (as in French brain surgeon Paul Broca's area for language), others sprawled out over the cortex. Large modules coordinate impute from smaller modules, which collate neural events from still smaller bundles. This reduction continues all the way to the single-neuron level.
    For many years Peggy La Cerra, a graduate in evolutionary psychology from UC Santa Barbara, and Roger Bingham, at the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, were outspoken advocates of the evolutionary psychology paradigm. Bingham even produced an award-winning 1996 PBS documentary series, "The Human Quest," which was nothing short of adulatory in canonizing the doctrines of this new science. In "The Origin of Minds," however, La Cerra and Bingham challenge the canon and reveal that they have become evolutionary psychology revisionists. Our ancestral inheritance is not a set of fixed cognitive tools, they argue, but a living "brain/mind-construction system" that exploits pliable brain tissue, changing it with new or changing experiences. The Swiss Army knife, it seems, can design new blades.
     There are two causal levels under consideration here: the proximate level that asks how the mind works and the ultimate level that asks why the mind works. At the how level, the mind is an emergent property of billions of individual neurons, each of which is connected to thousands of other neurons that together produce trillions of potential neuronal states. La Cerra and Bingham argue that as the individual grows and develops into adulthood, the interconnections grow and develop according to individual life experiences. Although we share a common evolutionary ancestry that generated a universal neural architecture, no two life paths are the same, so with trillions of possible permutations of neural connections in each brain, every human mind is unique. There are, the authors say, literally 6 billion different minds.
    Shifting from the how to the why, La Cerra and Bingham show that the basic underlying structure that makes up these 6 billion minds can be found in all living beings, from bacteria and bees to birds and baboons. Sensation and perception, learning and memory, cognition and decision-making are mental processes shared by all living organisms. There is not only a human nature, there is a life nature, at the core of which is energy management. "To do anything -- locate food, find a mate, reproduce, compose a sonata, solve an equation -- you have to stay alive with enough surplus energy to perform the
task at hand," the authors explain.
    To solve energy management problems, organisms evolved intelligence, which functions "in an ever-fluctuating environment by changing itself with every experience." The foundation of this intelligence is what La Cerra and Bingham call the adaptive representational network, "a network of neurons that memorializes a brief scene in the ongoing movie of your life, linking together your physical and emotional state, the environment you are in, the behavior or thought you generate, and the problem-solving outcome."
    What La Cerra and Bingham are describing is an auto-catalytic (self-generating) feedback loop. New experiences stimulate neurons to grow new synaptic connections. Those new connections are distinctive to every individual mind, which then responds to the environment in an idiosyncratic way, producing a behavioral repertoire of responses. This network evolved as an adaptation to help organisms survive in an ever-changing environment. No brain module can do what the adaptive representational network does, because modules evolved to solve specific problems whereas the adaptive representational network evolved to solve a range of problems, even those never encountered.
     This revisionist model of the mind spins a new interpretation on some old problems. "Intelligence," for example, is not a fixed set of specific abilities (memory or math), nor is it simply a generalized processor (as in British psychologist Charles Spearman's "g" or general intelligence). Rather, the adaptive representational network is the fundamental unit of intelligence whose flexibility leads "to a surprising range of human abilities -- the creation of selves and personalities, the generation of unprecedented thoughts and metaphors, and the ability to make inferences about our world and the people with whom we share it."
     Critics of sociobiology will be attracted to this new evolutionary model of  flexible intelligence: "An inner-city child who is dealing with life-threatening problems at home is intelligent if he's thinking about those problems -- even when there's an intelligence test sitting on his desk and his teacher is expecting him to be performing word analogies. This model makes it blatantly obvious that socioeconomic factors are inextricably imbedded in any measure of
'intelligence.' "
     La Cerra and Bingham also reinterpret clinical depression in terms of its adaptive response consequences. The symptoms of depression -- restlessness, agitation, disturbed sleeping and eating, impaired concentration and loss of motivation -- are not signs of an illness; rather, they represent an adaptive response to do something different in one's life. "Because behavior is so enormously expensive energetically, the best thing a person in this situation can do is to stop what he has been doing, reconfigure his life, and try to formulate a more viable trajectory into the future."
    Why would this intelligence system have evolved? "If you were an ancestral human who was being exploited by another individual or group of individuals, a complete behavior shutdown could abruptly force a renegotiation of the inequitable social relationship." Even in the modern world, depression "serves as a wake-up call, prodding people to abandon dead-end jobs and relationships." 
    The authors creatively reexamine numerous such issues in the psychological literature through the lens of adaptive representational networks. Although the volume is slim and would serve scientists and scholars better if it included references to the many and important studies discussed within, I was struck by how much La Cerra and Bingham packed onto every page. The narrative is comfortably divided between anecdotal stories and hard data. The theory's strength emerges in the integration of the life history of the species with the life history of the individual and in the way both histories shape brains into unique minds and selves.
     The theory's weakness is the same one that plagues all such theories, and that is the fact that there is still so much we do not understand about how the mind works. Thus, theorists are forced to turn to mind metaphors, such as Swiss Army knives, modules, memes, holograms and the like. La Cerra and Bingham claim that the adaptive representational network is not a metaphor but a descriptive model for what actually happens at the neuronal level. They may be right. We shall see how the community of practicing neuroscientists responds in attempting to test this theory against other theories.
     Still, La Cerra and Bingham's model explains more than the evolutionary psychology model, itself an improvement on earlier theories, so in the tradition of cumulative science and progressive paradigms, "The Origin of Minds" takes us closer to understanding the workings of the most complex machine in the cosmos.

From the March 16, 2003 Los Angeles Times

His economic plan: Start from scratch.
Capitalism not working for you? Michael Albert may be tilting at windmills, but readers are flocking to his book on a system to spread the wealth and work.

By Kevin Donegan, Special to The Times

You've heard the stats being thrown around. The top 1% of Americans has greater personal net worth than the bottom 95% combined, says NYU economist Edward Wolff in a 1999 report. One out of three non-elderly Americans doesn't have health insurance, says a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report. One in six children lives in poverty, says the U.S. Census. The majority of Americans work hard day in, day out, just to keep their heads above water, and many don't make it.
      In Washington and in statehouses across the country, Democrats and Republicans tweak the edges of the economy with innovations such as earned income tax credits, welfare reform and child-care subsidies, but things don't seem to change all that much. The concern is so great that in a recent poll by Zogby International, two-thirds of Americans agreed that "the income gap between the wealthy and other Americans has become so great that something needs to be done about it."
     Michael Albert thinks we should start over.
      Albert, with the help of others, has spent much of his life designing a new economy from the ground up. His latest book, "Parecon: Life After Capitalism" (Verso), shot from No. 2,423,754 on the Amazon bestseller list to No. 13 in just a few days after some online promotion. It now hovers in the 400s and will hit bookshelves later this month.
      "Parecon" (pronounced par-E-con, the title is short for "participatory economics") is already being translated into more than 20 languages. So why is there so much interest in what seems like such a quixotic undertaking?
     Albert, 55, points to popular culture as evidence there is widespread agreement about the evils of contemporary capitalism. "Go into the store and buy the 10 top-selling novels and read them. You'll be flabbergasted at the number of them that include a clear-cut condemnation -- although it's not the authors' purpose -- of one sector or another of modern society and the institutions in it."
     He identifies four key values that any economy must address: equity (how much should people get and why?); self-management (what kind of say over their conditions should people have?); diversity (is more variety better than less?); and solidarity (should people cooperate or compete?).
      A participatory economy would redefine existing divisions of labor through the idea of "balanced job complexes," whereby each job would contain a balanced share of tasks -- some creative and empowering, some rote and unfulfilling -- required in each workplace. There would be no managers whose primary responsibility is making decisions, just as there would be no janitors whose main job is cleaning up. Each worker would have an equal share of the gravy train and the dirty work, which Albert thinks will contribute to eliminating hierarchy and class.
     "Eighty percent of people have their talents and skills crushed out of them ... because we educate people to obey orders and to endure boredom because that's what they're going to face in life," he said.
      Participatory economics, which Albert developed with American University economics professor Robin Hahnel, places shared values at the forefront of economic relations. "If humanity should not aspire to create an elite minority joyfully dancing atop a suffocating mountainous majority," Albert writes, "what should we aspire to?"
      With his economic system, there would be no private ownership of productive capital, such as commercial property; instead, such assets would be publicly held and run. He points out, however, that he's not talking about a socialist or communist society such as the old Soviet Union, which despite its stated goal of classlessness, did, in fact, produce a class of economic planners whose interests often were opposed to those of workers. His system tries to safeguard against such divisions by using a non-hierarchical, democratic planning process to match the economy's production to people's consumption each year.
     Albert also wants a balanced division of labor, wages according to people's effort and sacrifice, and input into workplace decisions based on how much one is affected by them.
    For example, if someone wants to listen to music at work, only co-workers within earshot would be consulted. A hiring decision might be weighed by everyone who will work with the new employee. Depending on the issue at hand, some company decisions could be made by majority rule, some by consensus and, perhaps, others by fiat, as long as a balance that respects each person's right to "self-manage" is achieved over time.
     "Instead of gargantuan inequity, there would be equity," Albert said. "Instead of 'nice guys finishing last' or 'garbage rising,' there would be solidarity, and social relations would be positive. Instead of class rule, there would be self-management. People would have a say over their own lives."
      The task of replacing capitalism is comparable to amassing widespread support for ending slavery or women's suffrage, he continued. The institutions of capitalism "fall short in the same way that the plantation slave model fell short or that patriarchy falls short," he said. "The hard part is not getting people to support the goal but getting them to believe it's possible."

ALTHOUGH participatory economics hasn't yet entered mainstream economic debate, several realities may undercut Albert's assumptions. One is that the system relies on benevolent individuals to function effectively and people in the real world aren't always so kind to one another. Another is that people have varied natural abilities, so assuming everybody can share all tasks is, perhaps, asking too much.
     Albert waves off the criticisms, saying new institutions will encourage people to behave better and perform well. Despite the apparent enormousness of his goal and constantly having to defend his vision from criticism, Albert never seems less than confident that change is possible.
     "I'm not optimistic that we're going to win tomorrow or next week or next year, but I am optimistic that as people become aware of viable and worthy alternatives they'll strive to attain them," he said. In the meantime, people should organize to struggle for shorter-term goals, such as winning a 30-hour workweek (at current pay) and gaining more decision-making power, he said.
     Pressures to alleviate poverty and inequity have never been greater in many parts of the world, especially Latin America, where economic growth in the last two decades has stagnated alongside the adoption of economic policies largely dictated by the International Monetary Fund and Washington.
     Criticism of capitalism is not so radical an idea there, said Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research, a liberal Washington think tank. "Anyplace where the majority of people are poor, you have a whole different attitude to the system of property rights and allocation of income and wealth."
    But could such perceptions cause change in the U.S. economy?
     Cynthia Peters, a writer, activist and teacher in the "worker education program" at SEIU Local 285, a union of building service workers in Boston, says she worked in such an environment at South End Press, a small Boston-based book publisher that Albert helped found 25 years ago. South End is a nonprofit collective, whose authors include Noam Chomsky and bell hooks, that works on participatory economics principles.
      Peters, who worked there for 13 years, said that South End never functioned with managers or used a hierarchy, and that it made a conscious effort to share skills and knowledge among staff. "In order to make it a democratic organization," she said, "you can't allow any monopolies of expertise."
     South End publishes 10 to 12 titles per year with just five employees who rotate the regular work requirements, from the more creative and conceptual tasks to cleaning toilets. At South End, everyone gets paid the same, but in "Parecon" Albert recommends that people earn more (or less) if they put in more (or less) effort.
     Albert became politically radicalized while he was a promising physics student at MIT in the late 1960s. He says he would have been a physicist "in a better world," but the impact of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War drove him from his "natural calling" as a particle or theoretical physicist. His newfound commitment to social change drew him to studying the economy.
     He still reads physics and other hard sciences, watches TV and goes kayaking in his spare time, of which there's not much. He logs 70 hours a week between writing, speaking and running the online political Web site ZNet (www.zmag.org).
     Does he think those in power would willingly give up their profit-making property and decision-making control? "No, of course not," Albert said. The top 1% or 2% who are wealthy owners "will be opposed to this change to the last day."
      The next 17% or 18% of the population "will be quite split," Albert contends. "Some of them will look at their circumstances, their relative wealth, their income and their power and will bemoan the fact that it will diminish greatly as a result of this process. But others will look at how long they work -- the 60- and the 80-hour workweeks -- they will look at the alienated character of their relations with other people, and they will also look at the poverty and the degradation of others and they will agree that, on balance, this change is not only worth it but it is desirable.
      "Meanwhile, the real issue is the 80% who have a tremendous amount to gain."
     Albert has compared replacing capitalism to ending apartheid in South Africa, a revolutionary change in the dynamics of that society. He is always argumentative and at times cantankerous, and has an absolute conviction that he is right that is ever evident. "Michael never gives up," said Peters. "He's the visionary and he's the bulldog. I don't think I know anybody more tenacious."

March 16, 2003 L.A. Times:

'All Over Creation': The End of Nature
By CLAIRE DEDERER

reviewed:
ALL OVER CREATION
By Ruth Ozeki.
420 pp. New York: Viking. $24.95. 

At the end of Mary McCarthy's 1971 novel, ''Birds of America,'' the specter of Immanuel Kant appears at the foot of the protagonist's bed. ''Nature is dead, mein Kind,'' the bewigged Kant says. It's an odd, sad moment, and it captures the dread at the heart of the conservationist impulse. Are we too late? Mary McCarthy thought so. 
    Ruth Ozeki doesn't. In ''All Over Creation,'' she envisions the end of nature with a kind of apocalyptic cheerfulness. Five years ago Ozeki wrote a scathing sendup of the beef industry in her first novel, ''My Year of Meats.'' Isolating what must be one of the strangest literary niches ever, she has written another novel about the foul nature of what we put in our bodies, this time taking on the genetic engineering of crops. Echoing McCarthy, one of Ozeki's characters says, ''It's over.'' ''What's over?'' another asks. ''Nature.'' Even so, her people operate in a climate of optimism. They farm, they protest, they have babies. This makes for a surprisingly sophisticated tension in a novel that at first appears to be mere farce. 
     At the center of the book is Yummy Fuller, the daughter of an Idaho potato farmer, Lloyd, and his war bride, Momoko. Yummy grows up marked by her racial difference: ''I was a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes.'' At 14, she has an affair with her high school history teacher, becomes pregnant, has an abortion and flees town. A quarter-century later, she's back in Liberty Falls for a visit, three children in tow. 
      Yummy's parents now make their living selling seeds. Momoko breeds exotic flowers and vegetables and peddles their seeds by mail to fellow enthusiasts. Lloyd handles the marketing with an impassioned catalog extolling the glories of biological diversity (''Mrs. Fuller and I believe, firstly, that anti-exoticism is Anti-Life: 'God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body' [I Corinthians 15:38]''). Her parents are in decline. He's dying, she has Alzheimer's, and the two of them are cared for by Yummy's childhood best friend, Cass, who still lives next door. Cass is grown up now, and married to a potato farmer named Will. Will thinks this year he might try Cynaco's NuLife enhanced potatoes, which have pest resistance genetically engineered right into
them. 
     Meanwhile, across the country in Ohio, a foster kid named Frank is working the night shift at McDonald's when a band of slackers asks if they can have his old fry oil -- they run their van, the Spudnik, on the stuff. ''You did us a solid, bro,'' one says as he fills the tank. Before he knows it, Frank has joined their little tribe: two young women, Lilith and Charmey, and two young men, Geek and Y, whose goal in life is to rid the world of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.'s. The Seeds of Resistance, as they call themselves, are a kind of Monkey Wrench Gang for the genetic age. They travel around the country doing ''actions'' that consist of dressing up as Mr. Potato Head, infiltrating supermarket lines and haranguing moms about the food they're giving their kids. When the Seeds stumble onto Lloyd's catalog, they decide they've found their guru and head out to Idaho. 
     At the same time, in Washington, Yummy's former teacher (and statutory rapist), Elliot Rhodes, now does public relations for Cynaco, the company that produces the NuLife potato line. He's sent back to Liberty Falls to develop what his boss calls ''a proactive management strategy'' for their G.M.O.'s. He's supposed to tamp down protests and bolster sales. 
    So Elliot, the Seeds and Yummy converge on Liberty Falls. Will's acreage becomes the battlefield: should he plant genetically engineered potatoes or not? There's no question of Ozeki's stand on the subject: the novel becomes a kind of jolly tract against G.M.O.'s. Still, it's much more seamlessly done than ''My Year of Meats,'' a jalopy of a book whose various bits seemed tied together with baling wire. (Trying to unearth its allure, I appealed to a friend. ''I loved how it turned into a big old jeremiad!'' she said.) ''All Over Creation'' retains the shape of a novel. That is, the characters themselves do the political posturing and disseminate the information. And Ozeki is almost overly careful about showing all sides of the issue. She goes out of her way to make Will sympathetic. He's plain-spoken and sweet and almost freakishly considerate of his wife. 
    As the various interests rub against one another like tindersticks, Yummy stays out of the growing conflict. She's too busy sorting out her feelings about her parents. At first her indifference feels like a weakness in the book. We don't know how the main character feels about the central issue. Toward the end, as tensions are mounting over Will's potato field, Geek blows up at her: ''Look at you, all wrapped up in your neat little stories, blaming your daddy and refusing to take responsibility for your life, spinning all those super justifications for your addictions and the . . . way you treat your kids and bombs that go off in the night -- spending all your time feeling cynical and sorry for yourself while the whole . . . world is going to hell in a handbasket.'' Geek's explosion makes it clear that Yummy's apathy is critical to the book. She's the rest of us, neither for nor against, just going about the business of life. 
     There's a joggling rhythm to Ozeki's writing that some might find charming, but it can be wearing. Here, for instance, is Geek in his potato suit: ''He hung his cane over one arm and did a spudly little soft-shoe on his spindly green legs.'' A little of this sort of thing goes a long way. And she's overextended. We don't get to know the characters as well as we ought. But ''All Over Creation'' has a unity of theme that gives it a real grace. Ozeki returns repeatedly to the image of the seed: Momoko's seed business, Yummy as the bad seed, the seed growing inside a character who's pregnant. Even Frank's inability to control his erections is a goofy reiteration of the inexorable life going on all around us. The end of life is contained in a seed, too: as Lloyd warns, one conglomerate has already patented a biotechnology that ''permits its owners to create a sterile seed by cleverly programming a plant's DNA to kill its own embryos.'' Unsurprisingly, it's known as the Terminator. 
     This is great material for a novel. The radicals in particular make for a nice blend of humor and strangely affecting optimism. Ozeki has written a book where dread and hope coexist. Neither is given short shrift or magicked away. Nature isn't dead yet, but just to be on the safe side, let's buy organic. 

Claire Dederer is a writer in Seattle.

Guitar Craft Services,
Claymont Barn,
CHARLES TOWN,
West Virginia 25414.

Dear Team,

Just below the surface of what we call our day-to-day world lie riches. The "surface" is how we see the world and believe it to be. If in a moment this overlay, this veneer of interpretation, lifts we find a new world. Not a new world of clever intentions, political theorising and utopian devising, but a new world - the real world. We may like it, or not, but it is not a fiction. If we dislike it, then we at least we have something real to dislike, if we may.
     Probably, everyone here has experienced a lifting of the veil of everyday perception, and has some sense of what is behind it. Most of us have had some sense of this at a Level One course, and this is an aim of the Level One: to enable a direct experience of what is real within the musical life, and our individual lives.
     An aim of the Level Three course is to establish a personal practice sufficient to bring ourselves and the real world into closer relationship and accord. Actually they are not apart, but in our normal state we are not present to it. Our work at Level Three is to practice the making of efforts. When we bring intention to bear upon an habitual or mechanical activity, our state changes. When our state changes, we have an opportunity. When we have an opportunity, we have another opportunity.
    There are different kinds of efforts, and it is necessary that we learn to distinguish between them. Otherwise, we make the wrong kind of effort, and lose an opportunity. We are different kinds of people, and each of us finds greater ease or difficulty with a different kind of effort. 
    There are three areas within which we make these efforts of different kinds: physical, mental and emotional. This is what is meant by the expression that a musician has three disciplines, of the hands, the head and the heart. Each day we should place some demand upon each of these faculties. Each of us is unbalanced in our development of these faculties, and the harmony of their operation.
    But, we begin by doing nothing. While we are doing nothing, we watch ourselves doing nothing. It is crucial that this observation of ourselves is impartial. We see ourselves as we would a well-loved friend. We make no judgments, we accept ourselves as we are, and no mistakes are made - save one: the failure to remain impartial. As long as we maintain our impartiality we are outside, and observing this creature within whom we live. Otherwise, we become enmeshed within the creature and its concerns.
     As participants within this course, we have three areas of responsibility: 
Ourselves, and our personal work; 
The house, the property and the community of which it is a part; 
Guitar Craft. 
     Guitar Craft involves all the people that have a measure of commitment to this project, and the power behind Guitar Craft's appearance in the world. We may call this power the power of music, or the operation of the muse. But when we stand face to face with music, we see for ourselves what lies behind this particular quality. When we have seen this for ourselves, in this finer sense, we also have a responsibility to what lies behind music. When this is a real idea, and not just a bright idea, the three responsibilities are the same responsibility. In Guitar Craft we refer to this responsibility in the principle: Honor necessity.

Friday April 11, 2003
The Guardian 

It has, says Robert del Naja, been a "fucking horrendous" year. In these days of tabloid confessionals and celebrity magazines, the sound of rock stars complaining about their lot has become a familiar one. 
     Yet it's hard not to agree with Massive Attack's vocalist. For him, 2003 has been horrendous. On February 25, two weeks after the release of their fourth album, 100th Window, and on the eve of their first world tour for four years, Del Naja was arrested in his home town of Bristol as part of Operation Ore, a crackdown on child pornography on the internet. As is usual in these cases, the police raided his home, removing videos and computer equipment. A month later, on March 25, his property was returned: Avon and Somerset police had dropped the investigation. 
     As Del Naja walks into a suite at London's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, it is difficult to draw conclusions about how recent events have affected him. You could say that he seems nervous - he talks in a low, rapid mumble and dispatches three bottles of lager in an hour. Then again, he talked that way and drank that way when I met him five years ago, and the only problems in his life then were the perpetual upheavals and power struggles within Massive Attack. He looks exhausted - unshaven, dark-eyed, sallow-skinned. But Del Naja always looks a bit like that: he is famous for partying hard. "Didn't go to bed last night," he says. "Out and about in Bristol." 
      Nevertheless, every time the conversation drifts on to other topics - the lukewarm critical reception of 100th Window; the departure in 2000 of the band's founder member Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles; his role as celebrity cheerleader for the Stop the War coalition - it inevitably ends up back where we began. He has, he says, "started to notice weird coincidences... everything seems connected to something". The cover of 100th Window featured life-size human figures made of glass being shot by ball bearings: "That's perfect right now, the whole notion of human fragility, watching my whole life get shattered in the same way this year - set up, then shot down." 
      The video for the forthcoming single, Butterfly Caught, features Del Naja turning into a moth: "It's not deliberate, it's the director's vision, but it's another self-fulfilling prophecy isn't it?" he says, laughing grimly. "I'm not going to martyr myself with what's happened this year, but I will turn into a moth. I will become uglier and darker and lonelier and more undesirable, because that's the way it's got to be this year." 
     Perhaps this sort of thing is further evidence that Del Naja is, as he claims, "quite a paranoid person". Or perhaps that's just what happens when you make an album obsessed with voyeurism and the invasion of privacy, featuring a title that refers to computers' vulnerability to surveillance and a song about child abuse called A Prayer for England. 
     You find yourself facing allegations of internet child porn offences two weeks after its release. "I thought I was being subjective at the time of writing the record," he says. "It all came back to me, as if to test me, as if people were saying, 'Right, you've set this up, let's analyse it properly with you as the subject.'" 
     Del Naja says he was "caught in the sweep" of Operation Ore, the investigation into internet paedophilia founded on a list of 7,300 UK-based credit card numbers passed on to the national crime squad by the FBI. Del Naja's credit card number was among them. In 1999, his card had been charged $3 by a website - he doesn't remember which one, he says, but probably some porn site. 
     "The company that it's attributed to owns hundreds of websites, all different, some of which are absolutely vile, hideous. I was away in London and somebody phoned up and told me they'd been let into my house by a mate of mine. They took everything, every video, every memory stick, every hard drive, spent a month analysing it and found absolutely nothing." 
    Always one of rock's most disarmingly frank interviewees, Del Naja has never denied being an enthusiastic consumer of pornography: "I love having sex and I love watching people have sex," he told one interviewer in the mid-1990s. In 1999, he even collaborated with The Prodigy's Liam Howlett on the soundtrack to the hilariously titled Uranus Experiment, an American porn film that featured "the world's first zero-gravity cum-shot". 
     "I've always been open about porn," he says. "Some people's careers, if you mention they've been involved in porn, their respectability could be on the line, but I've got nothing to hide. My views are on public record. When the police were interviewing me, it was funny, I was answering the generic questions that they ask people in cases like this, but I kept interjecting with my opinions about what I felt about abuse in society and my views on pornography as well. I kept telling them, look, I've done the music for a porn film. I've got nothing to hide. And no, I've never seen anything as vile as that. I said to them, this is absurd, gave them access to every part of my life, no problem: have my life, get on with it." 
    He claims that despite the fact that no charges had been brought against him, the police informed the Sun newspaper about his arrest. "The whole thing became this kind of publicity joke. Someone in the police force called the Sun directly, said we've arrested so and so, we haven't charged him. The police shouldn't be giving that information to newspapers. They've got this campaign going on, [Sun editor] Rebekah Wade's taken it on as her mission." 
    Has he considered suing the police? "We've talked about what I can do about it, but it would be a long-drawn-out, expensive scenario. I don't want to get involved in it because I don't want to spend my life focusing on it. I don't want to spend my money on it." 
     Del Naja was bailed and made a brief statement, confirming his "total faith in the justice system" and asking observers "not to judge me prematurely". He admits that, at this stage, he considered "just going away. I already felt odd about putting a record out and touring with the whole war situation going on, then this on top, it just made me feel like, 'What is the point?'" 
     However, he continued planning the Antipodean tour. On March 5, the Sun followed its initial story with the news that Massive Attack's projected dates in New Zealand had been postponed. 
    Del Naja claims that the Sun called the New Zealand and Australian embassies: "They spoke to them, told them about the allegations - which were only allegations, there weren't any actual facts - and they cancelled all our visas," he says. "We thought, 'Fucking hell, this is getting really heavy.' We had to rearrange our tour dates, which cost a lot of money, caused a lot of heartache and disappointed a lot of people out there. There was no reason for them to do that, other than the fact that there wasn't actually a story there. Nobody believed the allegations, basically there was never a case. We got letters back from the consulate apologising, saying we've been misinformed, we never should have cancelled your visas, but the damage is done." 
     Eventually, the tour went ahead. "It was the hardest time in my life. I had to go on tour with those allegations in the air, which was horrendous. I didn't want to wallow in self-pity or martyr myself on stage. I decided not to get involved with making comments in the press, so I made a statement to the audience each night - 'If everyone's here, I guess you don't believe these ridiculous charges' - which got a big cheer. That's how it went down." 
    Back in England, the gossip internet site Popbitch - not, it must be said, the most reliable source of information - reported that Del Naja had been taunted by "a group of English lads" in the audience at Massive Attack's Sydney show, who allegedly waved an oversized baby's bottle at the stage and chanted "nonce". Del Naja refutes this. 
    "No. I'd know about that. If I'd been at a gig, the first gigs that I'd played for four years, and there were people taunting me, I think I'd remember it. If there were selected people shouting abuse, then maybe I didn't hear it, but I don't really care about them. They're going to find some excuse to shout stuff whatever, they're going to be in the audience for that purpose. It was hard, but it was amazing how many people rallied around me. The music industry on this occasion was really honourable. Obviously, I'm not party to the conversations that went on behind closed doors, in bars or in gentlemen's toilet cubicles, you know what I mean? But, on the whole, what we were getting back was really positive. Then, when we were in Melbourne, the war started and my problems seemed even more insignificant." 
    Ah, the war. Alongside Blur's Damon Albarn, Del Naja was the most vocal and high-profile musician to back the Stop the War coalition. Undaunted by the lack of support from other musicians - "we stepped out into the light, looked back and there was no one else behind us" - the duo financed and designed anti-war adverts in the NME and lobbied Parliament. 
    For some conspiracy theorists, who took to the music press's letters pages, the timing of his arrest was almost too perfect. Del Naja isn't so sure. "I'd say that wouldn't come from the police, although the tabloid thing, the cynicism of it, could be somehow connected," he says. "Because my opinions are considered anti-establishment, it would be a great way to knock me off my perch. No one likes anything more than to see a hypocrite toppled, which makes it all the more ironic if the Sun thinks it's the one to do the toppling." 
    The longer-term effects of the allegations on his career remain to be seen. On the one hand, Massive Attack are about to play five consecutive shows at London's Brixton Academy: evidence that, more than a decade after their debut album Blue Lines unwittingly gave birth to the chill-out movement, their popularity and influence shows little sign of abating. 
    On the other, sales of 100th Window dropped 57% in the weeks after it debuted at number one, although whether that's connected to Del Naja's arrest or the album's relentless uncommerciality is a moot point. 
    For his part, Del Naja notes that the allegations have had a positive effect on the volatile personal relationships within Massive Attack - "Me and G [rapper and producer Grant Marshall, who did not contribute to 100th Window] have really bonded, we've spoken more in the last couple of months than in the last three years" - but is perceptive enough to realise that he has become another victim of what journalist Mark Lawson calls the "nudge-nudge culture". 
     "It makes your general existence much more difficult in a way I've never really experienced," he sighs. "Now I walk into a shop or a pub and I can't really be myself. I have to look at everyone twice in the eye. I have to confront almost everyone: if you've got something to fucking say to me, come out and say it, let me fucking hear it. I'm quite a paranoid person anyway. I walked from my house to the studio today and it felt like there was a huge arrow bobbing above my head. Considering that the allegations were false and there was never a case, it doesn't make any difference. I've still been pointed at that way. You can say that it's a load of bollocks, but once it's written down, it's written down. It could come up in my obituary. All the things I've done in my life and that might come up. What's that all about? 
    "I feel shattered, but you learn from it. When I wake up in the morning I get that sinking feeling, you know? But you have to deal with it, you have to go forward. It's given me a lot more resolve to do what I want to do." 

Introduction

"Isn’t more information always better?" asks Gerd Gigerenzer. "Why else would bestsellers on how to make good decisions tell us to consider all pieces ofinformation, weigh them carefully, and compute the optimal choice, preferably with the aid of a fancy statistical software package? In economics, Nobel prizes are regularly awarded for work that assumes that people make decisions as if they had perfect information and could compute the optimal solution for the problem at hand. But how do real people make good decisions under the usual conditions of little time and scarce information? Consider how players catch a ball—in baseball, cricket, or soccer. It may seem that they would have to solve complex differential equations in their heads to predict the trajectory of the ball. In fact, players use a simple heuristic. When a ball comes in high, the player fixates the ball and starts running. The heuristic is to adjust the running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant —that is, the angle between the eye and the ball. The player can ignore all the information necessary to compute the trajectory, such as the ball’s initial velocity, distance, and angle, and just focus on one piece of information, the angle of gaze."
      Gigerenzer provides an alternative to the view of the mind as a cognitive optimizer, and also to its mirror image, the mind as a cognitive miser. The fact that people ignore information has been often mistaken as a form of irrationality, and shelves are filled with books that explain how people routinely commit cognitive fallacies. In seven years of research, he, and his research team at Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, have worked out what he believes is a viable alternative: the study of fast and frugal decision-making, that is, the study of smart heuristics people actually use to make good decisions. In order to make good decisions in an uncertain world, one sometimes has to ignore information. The art is knowing what one doesn’t have to know. 
      Gigerenzer's work is of importance to people interested in how the human mind actually solves problems. In this regard his work is influential to psychologists, economists, philosophers, and animal biologists, among others. It is also of interest to people who design smart systems to solve problems; he provides illustrations on how one can construct fast and frugal strategies for coronary care unit decisions, personnel selection, and stock picking. 
     "My work will, I hope, change the way people think about human rationality", he says. "Human rationality cannot be understood, I argue, by the ideals of omniscience and optimization. In an uncertain world, there is no optimal solution known for most interesting and urgent problems. When human behavior fails to meet these Olympian expectations, many psychologists conclude that the mind is doomed to irrationality. These are the two dominant views today, and neither extreme of hyper-rationality or irrationality captures the essence of human reasoning. My aim is not so much to criticize the status quo, but rather to provide a viable alternative."
—JB 

GERD GIGERENZER is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has also published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics). 

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SMART HEURISTICS 
At the beginning of the 20th century the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells, said in his writings on politics, "If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking." At the beginning of the 21st century, how far have we gotten with this program? In our society, we teach most citizens reading and writing from the time they are children, but not statistical thinking. John Alan Paulos has called this phenomenon innumeracy. 
     There are many stories documenting this problem. For instance, there was the weather forecaster who announced on American TV that if the probability that it will rain on Saturday is 50 percent and the probability that it will rain on Sunday is 50 percent, the probability that it will rain over the weekend is 100 percent. In another recent case reported by New Scientist an inspector in the Food and Drug Administration visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche. We can laugh about these examples because we easily understand the mistakes involved, but there are more serious issues. When it comes to medical and legal issues, we need exactly the kind of education that H. G. Wells was asking for, and we haven't gotten it. 
      What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?
      For instance, I've worked with physicians and physician-patient associations to try to teach the acceptance of uncertainty and the reasonable way to deal with it. Take HIV testing as an example. Brochures published by the Illinois Department of Health say that testing positive for HIV means that you have the virus. Thus, if you are an average person who is not in a particular risk group but test positive for HIV, this might lead you to choose to commit suicide, or move to California, or do something else quite drastic. But AIDS information in many countries is running on the illusion of certainty. The actual situation is rather like this: If you have about 10,000 people who are in no risk group, one of them will have the virus, and will test positive with practical certainty. Among the other 9,999, another one will test positive, but it's a false positive. In this case we have two who test positive, although only one of them actually has the virus. Knowing about these very simple things can prevent serious disasters, of which there is unfortunately a record. 
       Still, medical societies, individual doctors, and individual patients either produce the illusion of certainty or want it. Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin's adage that there is nothing certain in this world except death and taxes, but the doctors I interviewed tell me something different. They say, "If I would tell my patients what we don't know, they would get very nervous, so it's better not to tell them." Thus, this is one important area in which there is a need to get people — including individual doctors or lawyers in court — to be mature citizens and to help them understand and communicate risks. 
       Representation of information is important. In the case of many so-called cognitive illusions, the problem results from difficulties that arise from getting along with probabilities. The problem largely disappears the moment you give the person the information in natural frequencies. You basically put the mind back in a situation where it's much easier to understand these probabilities. We can prove that natural frequencies can facilitate actual computations, and have known for a long time that representations — whether they be probabilities, frequencies or odds — have an impact on the human mind. There are very few theories about how this works. 
       I'll give you a couple examples relating to medical care. In the U.S. and many European countries, women who are 40 years old are told to participate in mammography screening. Say that a woman takes her first mammogram and it comes out positive. She might ask the physician, "What does that mean? Do I have breast cancer? Or are my chances of having it 99%, 95%, or 90% ­ or only 50%? What do we know at this point?" I have put the same question to radiologists who have done mammography screening for 20 or 25 years, including chiefs of departments. A third said they would tell this woman that, given a positive mammogram, her chance of having breast cancer is 90%.
     However, what happens when they get additional relevant information? The chance that a woman in this age group has cancer is roughly 1%. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she will test positive on a mammogram is 90%. If a woman does not have breast cancer the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is some 9%. In technical terms you have a base rate of 1%, a sensitivity or hit rate of 90%, and a false positive rate of about 9%. So, how do you answer this woman who's just tested positive for cancer? As I just said, about a third of the physicians thinks it's 90%, another third thinks the answer should be something between 50% and 80%, and another third thinks the answer is between 1% and 10%. Again, these are professionals with many years of experience. It's hard to imagine a larger variability in physicians' judgments — between 1% and 90% — and if patients knew about this variability, they would not be very happy. This situation is typical of what we know from laboratory experiments: namely, that when people encounter probabilities — which are technically conditional probabilities — their minds are clouded when they try to make an inference.
    What we do is to teach these physicians tools that change the representation so that they can see through the problem. We don't send them to a statistics course, since they wouldn't have the time to go in the first place, and most likely they wouldn't understand it because they would be taught probabilities again. But how can we help them to understand the situation? 
      Let's change the representation using natural frequencies, as if the physician would have observed these patients him- or herself. One can communicate the same information in the following, much more simple way. Think about 100 women. One of them has breast cancer. This was the 1%. She likely tests positive; that's the 90%. Out of 99 who do not have breast cancer another 9 or 10 will test positive. So we have one in 9 or 10 who tests positive. How many of them actually has cancer? One out of ten. That's not 90%, that's not 50%, that's one out of ten. 
     Here we have a method that enables physicians to see through the fog just by changing the representation, turning their innumeracy into insight. Many of these physicians have carried this innumeracy around for decades and have tried to hide it. When we interview them, they obviously admit it, saying, "I don't know what to do with these numbers. I always confuse these things." Here we have a chance to use very simple tools to help those patients and physicians to understand what the risks are and which enable them to have a reasonable reaction to what to do. If you take the perspective of a patient — that this test means that there is a 90% chance you have cancer — you can imagine what emotions set in, emotions that do not help her to reason the right way. But informing her that only one out of ten women who tests positive actually has cancer would help her to have a cooler attitude and to make more reasonable decisions.
        Prostate cancer is another disease for which we have good data. In the U.S. and European countries doctors advise men aged 40 to 50 to take a PSA test. This is a prostate cancer test that is very simple, requiring just a bit of blood, and so many people do it. The interesting thing is that most of the men I've talked to have no idea of the benefits and costs of this test. It's an example of decision-making based on trusting your doctor or on rumors. But interestingly, if you read about the test on the Internet in independent medical societies like Cochran.com, or read the reports of various physicians' agencies who give recommendations for screening, then you find out that the benefits and costs of prostate cancer screening are roughly the following: Mortality reduction is the usual goal of medical testing, yet there's no proof that prostate cancer screening reduces mortality. On the other hand there is proof that, if we distinguish between people who do not have prostate cancer and those who do, there is a good likelihood that it will do harm. The test produces a number of false positives. If you do it often enough there's a good chance of getting a high level on the test, a so-called positive result, even though you don't have cancer. It's like a car alarm that goes off all the time.
       For those who actually have cancer, surgery can result in incontinence or impotence, which are serious consequences that stay with you for the rest of your life. For that reason, the U.S. Preventive Services task force says very clearly in a report that men should not participate in PSA screening because there is no proof in mortality reduction, only likely harm. 
     It is very puzzling that in a country where a 12-year-old knows baseball statistics, adults don't know the simplest statistics about tests, diseases, and the consequences that may cause them serious damage. Why is this? One reason, of course, is that the cost benefit computations for doctors are not the same as for patients. One cannot simply accuse doctors of knowing things or not caring about patients, but a doctor has to face the possibility that if he or she doesn't advise someone to participate in the PSA test and that person gets prostate cancer, then the patient may turn up at his doorstep with a lawyer. The second thing is that doctors are members of a community with professional pride, and for many of them not detecting a cancer is something they don't want to have on their records. Third, there are groups of doctors who have very clear financial incentives to perform certain procedures. A good doctor would explain this to a patient but leave the decision to the patient. Many patients don't see this situation in which doctors find themselves, but most doctors will recommend the test. 
       But who knows? Autopsy studies show that one out of three or one out of four men who die a natural death have prostate cancer. Everyone has some cancer cells. If everyone underwent PSA testing and cancer were detected, then these poor guys would spend the last years or decades of their lives living with severe bodily injury. These are very simple facts.
      Thus, dealing with probabilities also relates to the issue of understanding the psychology of how we make rational decisions. According to decision theory, rational decisions are made according to the so-called expected utility calculus, or some variant thereof. In economics, for instance, the idea is that if you make an important decision — whom to marry or what stock to buy, for example — you look at all the consequences of each decision, attach a probability to these consequences, attach a value, and sum them up, choosing the optimal, highest expected value or expected utility. This theory, which is very widespread, maintains that people behave in this way when they make their decisions. The problem is that we know from experimental studies that people don't behave this way. 
     There is a nice story that illustrates the whole conflict: A famous decision theorist who once taught at Columbia got an offer from a rival university and was struggling with the question of whether to stay where he was or accept the new post. His friend, a philosopher, took him aside and said, "What's the problem? Just do what you write about and what you teach your students. Maximize your expected utility." The decision theorist, exasperated, responded, "Come on, get serious!"
      Decisions can often be modeled by what I call fast and frugal heuristics. Sometimes they're faster, and sometimes they're more frugal. Deciding which of two jobs to take, for instance, may involve consequences that are incommensurate from the point of view of the person making the decision. The new job may give you more money and prestige, but it might leave your children in tears, since they don't want to move for fear that they would lose their friends. Some economists may believe that you can bring everything in the same common denominator, but others can't do this. A person could end up making a decision for one dominant reason. 
      We make decisions based on a bounded rationality, not the unbounded rationality of the decision maker modeled after an omniscient god. But bounded rationality is also not of one kind. There is a group of economists, for example, who look at the bounds or constraints in the environment that affect how a decision is made. This study is called "optimization under constraints," and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality from this perspective you realize that an organism has neither unlimited resources nor unlimited time. So one asks, given these constraints what's the optimal solution?
     There's a second group, which doesn't look at bounds in the environment but at bounds in the mind. These include many psychologists and behavioral economists who find that people often take in only limited information, and sometimes make decisions based on just one or two criteria. But these colleagues don't analyze the environmental influences on the task. They think that for a priori reasons people make bad choices because of a bias, an error, or a fallacy. They look at constraints in the mind. 
     Neither of these concepts takes advantage of what the human mind takes advantage of: that the bounds in the mind are not unrelated to the bounds in the environment. The bounds get together. Herbert Simon developed a wonderful analogy based on a pair of scissors, where one blade is cognition and the other is the structure of the environment, or the task. You only understand how human behavior functions if you look at both sides. 
      Evolutionary thinking gives us a useful framework for asking some interesting questions that are not often posed. For instance, when I look at a certain heuristic — like when people make a decision based on one good reason while ignoring all others — I must ask in what environmental structures that heuristic works, and where it does not work. This is a question about ecological rationale, about the adaptation of heuristics, and it is very different from what we see in the study of cognitive illusions in social psychology and of judgment decision-making, where any kind of behavior that suggests that people ignore information, or just use one or two pieces of information, is coded as a bias. That approach is non-ecological; that is, it doesn't relate the mind to its environment.
      An important future direction in cognitive science is to understand that human minds are embedded in an environment. This is not the usual way that many psychologists, and of course many economists, think about it. There are many psychological theories about what's in the mind, and there may be all kinds of computations and motives in the mind, but there's very little ecological thinking about what certain cognitive strategies or emotions do for us, and what problems they solve. One of the visions I have is to understand not only how cognitive heuristics work, and in which environments it is smart to use them, but also what role emotions play in our judgment. We have gone through a kind of liberation in the last years. There are many books, by Antonio Damasio and others, that make a general claim that emotions are important for cognitive functions, and are not just there to interrupt, distract, or mislead you. Actually, emotions can do certain things that cognitive strategies can't do, but we have very little understanding of exactly how that works. 
   To give a simple example, imagine Homo economicus in mate search, trying to find a woman to marry. According to standard theory Homo economicus would have to find out all the possible options and all the possible consequences of marrying each one of them. He would also look at the probabilities of various consequences of marrying each of them — whether the woman would still talk to him after they're married, whether she'd take care of their children, whatever is important to him — and the utilities of each of these. Homo economicus would have to do tons of research to avoid just coming up with subjective probabilities, and after many years of research he'd probably find out that his final choice had already married another person who didn't do these computations, and actually just fell in love with her.
     Herbert Simon's idea of satisfying solves that problem. A satisfier, searching for a mate, would have an aspiration level. Once this aspiration is met, as long as it is not too high, he will find the partner and the problem is solved. But satisfying is also a purely cognitive mechanism. After you make your choice you might see someone come around the corner who looks better, and there's nothing to prevent you from dropping your wife or your husband and going off with the next one.
      Here we see one function of emotions. Love, whether it be romantic love or love for our children, helps most of us to create a commitment necessary to make us stay with and take care of our spouses and families. Emotions can perform functions that are similar to those that cognitive building blocks of heuristics perform. Disgust, for example, keeps you from eating lots of things and makes food choice much simpler, and other emotions do similar things. Still, we have very little understanding of how decision theory links with the theory of emotion, and how we develop a good vocabulary of building blocks necessary for making decisions. This is one direction in which it is important to investigate in the future.
     Another simple example of how heuristics are useful can be seen in the following thought experiment: Assume you want to study how players catch balls that come in from a high angle — like in baseball, cricket, or soccer — because you want to build a robot that can catch them. The traditional approach, which is much like optimization under constraints, would be to try to give your robot the complete representation of its environment and the most expensive computation machinery you can afford. You might feed your robot a family of parabolas because thrown balls have parabolic trajectories, with the idea that the robot needs to find the right parabola in order to catch the ball. Or you feed him measurement instruments that can measure the initial distance, the initial velocity, and the initial angle the ball was thrown or kicked. You're still not done because in the real world balls are not flying parabolas, so you need instruments that can measure the direction and the speed of the wind at each point of the ball's flight to calculate its final trajectory and its spin. It's a very hard problem, but this is one way to look at it.
     A very different way to approach this is to ask if there is a heuristic that a player could actually use to solve this problem without making any of these calculations, or only very few. Experimental studies have shown that actual players use a quite simple heuristic that I call the gaze heuristic. When a ball comes in high, a player starts running and fixates his eyes on the ball. The heuristic is that you adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze, the angle between the eye and the ball, remains constant. If you make the angle constant the ball will come down to you and it will catch you, or at least it will hit you. This heuristic only pays attention to one variable, the angle of gaze, and can ignore all the other causal, relevant variables and achieve the same goal much faster, more frugally, and with less chances for error.
     This illustrates that we can do the science of calculation by looking always at what the mind does — the heuristics and the structures of environments — and how minds change the structures of environments. In this case the relationship between the ball and one's self is turned into a simple linear relationship on which the player acts. This is an example of a smart heuristic, which is part of the adaptive tool box that has evolved in humans. Many of these heuristics are also present in animals. For instance, a recent study showed that when dogs catch frisbees they use the same gaze heuristic.
     Heuristics are also useful in very important practical ways relating to economics. To illustrate I'll give you a short story about our research on  a heuristic concerning the stock market. One very smart and simple heuristic is called the recognition heuristic. Here is a demonstration: Which of the following two cities has more inhabitants — Hanover or Bielefeld? I pick these two German cities assuming that you don't know very much about Germany. Most people will think it's Hanover because they have never heard of Bielefeld, and they're right. However, if I pose the same question to Germans, they are insecure and don't know which to choose. They've heard of both of them and try to recall information. The same thing can be done in reverse. We have done studies with Daniel Gray Goldstein in which we ask Americans which city has more inhabitants — San Diego or San Antonio? About two-thirds of my former undergraduates at the University of Chicago got the right answer: San Diego. Then we asked German students — who know much less about San Diego and many of whom had never even heard of San Antonio — the same question. What proportion of the German students do you think got the answer right? In our study, a hundred percent. They hadn't heard of San Antonio, so they picked San Diego. This is an interesting case of a smart heuristic, where people with less knowledge can do better than people with more. The reason this works is because in the real world there is a correlation between name recognition and things like populations. You have heard of a city because there is something happening there. It's not an indicator of certainty, but it's a good stimulus.
        In my group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development I work alongside a spectrum of researchers, several of whom are economists, who work on the same topics but ask a different kind of question. They say, "That's all fine that you can demonstrate that you can get away with less knowledge, but can the recognition heuristic make money?" In order to answer this question we did a large study with the American and German stock markets, involving both lay people and students of business and finance in both countries. We went to downtown Chicago and interviewed several hundred pedestrians. We gave them a list of stocks and asked them one question: Have you ever heard of this stock? Yes or no? Then we took the ten percent of the stocks that had the highest recognition, which were all stocks in the Standard & Poor's Index, put them in the portfolio and let them go for half a year. As a control, we did the same thing with the same American pedestrians with German stocks. In this case they had heard of very few of them. As a third control we had German pedestrians in downtown Munich perform the same recognition ratings with German and American stocks. The question in this experiment is not how much money the portfolio makes, but whether it makes more money than some standards, of which we had four. One consisted of randomly picked stocks, which is a tough standard. A second one contained the least-recognized stocks, which is according to the theory an important standard, and shouldn't do as well. In the third we had blue chip funds, like Fidelity II. And in the last we had the market — the Dow and its German equivalent. We let this run for six months, and after six months the portfolios containing the highest recognized stocks by ordinary people outperformed the randomly picked stocks, the low recognition stocks, and in six out of eight cases the market and the mutual funds. 
    Although this was an interesting study, one should of course be cautious, because unlike in other experimental and real world studies, we have a variable and very random environment. But what this study at least showed is that the recognition of ordinary citizens can actually beat out the performance of the market and other important criteria. The empirical evidence, of course — the background — is consumer behavior. In many situations when people in a supermarket choose between products they go with the item with name recognition. Advertising by companies like Benetton exploits the use of the recognition heuristic. They give us no information about the product, but only increase name recognition. It has been a very successful strategy for the firm. 
      Of course the reaction to this study, which is published in our book Simple Heuristics that Make Us Work, has split the experts in two camps. One group said this can't be true, that it's all wrong, or it could never be replicated. Among them were financial advisers, who certainly didn't like the results. Another group of people said, "This is no surprise. I knew it all along. The stock market's all rumor, recognition, and psychology." Meanwhile, we have replicated these studies several times and found the same advantage of recognition — in bull and bear market — and also found that recognition among those who knew less did best of all in our studies.
      I would like to share these ideas with many others, to use psychological research, and to use what we know about how to facilitate people's understanding of uncertainties to help to promote this old dream about getting an educated citizenship that can deal with uncertainties, rather than denying their existence. Understanding the mind as a tool that tries to live in an uncertain world is an important challenge.

It's scrambled codes with toast for breakfast again. You put on your neck-tie, your lingerie and your Alf mask and jump in the public fountain, barking with obscene glee. Your friends are playing two trumpets and a saxophone all around the university square in total cacophany. Others are blending into the crowds of passersby only to break off into enticingley strange and silly movements frolicking and squirming and speaking in tongues. It's a chock to the system of the socius. It's a festival of defiance against the totality of habitual reality. A perplexing awakening of wonder. You make off with a few new friends who are sick of the same old shit and are in tune with the fun behind your noise. Over to the housing co-op where you can get to know each other better over more (anti)music, flying couch cushion ruckus and group showers. After a night like this it is inconceivable that anyone would go to work in the morning, so you put on business suits and resolve to go on a Gardeners Against the Work Ethic Association canvassing mission to find someone willing to have their lawn ripped up for a free garden. It's a seductive campaign for a general strike in disguise: once there are gardens all over and free feasts become the rule, people will stop paying rent, throw out the money system and turn this into a real party town! 
      Now who could sustain such lunatic ideas and actions, except a being who hasn't been told what to think or do in any way - long enough to get some breathing space for their dreams. One who's managed to carve out a psychically criminal cavern in which to make a liberated zone where fears can be faced and passed through to ecstacy, where the risk and daring required for adventures in subversive looniness can be nurtured. 
     Let's call this liberated zone, simply, space. Spaces must be ever-uniquely improvised and are nourished by an interplay with departures and movement. The anxiety-stricken, oedipalized city, heavily policed and peopled by a self-policing populace, inevitably leads to helpless doldrums and is best left for more wild areas. A patch of woods, a small clearing for a garden, some good friends and a swimming hole could be the perfect mix. Put together a network of such places around the country or the world, and you have a recipe for a movement/space interplay with potentially explosive possibilities. 
     Such a network is already in the making, quietly gathering momentum in the fissures of sedentary survival. And some of us are considering creating such a space in connection with Dreamtime, an experimental micro-village in rural Wisconsin. By next spring we could be exploring the area extensively, acquiring some forested land, and generally setting up a base for warm weather creative revelry. 
      We want a place to practice the arts of living in delirium, of eroticizing everyday life; a life of situations created for all the intensity that life could and should have. As the Radical Faeiries cut wood in drag, we will play with what we can become, experimenting with consciousness as we play with conventional ways of approaching all activities. Toward this end, we propose to demolish any policy or attitude of "work requirements" by unseparating necessities from enjoyable passtimes. Don't do it if you don't want to! If there is some mental task that would enhance our situation, let us delight in doing it together as some strange game. Labour of love or no labour at all! 
     In the years to come, more trees and low-maintenance perennials could be planted, additional shelters, car art gardens out of dead police cars, etc., could make this a hospitable place year- round - feuled by different people and energies at different times. Part of this vision is to help make Dreamtime Village a vibrant place for the long-term. Located in a mostly abandoned farm town, with an old school building, post office, hotel, etc., Dreamtime has the potential to be a thriving place for cultural improvisation if it continues to be re-inhabited by cretive people. We look forward to participating in the village in our own schizo-communitarian way: meaning an anti-regimentalist transcendence of hierarchy, leadership, and traditional collectivist organisation; to help realize the ludic spirit of the Corroboree participatory arts festival there, not just in August but always. 
      A base to facilitate the interplay of movement and space. We could host a festival of uncontrolled movement and house a radical library with a focus on nomadics world-wide (send any materials or info to Sasha). We believe the purchase of our encampment can be made with the help of anonymous donors and intend it to be ownership-irrelevant. Collaborate. We know of a sister project in Oregon, and we have no intention to stop moving. 

Contacts: 
Sasha K.
41 Sutter Street, Suite 1661
San Francisco, CA 94104

UnruLEE
4743 Hiawatha Avenue #116
Minneapolis, MN 55406

reprinted from il Frenetico #2