Have you noticed that the brain has an answer for almost everything? Not only does it work overtime to predict what’s going to happen next, it works nearly as hard to explain what happened after the fact.
The associative machinery of the brain seeks causes.
When something unexpected occurs, the brain tries to explain it and incorporate that explanation into our mental model. Random acts or events, however, are impossible to anticipate and account for.
A random act or event is one that is governed by or dependent upon chance.
Synonyms are: stray, accidental, arbitrary, indiscriminate, haphazard, unplanned, fortuitous, aimless, desultory, hit or miss, unpremeditated, purposeless, adventitious, chance, unintentional, and unexpected.
We’re continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize. … In all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. —Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk
After the fact, everything seems inevitable. After the fact, the past appears coherent as a result of our storytelling mind imposing order on it. After the fact, we have a sense of having had far more control over the direction of our lives than we actually had. But a story is still a story, and there’s no such thing as a “true story.”
Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one’s memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something in the past) according to currently known facts and one’s current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was. —Robert Todd Carroll, The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary
The brain makes post-hoc dot connections.
It’s not surprising that when the brain looks back, it can construct a neat cause-and-effect explanation for an event that was not expected. The hindsight bias helps all of us maintain the illusion of control by seeming to eliminate randomness. But it’s only possible to clearly and accurately separate the signals from the noise—and connect the dots—after an event has occurred and the outcome is known. Even then, our explanations are going to be coming from our brain, which means our experiences, our point of view, our beliefs, and our biases.
Our brain looks for patterns in order to explain unexpected events so it will be better prepared to predict and respond to them the next time they occur. But no matter how good it may be at figuring out and responding to a single unexpected event that has occurred, it will never be able to predict truly random events.
The question is would you want it to?
Can you recognize a random act and accept it as such or are you more comfortable having an explanation for it even if that explanation isn’t true?
The photo at the top of the post is from the movie Stranger Than Fiction. Author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) has been trying to decide how to kill off the main character in her novel. She finally figures it out when she notices an apple fall onto the sidewalk and roll away.
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