What if the brain really liked novelty instead of just having a strong response to it?
If the brain actually liked novelty, then it (and we) would revel in the surprise of all the random and unpredictable events that occur in our lives instead of employing the hindsight bias to try to explain them.
Our belief in a linear, cause-and-effect world leads us to think that everything can be explained and, therefore, everything is predictable—or at least it should have been—after the fact. So we convince ourselves that random events were actually foreseeable.
After an event occurs it’s easy to believe that we—or others—either knew it would happen or should have known it would happen. In hindsight, we can separate the relevant signals from the irrelevant signals to reveal a clear and inevitable path to an obvious conclusion. But we only know what was relevant because we know the outcome. It’s much harder to sort things out when you don’t know what to sort for.
The hindsight bias makes the past seem more predictable than it actually was—and also more consistent with the present.
Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the “I knew it all along” effect. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan
We Can’t Stop Making Sense
Per cognitive psychologist Daniel M. Bernstein and others:
Hindsight bias is an unintended by-product of an otherwise adaptive process for selecting and processing information as we try to make sense of the events that we experience.
We try to make sense of the events we experience so we will know what to do the next time we encounter a similar situation. The brain can’t pay attention to everything, so it focuses on what seems important in the moment in order to predict what’s going to happen next and prepare a response. (The further into the future the brain tries to project its predictions, the less accurate they’re likely to be because the world we live in is not linear but a complex adaptive system containing multiple other complex adaptive systems. Think of the butterfly effect.)
Novel—random, unpredictable—events alert the brain by activating the amygdala and the reward system. What’s going on? What does it mean? What should I do about it?
The part of the brain that responds quickly to novel events is not logical or analytical. It relies on seeing patterns and making connection in order to be able to jump to conclusions, which is good for getting us out of trouble rapidly. When our brain developed during the Pleistocene era, a more dangerous but also a less complicated time to be alive, jumping to conclusions and not being logical or analytical didn’t matter as much as it does now when we have so much more information to parse.
We think we understand more than we do. The fact that our brain is capable of connecting some dots after the fact doesn’t mean the dots are, in fact, connected or could have been connected in real time. Furthermore, having an unquestioning belief in post hoc dot connection can lead to unintended and even undesirable consequences.