Faulty Powers

Despite the fact that humans have been known to be eaten by bears, sharks and assorted other carnivores, we love to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, despite our unwavering conviction that we are smarter than the computers we invented, members of our species still rob banks with their faces wrapped in duct tape and leave copies of their resumes at the scene of the crime. Six percent of sky-diving fatalities occur due to a failure to remember to pull the ripcord, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent abroad in response to shockingly unbelievable e-mails from displaced African royalty and nobody knows what Eliot Spitzer was thinking.

Are these simply examples of a few subpar minds amongst our general brilliance? Or do all human minds work not so much like computers but as Rube Goldberg machines capable of both brilliance and unbelievable stupidity? In his new book, "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind," New York University professor Gary Marcus uses evolutionary psychology to explore the development of that "clumsy, cobbled-together contraption" we call a brain and to answer such puzzling questions as, "Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts?" and "How can 4 million people believe they were once abducted by aliens?"

According to Marcus, while we once we used our brains simply to stay alive and procreate, the modern world and its technological advances have forced evolution to keep up by adapting ancient skills for modern uses--in effect simply placing our relatively new frontal lobes (the home of memory, language, speech and error recognition) on top of our more ancient hindbrain (in charge of survival, breathing, instinct and emotion.) It is Marcus's hypothesis that evolution has resulted in a series of "good enough" but not ideal adaptations that allow us to be smart enough to invent quantum physics but not clever enough to remember where we put our wallet from one day to the next or to change our minds in the face of overwhelming evidence that our beliefs are wrong. "Evolution is conservative and stingy," Marcus tells NEWSWEEK. "It uses what it has. It doesn't start over--as a statistical matter, something is much more likely to evolve if it involves tinkering."

A kluge (rhymes with "huge") is defined as a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. Marcus's finest example is the contraption used by the Apollo 13 astronauts to get home after their CO₂ filters began to fail--using a plastic bag, cardboard box, some duct tape and a sock, they were able to cobble together a new filter and get home safely. Despite the fact that it worked, NASA has never been tempted to incorporate that design into its space projects.

In his attempt to define the "klugey-ness" of the human mind, Marcus would have us look no further than our memories, which he describes as "the mother of all kluges." Unlike computers, we cannot readily recollect all that we've remembered. Turns out, our memory is driven by cues. We need hints and context to remember where we put our purse ("Retrace your steps"). To free associate from one memory to the next may, Marcus writes, "lead depressed people to seek out depressive activities, such as drinking or listening to songs of lost love, which presumably deepens the gloom as well." 

Yet another problem with our contextual memory is that memories tend to run together and are prone to contamination. I clearly remember being 5 years old and watching my mom hit my dad in the face with a Boston cream pie. The only problem is that it never happened. It was a dream that, for some reason, I remember as fact. Marcus believes our memory evolved in this way in an attempt to prioritize memories since our brains are much slower than the memory system available to computers and our neurons cannot keep all our recollections at hand for immediate retrieval. It's a workable system but one that doesn't allow us the time or ability to check memories for accuracy as a computer would be able to.