RH: The point about our brain is that it insists on seeing order, meaning and pattern even where there is none. It's a very human characteristic to fool ourselves that we are in control.
Leonard Mlodinow: In today's world, it seems that we make more mistakes seeing patterns that aren't there rather than missing patterns that are there. In fact, there's a great experiment on that, they put a rat in front of a red light and a green light. And the red light and the green light flash without any pattern, at random. But the green light flashes 75% of the time, and the red light flashes 25% of the time. And the rat, if it guesses correctly which is going to flash, it gets a little sugar water. So when they let the rats do this, they see after a while that the green light is flashing more than the red light and they just start guessing green, green, green, green, green every time. And they get it right 75% of the time and are happy with that.
RH: That's what you should do.
Leonard Mlodinow: That's what you should do. Yeah. But people, we think we know better, right? So when they put humans in front of such an experiment, they won't do what the rat does. They've seen that it's 75% green and they'll guess a pattern. They'll go, green, green, red, green, green, green, red.They'll start spewing out these red and greens in some weird pattern that's tailored to be 75% green and 25% red, thinking that they can beat the system, just like the people here in the casino think they can. And when you do that, you end up about, I think, 60% of the time you get it right, instead of 75%. And so the humans are out performed by a rat. That's because we see patterns where there aren't any. That's just the way our minds work. Too clever by half. Or too clever by three quarters, in this case.
RH: We are lucky to be born. We win the lottery just in being here at all. Your unique identity is the result of one sperm amongst hundreds of millions fertilising one particular egg in one particular sexual exchange. And the same lucky break had to favour your ancestors in every generation back to the very beginning of life. And we are luckier still as individuals to have been born NOW. We have so much available to us -possible only through the understanding that science has already given us. Just look how far we've come in my lifetime -we've got life-saving medicine, super-computers, the internet. We can travel further and faster, higher and deeper than ever before. We constantly push at the frontiers of possibility. Imagine what's still to come! We are made by the laws of physics working through four billion years of evolution. We have a brief window of life through which to see the universe and understand how we came to be in it. The truth may not always be comforting in the face of suffering, but it has a majesty of its own. That's what I tell people when they ask me, "Why do you bother to get up in the mornings?"
