Brain ...........from Fooled by Randomness !!!!!!!!

Brain

Its so ironic that we hardly give any thought to the functioning of our thinking engine. All of us think. What is it to ‘Think’?

One school of thought (Herbert Simon) relates it to optimization. According to him our brain is a big optimization machine. Another aspect related to this is about the level or extent of optimization. It takes infinite effort and time to bring most optimized solution.

It means our brain must have some indications on when to stop optimizing or when is it safe to approximate. We can call these as ‘set of rules’. So our brain is a big optimizing machine with a set of rules in it which helps in approximation. But there is a slightly contrary opinion to it from Kahneman and Tversky.

Our brains are always biased hence are not optimizers. They have a ‘heuristic’ approach to optimization which gets affected by the recent events. Brain does not have a central processing system . It does not process all the information it has to think. It is usually biased towards a more recent information or else affected by other attributes. It is more of local rather than global optimization. This can probably explain different responses to similar situations at different times