In a recent blog post (Emergence, Patternicity and the Wave) I touched briefly on the human tendency to seek out patterns. Like when we imagine feudal ant societies as the basis for ant colony behavior. The ants can be explained by simple rules governing individual ants--which isn't pure randomness--but sometimes we even insist on seeing order and organization where there really is nothing. And it doesn't help that randomness tends to be so organized-looking, following natural statistical laws that produce triple lottery winners, record breaking craps rolls, and identical twins separated at birth who marry women with the same name. But if you do the math, all of these phenomena are well within the boundaries of chance. In fact, with all the random people in the world doing all the random stuff they do every day, the chance of this kind of stuff just happening randomly is downright probable.
Randomness was the subject of a recent episode from WNYC's Radiolab (if you haven't heard a Radiolab episode yet, get on it, it's awesome). Jad and Robert chose to go with the more obscure and fancy sounding word for randomness: stochasticity. Stochasticity is, according to my dictionary, "the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan." It is what believers in luck and conspiracy and destiny laugh off. It is governed only by statistics, and has made several Las Vegas entrepreneurs disgustingly wealthy. You can kiss those dice as many times as you want, but stochasticity is not convinced.
The Radiolab episode had several fascinating stories, but the one that caught my ear (and inspired this post) was about a woman with Parkinson's disease named Ann who was addicted to gambling. And I don't mean that she lost a paycheck or two at online poker, I mean she was crippled by the need to gamble, morning, afternoon, and night. A high school English teacher on a state employee's salary, Ann lost more than $200,000 in a year. That's $200,000 dollars in quarters. Ann was genuinely, hopelessly, physically addicted to playing slots.
Ann describes her mindset as a continual, compulsive search for the secret to winning: she got three lemons in a row before winning last time, so maybe lemons had something to do with it. "The trick of a one-armed bandit," Read Montague, a professor of neuroscience at Baylor University, told The Boston Globe, "is that it provides us with the illusion of a pattern. We get enough rewards so that we keep on playing. Our cells think they'll figure out the pattern soon. But of course they won't." So Ann's gambling problem boiled down to her compulsion to see patterns where there were none--her natural patternicity. Patternicity is a word I borrowed from Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptic's Society. Allow me to quote from the blog post where I introduced patternicity, to save you clicking time:
Patternicity, argues Shermer, is a reaction that humans evolved in order to protect ourselves. The example he gives is that of a rustle in the grass, which may or may not be a deadly predator. Although it is far more likely that the rustle is just a trick of the wind, assuming the existence of the predator is a safer bet if you don't want to end up as somebody else's dinner.
And this natural, built-in tendency to see patterns around us is of course controlled by a natural, built-in chemical: the neurotransmitter dopamine. High levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia and other serious psychological disorders. Dopamine also just happens to be associated with body movement control, and low levels of it are the primary cause of Parkinson's symptoms. Aha! The pieces are starting to fit together, aren't they…
Ann was on a drug to control her Parkinson's symptoms, and this drug worked by imitating dopamine. No wonder Ann's patternicity was on a rampage! And she wasn't alone; The Boston Globe article cited recent medical studies that found that anywhere from 3 to 13 percent of patients on medication like Ann's develop severe gambling addictions or related compulsions.
This kind of overambitious patternicity is markedly different from the delusions of government conspiracy popularly associated with other dopamine related psychological disorders, but it seems quite possible that they both boil down to chemical imbalances that screw with our pattern recognition software. Our body is incredibly complicated, and as far as I can tell there is no part of our own anatomy more baffling and full of surprises than the brain. Tinker with its chemistry just a smidgen, and all kinds of crazy shit happens. And you thought you were in control...
Randomness was the subject of a recent episode from WNYC's Radiolab (if you haven't heard a Radiolab episode yet, get on it, it's awesome). Jad and Robert chose to go with the more obscure and fancy sounding word for randomness: stochasticity. Stochasticity is, according to my dictionary, "the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan." It is what believers in luck and conspiracy and destiny laugh off. It is governed only by statistics, and has made several Las Vegas entrepreneurs disgustingly wealthy. You can kiss those dice as many times as you want, but stochasticity is not convinced.
The Radiolab episode had several fascinating stories, but the one that caught my ear (and inspired this post) was about a woman with Parkinson's disease named Ann who was addicted to gambling. And I don't mean that she lost a paycheck or two at online poker, I mean she was crippled by the need to gamble, morning, afternoon, and night. A high school English teacher on a state employee's salary, Ann lost more than $200,000 in a year. That's $200,000 dollars in quarters. Ann was genuinely, hopelessly, physically addicted to playing slots.
Patternicity, argues Shermer, is a reaction that humans evolved in order to protect ourselves. The example he gives is that of a rustle in the grass, which may or may not be a deadly predator. Although it is far more likely that the rustle is just a trick of the wind, assuming the existence of the predator is a safer bet if you don't want to end up as somebody else's dinner.
And this natural, built-in tendency to see patterns around us is of course controlled by a natural, built-in chemical: the neurotransmitter dopamine. High levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia and other serious psychological disorders. Dopamine also just happens to be associated with body movement control, and low levels of it are the primary cause of Parkinson's symptoms. Aha! The pieces are starting to fit together, aren't they…
Ann was on a drug to control her Parkinson's symptoms, and this drug worked by imitating dopamine. No wonder Ann's patternicity was on a rampage! And she wasn't alone; The Boston Globe article cited recent medical studies that found that anywhere from 3 to 13 percent of patients on medication like Ann's develop severe gambling addictions or related compulsions.
This kind of overambitious patternicity is markedly different from the delusions of government conspiracy popularly associated with other dopamine related psychological disorders, but it seems quite possible that they both boil down to chemical imbalances that screw with our pattern recognition software. Our body is incredibly complicated, and as far as I can tell there is no part of our own anatomy more baffling and full of surprises than the brain. Tinker with its chemistry just a smidgen, and all kinds of crazy shit happens. And you thought you were in control...
2 comments:
I think I see a pattern of Shermer quotes, but it could be the drugs.
Well it is the same quote...
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