not seeing the forest for the trees

Neuroscience tells us that humans can only pay attention to one or at most a few items at a time. There is so much information to process that your brain ignores most of it. There are some inborn mechanisms to help you pick what to focus on, and in some instances learning plays a role too. The key skill you acquire in learning how to drive a car, or any other fast paced activity, is to digest what is important and what is not. Beginning drivers are overwhelmed with information coming at them at high speed. One gets the impression that over time, one learns to process it, but the reality is, one learns to ignore most of it. Even walking slowly, the information flow is so vast that it would quickly overwhelm your processing capacity. The only reason why the near-stationary world does not come at you so fast, is that you learned to deal with it as a toddler.

The idea that you actually see and hear what is happening is an illusion. It is an illusion created by your brain. That is what your brain is there for. To simulate the world. And that simulation runs in the background at all times. It is where you live. Your sensory systems update the simulation in piecemeal fashion, picking and choosing important spots that need updates. All in all very little information is added but it is added constantly. Most of the time, these updates are sufficient and there are few surprises. Occasionally, things fail in some minor way. Very rarely they fail catastrophically and we get hit by something we never saw coming.

There are hundreds of experiments to show that this is for real and that your perception of reality is largely a deception. Furthermore, early attempts at artificial intelligence and robotics quickly ran into this problem. There was so much information to process that the poor robot could only move a fraction of an inch every ten minutes or so. Even then it failed to keep up. And some robots were feeding all their info into supercomputers for processing. They were worse at "surviving" than a simple housefly.

For a while it was thought that a lack of computing power was the issue, and there are many texts purporting to show how extensive the compute power of human brains is. Much like similar texts claiming how many genes we had or needed -or wish we had-, the super brain theorists will be in for a surprise when all is said and done. Our brains, like everything else about us, are a bag of clever tricks. Their processing capacity is very limited. Other animals survive very well with even more limited compute power and it is by no means certain that superior intelligence is a better long term survival strategy. For one, the cost of building and maintaining it is quite prohibitive. Evolution seems to favor simple designs.

Because humans can only process so much, they often get bogged down in details. Advertisers know this and take advantage of it. They focus on branding or associating items with one critical feeling. They know people have limited bandwidth and so they like simple messages. Simple messages that stick in your mind. Enjoy Coca-Cola ice-cold.

Politicians too like things to be simple. And so do nay-sayers who argue against climate change, evolution, the benefit of vaccines, and other obvious phenomena. But even those of us who try to pay attention to the bigger picture can fail to grasp the magnitude of certain situations. We prefer to deal with pollution, greenhouse gases, global warming, drought, food shortages, deforestation, etc. in piecemeal fashion. And in doing so, we may fail to grasp the big picture. We are living in our simulation where all is well. And most of the time that works for us. We may think the big picture is unchanged and needs only updating in a few critical spots. However, in rare circumstances that view can fail catastrophically too. Unfortunately we may have reached or we are about to reach such a circumstance.