Jonah Lehrer
How we make decisions
To my brother Eli and sisters Rachel and Leah.
“Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what someone else wants to do? How can you be sure of this? Isn't it all a matter of brain chemistry, signals scurrying back and forth, electrical energy bark? How to understand whether we really want to do something or if it’s just nerve impulse in our brain? Some trifling activity in an inconspicuous area of one of the cerebral hemispheres - and now I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana.”
Don DeLillo "White Noise"
Introduction
I was flying my Boeing 737 to land at Tokyo Narita International Airport when the left engine caught fire. We were at an altitude of seven thousand feet, the landing strip was directly ahead, the lights of skyscrapers flickered in the distance. Within a few seconds, everything in the cockpit began to ring and hum, warning the pilot about the failure of several systems at once. Red lights flashed everywhere. I tried to quell my panic by focusing on the instructions to follow if the engine caught fire, and cut off the fuel and power supplies to the damaged areas. The plane tilted sharply. The evening sky lay on its side. I tried my best to level the plane.
But he couldn't. He lost control. The plane was tilting on one side, I tried to straighten it, but it immediately fell onto the other. It seemed like I was fighting against the atmosphere itself. Suddenly, I felt the plane, shaking, begin to lose speed: the movement of air over the wings slowed down. The metal frame creaked and grinded - the terrible sound of steel giving in under pressure. physical impact. It was urgent to find a way to increase the speed, otherwise gravity would force the plane to dive straight into the city below.
I didn't know what to do. If I had increased the gas, I might have been able to gain altitude and speed - then I could circle over the landing strip and level the plane. But can the remaining engine cope with the climb alone? Or will he not withstand the stress?
The second option is to make the descent steeper in a desperate attempt to gain speed: I sort of dive so as not to go into a real dive. A sharp descent will give me a chance to avoid engine shutdown and return the plane to required course. Of course, instead I can only hasten disaster. If I can't regain control of the plane, it will go into what pilots call a death spiral. The overload will become so strong that the car will fall to pieces before it even reaches the ground.
I couldn't make up my mind. Nervous sweat stung my eyes. My hands were shaking with fear. I felt the blood pulsating in my temples. I tried to figure out what to do next, but there was no time for that. The speed continued to decrease. If I had not acted immediately, the plane would have crashed to the ground.
And then I made a decision: I will save the plane by pointing it down. I moved the lever forward and silently prayed for the speed to increase. And she really started to grow! The problem was that I was descending directly over the suburbs of Tokyo. The altimeter needle was moving towards zero, but suddenly there was an acceleration that allowed me to regain control of the plane. For the first time since the engine caught fire, I could stay on a steady course. I was still falling like a stone, but at least I was doing it in a straight line. I waited until the plane dropped below two thousand feet, and then I pulled back on the yoke and increased the throttle. The flight was terribly uneven, but I was moving towards my intended goal. Seeing the runway lights right in front of me, I lowered the landing gear and concentrated on not losing control of the plane. At this time, the co-pilot shouted: “One hundred feet! Fifty! Twenty!" Right before landing I did last try level the plane and waited for it to hit solid ground. It was a hard landing - I had to brake sharply and steer the plane to the side at high speed - and yet we returned to the ground safe and sound.
Only when the plane approached the airport building did I notice the pixels. In front of me was a panoramic television screen, not Windshield cockpit. The landscape below was simply patchwork quilt from images received from satellites. And although my hands were still shaking, I wasn't really risking anything. There were no passengers in the plane: the Boeing 737 was nothing more than virtual reality, created by the $16 million Tropos-500 flight simulator. This simulator belongs to the company Canadian Aviation Electronics, was located in a cavernous industrial hangar outside Montreal. My instructor pressed the button and caused a fire in the engine (he also made my life more difficult by adding a strong crosswind). But the flight seemed real. By the time it ended, I was literally bursting with adrenaline. And some part of my brain still believed that I almost fell on Tokyo.
This collection includes the legendary stories of the classics of Russian science fiction Arkady and Boris Strugatsky "Ugly Swans", " Inhabited island", "Roadside Picnic", "Bug in the Anthill" and "A Billion Years Before the End of the World".
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Desire for the Strange (collection)
Second place in the ranking of live citations of all Russian literature is occupied by the Strugatsky brothers' novel "It's Hard to Be a God." On the first – “Twelve Chairs” and “Golden Calf”. On the third – “The Master and Margarita”. Fourth – “Woe from Wit”. If anyone didn't know. And this is not fashion. This has been the case for many decades.
Not one more of the works of Russian literature in total post-war period(1945–1991!) is not quoted in everyday life today. (The exception is the brilliant “Seventeen Moments of Spring.”)
“The Baron replaced the loss of fluid within half an hour and became somewhat drowsy.” “Noble don, a man of great intelligence...” “Well, in general, powerful thighs!” “And I’ll say it straight out, brothers: a bookworm? – impale you!” And further, more, more...
Not a single other Soviet writer of this era introduced a new word into the Russian language. Have you heard the word "stalker"? "Roadside Picnic" became a regular trend.
Not a single Soviet writer of his time was translated so much. Hundreds of publications in all civilized and less civilized languages of the world: the exact number was difficult to count (there were reasons for this). They could be rich - but the VAAP (All-Union Copyright Agency) of the USSR took 97% (!) of royalties to the state.
They did not exist for official criticism. Some envied their brilliance and glory, others believed that “real literature” was in the form of exclusively “critical realism” in defiance of “socialist” realism. For a piece of the government pie, writers ate each other alive, and the disgusting, mocking Strugatskys stayed away from the “literary process.”
There were never any other people's opinions or government enticements between them and their readers. And the readers included half of the entire young intelligentsia of the country. The half whose forehead was higher and whose eyes had smaller blinders. Then the young intelligentsia became middle-aged, and a new generation of mature schoolchildren was added to the readers.
Their language gave pleasure, the plot was addictive, and their thoughts made you think. Students, engineers and doctors, lawyers and journalists - the layer from which the elite is formed in normal countries - exchanged phrases of the Strugatskys like a password.
...It started in 1962. Several early novels and short stories did not stand out from the general flow of Soviet science fiction that gushed from Khrushchev's thaw. Long years Before that, science fiction was banned. No deviations from the general ideological line were welcomed - neither about the future, nor about the present.
Breakthrough! The first Earth satellite is Soviet! The first man in space is ours! The communist tomorrow of all humanity is not far away! In short, Soviet spaceships littered the expanses of the Universe, sowing a conflict between the good and the best.
And then a short story by A. and B. Strugatsky “An Attempt to Escape” comes out. In which space travel is purely conventional and does not play any role. Just: normal people got from one world to another. And one of the people escaped into the future from fascist concentration camp. How? It doesn't matter. And in the end, ashamed of his desertion, the fugitive returns and dies in battle.
On the nerves - with a pull-out. There is no bright future for you in the future, and there is no bright future in other worlds, and in other eras. And you will have to fight for happiness and justice, fight against fascism and scum of all stripes and guises, always and everywhere. Instead of a pleasant rest in a comfortable, bright tomorrow, yeah.
It was an era when writing an honest review of a book was the same as writing a denunciation of it.
The Strugatskys never wrote science fiction (in the popular sense). The Strugatskys wrote harsh and piercing dystopias. The only ones in the deaf and impenetrable Soviet Empire– they managed to be free among all the writers.
Under the discounted label of “fantasy,” they slipped out of fences and boundaries into the space of uncensored analysis of man and history. Dystopia was a forbidden genre: no freethinking, the Party itself will indicate and predict everything necessary! But... "fantasy", youth, light genre, Jules Verne, you know...
Together with the Party and censorship the Strugatskys (already by-effect) deceived serious critics and self-respecting “authoritative readers”: uh, science fiction is subliterature. Such is the magic of a label for rednecks who respect their “culture” and sincerely consider their armpits, sweaty from mental effort, to be the salt of the earth.
And in 1973, an international scandal broke out with " Ugly swans", who knows how they got to the damned West and were published there. And now, of all the magazines, only the youth-scientific popovskaya "Knowledge is Power" was published by the Strugatskys, and the books waited in line for five years at publishing houses.
“While working on this story, we came to the conclusion that communism is impossible,” they said about “ Predatory things century", published in 1964. Written almost half a century ago, this is a prophetic book, cruel and irreconcilable. Both widespread drug addiction and extreme sports are predicted the only way feel the thrill aimless life, and the suicidal dead end of existence for the sake of consumption.
They were also always loved for their inflexibility, for their tough and active optimism. The Strugatsky heroes always fought for what they believed in. They fought with such conviction that victory was inevitable. Even if it went beyond the scope of the book.
M. Weller
Ugly swans
With family and friends
When Irma came out, carefully closing the door behind her, thin, long-legged, smiling politely in an adult way with a large mouth with bright lips like her mother’s, Victor began to diligently light a cigarette. This is no child, he thought stunned. Children don't talk like that. It’s not even rudeness, it’s cruelty, and it’s not even cruelty, but she just doesn’t care. It was as if she had proved a theorem to us here - she had calculated everything, analyzed it, busily reported the result and walked away, her pigtails shaking, completely calm. Overcoming awkwardness, Victor looked at Lola. Her face was covered in red spots, her bright lips were trembling, as if she was about to cry, but she, of course, did not even think about crying, she was furious.
Yes, Victor thought, and I lived with this woman, I walked with her in the mountains, I read Baudelaire to her, and trembled when I touched her, and remembered her smell... it seems that I even fought over her. I still don’t understand what she was thinking when I read Baudelaire to her? No, it's just amazing that I managed to escape from her. It’s incomprehensible to my mind, how did she let me out? I guess I wasn't sugar either. I’m probably not sugar now, but then I drank even more than now, and besides, I believed myself great poet.
“Of course, you don’t care where it is,” Lola said. – Capital life, all sorts of ballerinas, artists... I know everything. Don't imagine that we don't know anything here. And your crazy money, and your mistresses, and endless scandals... If you want to know, it doesn’t matter to me, I didn’t bother you, you lived as you wanted...
In general, what ruins her is that she talks a lot. As a girl, she was quiet, silent, mysterious. There are girls who know from birth how to behave. She knew. In fact, even now she’s okay when she sits silently on the sofa with a cigarette, her knees out... or she suddenly puts her hands behind her head and stretches. This must have an extraordinary effect on a provincial lawyer... Victor imagined a cozy evening: this table was pushed towards that sofa over there, a bottle, champagne sizzling in glasses, a box of chocolate tied with a ribbon, and the lawyer himself, wrapped in starch, with a bow tie. Everything is like with people, and suddenly Irma comes in... A nightmare, Victor thought. Yes, she is an unhappy woman...
“You yourself must understand,” said Lola, “that it’s not about money, that it’s not money that decides everything now.” “She has already calmed down, the red spots have disappeared. - I know you have your own way fair man, eccentric, loose-lipped, but not angry. You have always helped us, and in this regard I have no complaints against you. But now I don’t need that kind of help... I can’t call myself happy, but you didn’t manage to make me unhappy either. You have your own life, and I have mine. By the way, I’m not an old woman yet, I still have a lot ahead of me...
Psychologies:
Your book How We Make Decisions has become a global bestseller. Why did you want to write about this?
Jonah Lehrer:
Going to the supermarket, I could spend half an hour, for example, trying to decide on the type of breakfast cereal! And then for another half hour I thought about which one to take toothpaste... In general, at some point it became simply impossible to tolerate it, and working on the book helped me a lot. By writing it, I learned to make many decisions faster. Because I found out for sure: extra time Time spent on making a decision does not at all guarantee that it will be successful. There is no direct dependence here. Just as there is, for example, no direct relationship between the amount of information we have and the quality of our decision. Sometimes additional knowledge about the situation only harms, complicating our choice...
Have you managed to find a single algorithm for making the right decisions?
D.L.:
Unfortunately no. The human brain is still poorly understood and mysterious. But the science of the brain is still too young, and not only does it not have ready-made answers, it is still far from always able to even pose precise questions. Therefore, if someone claims: “I know exactly how to always take right decisions, listen to me - and everything will work out for you” - don’t believe this person. He’s just lying. We can only outline the most general principles, following which you can get closer to your desired goal.
For example, following intuition?
D.L.:
The ability of our intellect to instantly find answers and solutions outside of predictable logic really helps us out sometimes. But you shouldn’t always trust your intuition. For example, you need to make some decision, that is, make a choice. Have you already been to similar situation and experienced something similar. If you have enough time, you will most likely remember it, remember your actions at that moment and their results. But sometimes there is little time and you need to act quickly. And this is where intuition comes in. Memory has not yet had time to find the necessary events, causes and consequences, but your emotional memory has already compared them. And if your previous choice was successful, then inner voice(hoping for a new portion of positive emotions) shouts: “Come on, go ahead!” And if things end badly, fear comes into play, and the same voice protests: “Don’t do this under any circumstances!” Something like this, from the point of view modern science, and intuition works. When we find ourselves in a completely new situation, no inner voice will help us. We simply never experienced emotions that could be useful to remember. And even if intuition is trying to say something, you don’t need to listen to it: you will have to act, relying on logic and common sense.
It is better to solve complex problems with a light heart
Intuition is useless if we find ourselves in a situation that we have not encountered before and cannot remember, says Jonah Lehrer. This is where reason comes into play. But this does not mean that emotions should be silent while logic works. Indirectly, emotions can still help us... only if it positive emotions. Lehrer cites the work of Mark Jung-Beeman, a neuroscientist who has studied intuition. He showed that in good mood we are much better at dealing with complex tasks than when irritated or upset. In his experiments funny people solved 20% more vocabulary puzzles than the sad ones. Jung-Beeman sees the explanation in the fact that the areas of the brain responsible for controlling behavior in this case are not busy managing a person’s emotional life. They don’t “worry” that we’re not happy, and therefore don’t cause significant distractions. internal resources to improve our mood. As a result, the rational brain can fully focus on what is needed, namely, finding the optimal solution to a specific problem.
« (Astrel, Corpus, 2010).
So how do the best decisions come about?
D.L.:
Thanks to the interaction of logic and intuition, two types of thinking. And in order to adjust the functioning of the brain in this way, we need to learn to think about how we think. Not a single animal on the planet thinks about this process, does not try to figure out what is happening in its head - only humans! And it’s a shame that we do this much less often than we could. We make decisions spontaneously, or are guided only by emotions, or... You never know what else - just without thinking about how they should be made. But this is a great and unique gift, and we simply have no right not to use it to the fullest!
How can we understand what is going on in our heads?
D.L.:
Practice is the main key! You need to constantly exercise. Of course, it is much easier to make a minimum of effort, to think without thinking, to make decisions without bothering to understand how we do it. But if we really want to achieve something, we inevitably have to work harder. This happens everywhere: to become good athlete, you need to train more to succeed in science - devote more time to research and getting to know the work of your colleagues. And with decision making everything is exactly the same. You'll have to put in more work. We'll have to think about how we do this. And when will it become constant practice, habit, we will certainly be able to make much better decisions. You just need to understand that we are all different and each person’s brain has individual characteristics. This skill can be given to some big amount effort, and less for others, but I am sure that everyone is capable of succeeding. A good example meditation can serve: in a sense, this is also a practice of comprehending how we think - and the ability to get rid of unnecessary thoughts. The technique of meditation is also not mastered immediately. But anyone can do this.
Will we ever be able to understand how our brains work? Will we learn everything about the mechanisms of thinking?
D.L.:
To be honest, I'm not sure about this. The brain and thought processes are perhaps the biggest mystery in the universe. We can say that in some aspects we have come closer to understanding it, but in others we are still faced with a bigger mystery. And we still don’t understand how we think—how we do it.
Similar things happen in other areas of science. After all, physicists several decades ago were almost sure that they were about to understand absolutely everything about the structure of our world...
“ONLY WE, PEOPLE, ARE ABLE TO THINK ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON IN OUR HEADS. IT’S A PITY THAT WE DO THIS LETTER THAN WE COULD!”
D.L.:
Exactly! What do we have today? String theory, guesses about the multiplicity of universes and hypotheses about the existence of at least 11 dimensions! A non-specialist is generally unable to understand that today's theoretical physics thinks about the structure of the world. But we are able to suspect that this science is in greater confusion than ever before. But this happens in parallel with the accumulation of new knowledge. Their volume is growing, but understanding has not yet increased. And neurobiology, it seems to me, follows exactly the same path.
And you call yourself an optimist?
Six months ago, I wrote () about the scandal with Jonah Lehrer, an author of books on decision-making, and about a creative who was caught fabricating a Bob Dylan quote and other things related to plagiarism.
Jonah recently spoke at the Knight Foundation's Media Learning Seminar. Jonah talked about how he tried to understand when and how he made mistakes, and what they meant to him. He realized that they were traits of his character, as fundamental parts of his personality as the parts of which he was proud.
He said that he understood much more deeply how difficult it is to change oneself.
He talked about a topic that he had begun to develop before the scandal - about forensic medicine and the thinking errors that experts make in personality identification tasks. He, in particular, mentioned the case of Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly accused of plotting an explosion in Spain. Jonah said, “that if I just researched the psychology of deception, that if I studied the neuroscience data about broken trust, then I could find a way to fix myself, I thought that abstract knowledge would be a cure. But such knowledge is not enough. I know this from my own experience."
Jonah was talking about his conversation, before the scandal, with Dan Ariely about his new book on deception. The reasons for people's behavior in Ariely's experiments were so clear and explainable, and people were predictable and comical in their delusions, but this view from the outside turned out to be completely useless for him.
Lehrer is confident he will restore trust, not with words or apologies, but by following a set of rules. One of them - " Golden Rule» Charles Darwin. It lies in the fact that when a fact or observation is encountered that contradicts your beliefs, it must be immediately and definitely remembered. Darwin discovered that if you don't do this, uncomfortable ideas will quickly disappear from memory. This rule honestly recognizes our weaknesses and forces us to act in spite of them.
Jonah ended the speech by saying that he would later “tell his daughter that his failure was painful, but that pain had a meaning. That pain showed me who I was and how I needed to change.”
Journalists found out that the Knight Foundation paid Jonah 20 thousand dollars for this 45-minute speech! The Knight Foundation's mission is to "sponsor media innovation, journalism excellence, and free speech." And this organization wrote a check to the man who made the main mistakes of journalism! And he accepted money from them for his apology!
He didn't say anything about it, perhaps because it didn't seem strange to him. Ethics is probably not part of his set of rules, which are more like algorithms for a CNC machine. Perhaps it would make some sense if he were completely broke, but it is impossible to say that he is in need - two years ago he bought a house near Los Angeles for $2.25 million. He bought it with money received from books that his readers now don’t even want to see on their shelves.
Jonah Lehrer
How we make decisions
To my brother Eli and sisters Rachel and Leah.
“Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what someone else wants to do? How can you be sure of this? Isn't it all about the chemistry of the brain, the signals scurrying back and forth, the electrical energy of the cortex? How do we understand whether we really want to do something or is it just a nerve impulse in our brain? Some trifling activity in an inconspicuous area of one of the cerebral hemispheres - and now I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana.”
Don DeLillo "White Noise"
Introduction
I was flying my Boeing 737 to land at Tokyo Narita International Airport when the left engine caught fire. We were at an altitude of seven thousand feet, the landing strip was directly ahead, the lights of skyscrapers flickered in the distance. Within a few seconds, everything in the cockpit began to ring and hum, warning the pilot about the failure of several systems at once. Red lights flashed everywhere. I tried to quell my panic by focusing on the instructions to follow if the engine caught fire, and cut off the fuel and power supplies to the damaged areas. The plane tilted sharply. The evening sky lay on its side. I tried my best to level the plane.
But he couldn't. He lost control. The plane was tilting on one side, I tried to straighten it, but it immediately fell onto the other. It seemed like I was fighting against the atmosphere itself. Suddenly, I felt the plane, shaking, begin to lose speed: the movement of air over the wings slowed down. The metal frame creaked and grinded - the terrible sound of steel yielding under the pressure of physical force. It was urgent to find a way to increase the speed, otherwise gravity would force the plane to dive straight into the city below.
I didn't know what to do. If I had increased the gas, I might have been able to gain altitude and speed - then I could circle over the landing strip and level the plane. But can the remaining engine cope with the climb alone? Or will he not withstand the stress?
The second option is to make the descent steeper in a desperate attempt to gain speed: I sort of dive so as not to go into a real dive. A sharp descent will give me a chance to avoid engine stalling and return the plane to the desired course. Of course, instead I can only hasten disaster. If I can't regain control of the plane, it will go into what pilots call a death spiral. The overload will become so strong that the car will fall to pieces before it even reaches the ground.
I couldn't make up my mind. Nervous sweat stung my eyes. My hands were shaking with fear. I felt the blood pulsating in my temples. I tried to figure out what to do next, but there was no time for that. The speed continued to decrease. If I had not acted immediately, the plane would have crashed to the ground.
And then I made a decision: I will save the plane by pointing it down. I moved the lever forward and silently prayed for the speed to increase. And she really started to grow! The problem was that I was descending directly over the suburbs of Tokyo. The altimeter needle was moving towards zero, but suddenly there was an acceleration that allowed me to regain control of the plane. For the first time since the engine caught fire, I could stay on a steady course. I was still falling like a stone, but at least I was doing it in a straight line. I waited until the plane dropped below two thousand feet, and then I pulled back on the yoke and increased the throttle. The flight was terribly uneven, but I was moving towards my intended goal. Seeing the runway lights right in front of me, I lowered the landing gear and concentrated on not losing control of the plane. At this time, the co-pilot shouted: “One hundred feet! Fifty! Twenty!" Just before landing, I made one last attempt to level the plane and waited for it to hit solid ground. It was a hard landing - I had to brake sharply and steer the plane to the side at high speed - and yet we returned to the ground safe and sound.
Only when the plane approached the airport building did I notice the pixels. In front of me was a panoramic television screen, not a cockpit windshield. The landscape below was just a patchwork of satellite images. And although my hands were still shaking, I wasn't really risking anything. There were no passengers on board: the Boeing 737 was nothing more than a virtual reality created by the $16 million Tropos 500 flight simulator. This simulator belongs to the company Canadian Aviation Electronics, was located in a cavernous industrial hangar outside Montreal. My instructor pressed the button and caused a fire in the engine (he also made my life more difficult by adding a strong crosswind). But the flight seemed real. By the time it ended, I was literally bursting with adrenaline. And some part of my brain still believed that I almost fell on Tokyo.
The advantage of a flight simulator is that it can be used to study own solutions. Did I do the right thing by continuing to decline? Or was it worth trying to gain altitude? Would this allow me to have a softer, safer landing? To find out, I asked the instructor to give me one more try - I decided to go through the same artificial scenario again and again try to land on one engine. He flicked the switches, and before my heart rate had returned to normal, the Boeing was back on the runway. Hearing the crackling voice of the air traffic controller clearing takeoff in my headphones, I increased the throttle and rushed across the area in front of the hangar. The world around me continued to accelerate, and now the plane had already taken off from the ground, and I found myself in the silence of the evening blue sky.
We climbed ten thousand feet. I had just begun to enjoy the tranquil view of Tokyo Bay when the controller told me to prepare to land. The scenario repeated itself, like in a familiar horror film. I saw the same skyscrapers in the distance and flew through the same low clouds, I followed the same route over the same suburbs. I went down to nine thousand feet, then to eight, then to seven. And then it happened. The left engine disappeared in flames. And again I tried to keep the plane level. Vibration arose again, warning of a loss of speed. True, this time I rushed to the heavens. Having increased the gas supply and raised the nose of the plane, I carefully monitored the operating indicators of the remaining engine. It soon became clear that I would not be able to gain altitude. There simply wasn't enough power for this. The vibration shook the entire body of the plane. I heard a terrible sound - the wings could not cope with the load, a low rumble filled the cockpit. The plane dived to the left. Female voice calmly described the disaster, telling me what I already knew very well: I was falling. The last thing I saw was the flickering of city lights just above the horizon. The image on the screen froze as I hit the ground.
Ultimately, the difference between landing safely and dying in a firestorm came down to a single decision made in a state of panic after an engine fire. Everything was happening incredibly fast and the only thing I could think about was... human lives that would be at stake if this flight were real. One decision resulted in a safe landing, the other resulted in a fatal loss of speed.
This book is about how we make decisions. About what was going on in my head after the engine caught fire. How human brain- most complex object in the universe known to us - decides what to do. It's about airplane pilots, NFL quarterbacks, TV directors, poker players, professional investors and serial killers, as well as the decisions they make every day. From the brain's point of view, the line dividing good decision from the bad, and the attempt to descend is from the attempt to gain height, very thin. This book is about just such a line.
Ever since people started making decisions, they have been wondering how they do it. For centuries they created complex theories making decisions by observing human behavior from the outside. Since consciousness was inaccessible—the brain was simply a black box—these thinkers had to rely on untestable assumptions about what was really going on in a person's head.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, all hypotheses have revolved around one theme - people are rational. When we make decisions, we are expected to consciously analyze everything possible options and carefully weigh all the pros and cons. In other words, we are thinking and logical beings. This simple idea lies at the heart of the philosophies of Plato and Descartes, it forms the foundation of modern economics, and it has driven cognitive science for decades. Over time, our rationality began to define us. Simply put, it is she who made us human.