Pecha Kucha 2/3 of 20: Hardwired to Simplify

In the first slide I talked about how we humans tend to leap at conclusions (where “at” implies a little less accuracy than leaping “to” conclusions) in conversation, taking words we hear and say and assuming their meaning is absolute.

Here’s slide 2:

We are happy when things are really clear. Shallow rapid processing, snap decisions, black and white.

Grey areas require more processing and contemplation and are therefore not easy, they have no nice edges. Where does black stop being black, and when is it really white? Hard for our minds to figure that out.

These color words are a good example of how we gravitate to definite meanings, and how we describe things that are ambiguous – looking for edges and sometimes not finding them.

Slide 3:

We have had this ability of rapid shallow processing for a long time. Plato was a deep thinker and wondered about it. He suggested there were ideal “Forms” that existed independently that our minds accessed so we could compare reality against them, resulting in recognition and confidence. Clever. We see a chair, compare it to the Form, it's a match (but never as pure).