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is because the conscious brain can only process a trickle of data. Psychologists agree that only one to four “items,” either thoughts or sensations, can be held in mind, immediately available to consciousness, at the same time. Some have tried to quantify these constraints. According to the work of Manfred Zimmerman of Germany’s Heidelberg University, only a woeful fifty bits of information per second make their way into the conscious brain, while an estimated eleven million bits of data flow from the senses every second. Many psychologists object to these attempts to measure thoughts and perceptions as digital bits. But however they’re measured, the stark limits of the mind are clear. It’s as if each person’s senses generated enough data to run a 3D Omnimax movie with Dolby sound—only to funnel it through an antediluvian modem, one better suited to Morse code. So how do humans re-create the Omnimax experience? They focus on the items that appear most relevant and round them out with stored memories, what psychologists call “schemas.”

In the Moses example, people concentrate on the question about animals. The biblical details, which appear to fit into their expected clusters, are ignored. It’s only when a wrong name intrudes from outside the expected orbit that alarms go off. In one experiment at Carnegie Mellon, when researchers substituted a former U.S. president for Moses, people noticed right away. Nixon had nothing to do with the ark, they said.

Even after falling victim to the Moses Illusion, Jennings found no fault in his own thinking. “The brain’s doing the right thing!” he said. “It’s focusing on the right part of the question: How many animals did the biblical figure take onto the ark?” That, he said, is how the brain should work. “It’s just that the question writer has found a way to work against you.” Those sorts of tricks, he added, are uncommon on Jeopardy.

Strangely enough, the cerebral carelessness that leads to the Moses Illusion also serves a useful function for human thought. Filtering out details not only eliminates time-consuming busy work. It also allows people to overlook many variations and to generalize. This is important. If they focus too much on small changes, they might think, for example, that each time a friend gets a haircut or a suntan, she’s a different person. Instead, the brain settles on the gist of the person and is ready to look past some details—or, in many cases, to ignore them. This can be embarrassing. (Sometimes it is a different person.) Still, by skipping over details, the brain is carrying out a process that is central to human intelligence and one that confounds computers. It’s thinking more broadly and focusing on concepts.

The Jeopardy studio sits on the sun-drenched Sony lot in Culver City. Seven miles south of Hollywood’s Sunset and Vine, this was a suburban hinterland when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) started making movies there in 1915. In later decades it turned out such classics as The Wizard of Oz and Ben Hur—all of them introduced by the iconic roaring lion. Following years of mergers and acquisitions, the lot became the property of a Japanese industrial giant—a development that likely would have shocked Samuel Goldwyn. Sony later gobbled up Columbia Studios, which had belonged to Coca-Cola for a few years in the eighties. On the Sony lot, the MGM lion gave way to Lady Liberty holding her torch. In the summer of 2007, as IBM considered a Jeopardy project, tourists on the Sony lot were filing past the sets of Spiderman II and Will Smith’s Happyness. Others with free passes lined up for Jeopardy. If they made their way past the fake Main Street, with its cinema, souvenir shop, and café, they would come across a low-slung office building named for Robert Young, the actor who played the homespun 1970s doctor Marcus Welby, M.D.

This is where Harry Friedman worked. Friedman, then in his late fifties, was the executive producer of both Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, the top- and second-ranked game shows in America. Wheel, as it was known, relied on the chance of a