The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [33]
It’s become a bit in vogue to pick on the human brain. We’re “predictably irrational,” in the words of behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s bestselling book. Stumbling on Happiness author Dan Gilbert presents volumes of data to demonstrate that we’re terrible at figuring out what makes us happy. Like audience members at a magic show, we’re easily conned, manipulated, and misdirected.
All of this is true. But as Being Wrong author Kathryn Schulz points out, it’s only one part of the story. Human beings may be a walking bundle of miscalculations, contradictions, and irrationalities, but we’re built that way for a reason: The same cognitive processes that lead us down the road to error and tragedy are the root of our intelligence and our ability to cope with and survive in a changing world. We pay attention to our mental processes when they fail, but that distracts us from the fact that most of the time, our brains do amazingly well.
The mechanism for this is a cognitive balancing act. Without our ever thinking about it, our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line—to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities—is one of human cognition’s most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.
In two important ways, personalized filters can upset this cognitive balance between strengthening our existing ideas and acquiring new ones. First, the filter bubble surrounds us with ideas with which we’re already familiar (and already agree), making us overconfident in our mental frameworks. Second, it removes from our environment some of the key prompts that make us want to learn. To understand how, we have to look at what’s being balanced in the first place, starting with how we acquire and store information.
Filtering isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s been around for millions of years—indeed, it was around before humans even existed. Even for animals with rudimentary senses, nearly all of the information coming in through their senses is meaningless, but a tiny sliver is important and sometimes life-preserving. One of the primary functions of the brain is to identify that sliver and decide what to do about it.
In humans, one of the first steps is to massively compress the data. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “Information wants to be reduced,” and every second we reduce a lot of it—compressing most of what our eyes see and ears hear into concepts that capture the gist. Psychologists call these concepts schemata (one of them is a schema), and they’re beginning to be able to identify particular neurons or sets of neurons that correlate with each one—firing, for example, when you recognize a particular object, like a chair. Schemata ensure that we aren’t constantly seeing the world anew: Once we’ve identified something as a chair, we know how to use it.
We don’t do this only with objects; we do it with ideas as well. In a study of how people read the news, researcher Doris Graber found that stories were relatively quickly converted into schemata for the purposes of memorization. “Details that do not seem essential at the time and much of the context of a story are routinely pared,” she writes in her book Processing the News. “Such leveling and sharpening involves condensation of all features of a story.” Viewers of a news segment on a child killed by a stray bullet might remember the child’s appearance and tragic background, but not the reportage that overall crime rates are down.
Schemata can actually get in the way of our ability to directly observe what’s happening. In 1981, researcher Claudia Cohen instructed subjects to watch a video of a woman celebrating her birthday. Some are told that she’s a waitress, while others are told she’s a librarian. Later, the groups are asked to reconstruct the scene. The people who are told she’s a waitress remember her having a beer; those told she was a librarian remember her wearing glasses and listening to classical music (the video