Why our brains are horribly dumb
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re still picking our jaws up off the floor after the ending of Ted Lasso S2E6. This week I’m writing about what a lot of us are doing now, which is imagining what happens next in that story and how our cognitive need for narrative makes us horribly dumb. Speaking of trying to predict the future, Jack Hughes reaches back to 1948 to look ahead to 2024 to reach his conclusion that Joe Biden should announce for re-election.
As always, we recommend things to do (learn Ryan Holiday’s 23 rules to be productively creative — #11 works, I swear), read (Sabra Ayers’ bonkers story about a disinformation campaign in Highland Park, Texas), watch (S1 of NatGeo’s Genius), and listen to (“Nervous” by Madi Diaz). And by the way, I’ve got a speaking engagement for the LBJ Foundation coming up at which presidential historian Mark Updegrove will be interviewing me. Kind of excited about this one.
But first, did you hear about Scott Apley?
Apley was—the past tense should give away the ending—a city councilor down near Galveston and a member of the Texas Republican Party’s executive board, but he wasn’t just focused on local issues. “I wish I lived in the area!” he wrote online about a mask burning party in Ohio. To Dr. Leana Wen’s tweet affirming the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine, he replied, “You are an absolute enemy of a free people,” adding the hashtag #ShoveTheCarrotWhereTheSunDontShine. He added a period at the end of his tweet. Maybe he thought proper punctuation moderated the tone of threatening an Asian woman with rape. Maybe he believed in proper syntax or that a hashtag is part of the sentence rather than what it is, a tag to help others discover his tweet.
Apley did not live to see #ShoveTheCarrotWhereTheSunDontShine trend on Twitter. He died of COVID-19, and of course the hashtag trended when people dunked on him posthumously, mocking his inhumanity through imitation. I regret the fissure of satisfaction his fatal comeuppance gave me, but I didn’t mind that feeling’s less-loathsome cousin: an appreciation of the narrative symmetry of cause and effect. He fucked around; he found out.
When it comes to narrative structure, our brains have OCD, always needing things to make sense. We are hardwired to tell stories about a person overcoming obstacles to reach a goal. This basic narrative structure appears in the Bhagavad Gita, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Navajo coyote stories, the Tale of Genji, Greek plays, and just about every scripted show on television. Our brains are so addicted to story that they’re always making predictions about how experiences will become a story and chop up our experience of the space-time continuum into discrete, story-length events. If the story is incomplete, our brains will make stuff up to make the story make sense, and if something that actually happened doesn’t fit the story, out it goes. Forgotten.
And so Apley’s death creates a satisfying narrative arch, but only up to a point. He denied COVID; COVID killed him. Our brains tell us that what happens next should advance the plot. He denied COVID; COVID killed him; his allies, forced to confront the error of their ways from a too-close-for-comfort distance, learn from this experience and get vaccinated.
Our brains are horribly dumb, but not in the way you probably think. The COVID deniers evince remarkable consistency. Their past is prologue-ing all over the present, yet I would have bet money that after Apley’s death his family and friends would have rushed to Walgreens en masse to get vaccinated. In my head, they would have worn tank tops to save themselves the time it would take to roll up their sleeves, so great would be their urgency to get the life-saving jab.
That is not what happened.
Two days after his county Republican Party posted condolences on Facebook without addressing the cause of death, they posted an article suggesting a young man died from taking the vaccine. “Another tragedy - From the Vaccine!!!!!”
Our brains are horribly dumb, and the smarter we are, the better our brains are at being dumb. In his 2012 book The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney synthesized reams of research into cognitive science and discovered that “intelligence or sophistication actually make biased reasoning about politics worse,” he said. “The more you know, the more you can reinforce your beliefs.”
Our brains are so horribly dumb.
This is not a post about the guilty pleasure of seeing a pandemic claim a righteous kill. Apley’s death doesn’t require me to have an opinion about it. It’s not the world’s job to make sense, nor does it seem particularly well-suited to the task.
There is a profession, however, devoted to making sense of things. Our brains chop the timeline into events, and these people peer at them to discern their contours and shape and heft. Then they write it all down, we read it, and we end up understanding what the hell is going on. This timeline can be a confusing place what with its inexorable march into entropy and nothingness. And unlike streaming services, there is no pause button and rarely subtitles. In theory, the heralds help us get a sense of things.
Lately, however, the heralds seem to be falling down on the job. The Washington Post wrote a couple articles about Apley’s symbolically useful death. The writer, whose name doesn’t bear inclusion here, has a similarly defective brain in that it likewise tries to make sense of things. It’s not the writer’s fault, nor does it make the writer unusual in the slightest.
Ostensibly, this story is about “division.” Some people think this, some people think that. True enough, as far as it goes, but the writer goes further to suggest that this chasm can somehow be bridged.
Apley’s hospitalization and death showcased the bitterness of the country’s divide over coronavirus vaccination, and over how to bridge it, as the pandemic makes personal tragedy inseparable from politics.
Left unsaid is what materials could build such a bridge because the answer is understood. The heralds worship the false god of the Enlightenment that preaches the comforting but false dogma that the truth shall set you free. Framing events this way—if only people would sit still and listen to facts, then we’d solve this mess—has not failed for lack of effort. The problem is our brains are horribly dumb, trying to make sense of nonsense.
We would understand our world better if we stopped trying to balance the equation. Nonsense is not resolved by sense. Nonsense these days is a reaction to sense, an anger at being told once again that smarter people who eat arugula know better than you. So otherwise intelligent people burn masks, denying that a violent insurrection was either violent or an insurrection, or ruling that it’s out of order to use the word “racism” while debating a voter suppression bill. Or, for that matter, banning a book about Texas state history from the Texas state history museum.
But the news tries to make sense of a world overrun by madness and ends up like computer-generated imagery in 3-D movies in the aughts. You are being shown a moving picture of a Roman colosseum, but your brain has to strain to override the janky angles and false perspectives your eyes see. Your brain calls your eyes liars and ends up giving itself headaches.
Now the news tells us about the divide between those who know and those who do not yet know as if we can’t see a madness infecting people. So we strain to pull our brains in alignment with what we’re told we’re seeing and try to talk sense into people who’ve lost theirs as if this was a simple matter of missing information.
Surely, we tell ourselves, this is what it will take to knock some sense into them.
“What will it take?” we ask behind closed doors, marveling at officials who erect roadblocks to prevent everything short of college football teams from treating the coronavirus as serious as lice. We imagine cause leading to effect while reality disproves Newton’s Third Law of Emotion. We struggle to hold onto the story that for every action there is an equal and opposite satisfaction only to end up with headaches, blinking our eyes at the horror the world has become. Surely, we tell ourselves, this is what it will take to knock some sense into them.
Our brains are horribly dumb.
It’s OK to turn away. Paying attention to the heralds exacts a cost to your emotional and mental health. You can’t doomscroll your way into heaven. Two recent studies—one Dutch, the other Norwegian—found a new class of news consumers called “followers turned avoiders.” These were smart, kind-hearted, and quite good-looking folks (a lot like you, come to think of it) who used to follow the news before the pandemic and may have initially increased their news consumption before consciously avoiding it because of the “information overload and emotional drain.”
The Norwegians identified this behavior as “a thoughtful, strategic part of news consumption more broadly, not its irresponsible or anti-democratic opposite.”
“We are all, at times, news avoiders,” concluded the Norwegians, who described news avoidance “as meaningful and situated, as inherently human rather than inherently problematic.”
You’re having a normal response to having a dumb brain. We try to make sense out of nonsense and wonder not why we persist in doing what never works but why they don’t give up their nonsensical ways. As for me, I’m going to wear a mask, get better at listening, and mark the time till I get a booster by finding out if scotch still tastes good. Some day the pandemic will end, and its attendant madness may abate, but our brains will carry on being horribly dumb. Until then, when you get the urge to make sense of the world and catch yourself saying, Surely, now they’ll accept the truth, just remember: No, they won’t, not even now.
And don’t call me Shirley.
Jason Stanford is the NYT-best selling co-author of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Pointing at things
Not mourning the SAT
Babbling like a baby bat
Appreciating Sean Penn
Learning about YIMBYs
Ordering cell-grown meat
Getting a better microphone
Using a cotton bag 20,000 times
Forgetting the Alamo with Al Jazeera
Falling in love by first paying attention
Watching the greatest shot in TV history
Learning these 23 rules for productive creativity
Making chicken with black beans, rice, and chiles
Getting hyped for a Steve Martin scripted TV show
What I’m reading
Sabra Ayers: “How a mysterious social justice group roiled a Dallas community” - This story is bonkers.
The letters addressed to white parents of Highland Park Independent School District students arrived by FedEx in mid-July. Sent by Dallas Justice Now, the language on the letters was extreme: If you are a parent of a white student, pledge not to let your child apply to or attend Ivy League schools so that a student of color may have the admissions spot.
Jesse Dougherty: “Going, going, gone: This memory of a Frank Howard home run, vivid and bright, will live in his mind forever. But is it true?” - Read this article after my essay on storytelling. It’ll make a lot more sense.
He can still hear the ball popping off Frank Howard’s bat. He remembers looking up, bending his head back, the home run sailing straight over his seat and the tall Chevron sign beyond center. He can see it in motion, set against the light blue sky, as if it were taking off like an airplane instead of coming down. And he recalls the sound once it fell, the gasps that rustled through his section, the murmurs that followed and sounded like a hundred question marks: Did it find a patch of grass behind Sick’s Stadium in Seattle? Or could it have reached the traffic on Martin Luther King Jr. Way?
Mimi Swartz: “How Far Are Texans From Open Rebellion Against Greg Abbott?” - Pretty far.
A law school classmate of our governor once insisted to me that Greg Abbott was more dangerous than his predecessor Rick Perry because he was smart. I would say that the events of the past few months lend considerable support to the first part of the sentence.
What I’m watching
The Suicide Squad was utterly bizarre and yet somehow watchable.
The thing I love about profiles of genius is recognizing how often it occurs in a community of geniuses. Albert Einstein was buddies with Carl Jung and ribbed Werner Heisenberg for what he perceived as the flaws in quantum physics. I tore through the first season of Genius, the National Geographic show running on Hulu. Looking forward to the subsequent seasons about Picasso and Aretha Franklin.
What I’m listening to
Jungle, whose new album I featured last week, sent me down an early ‘90s funk hole. Credit my Uncle Ron with introducing me to The Brand New Heavies.
It continued with Us3’s 1993 album, Hand On The Torch. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know we have something special down here at the Birdland this evening: a recording from Blue Note Records.” *pop*
Madi Diaz is the spiritual child of Patty Griffin and P.J. Harvey. I like this new song, “Nervous,” off her new album, History of a Feeling.
I’m going to give the last word to my friend Walker Lukens, who wrote the song of the summer for 2021 way back in 2020. I looked up the other day and realized summer was nearly over and my trip over Labor Day to Long Island that used to be a long way away was suddenly next week.
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