Survival of the Slinkest

• Singular + link = slink
• Slinkable = the ability to be singularly linked

Our story begins three million years ago in patch of African lowlands where a monkey-like hominid named Lucy is scurrying away from her hominid companion. There were 3 signs that her companion was not having a good day. 1) the insects he ate for breakfast were upsetting his digestion, 2) an annoying splinter was still lodged in his his thumb and, 3) a saber-tooth tiger just tore off his right leg.

Yes, not a good day for Lucy’s companion.

A few moments earlier they had both noticed a faint stirring of shadows in the shrub nearby. While her companion stood transfixed with curiosity, Lucy sprinted away, not waiting to determine if the stirring was a harmless swaying of branches or a deadly predator.

Lucy’s companion is in the process of being removed from the gene pool, but not Lucy. She would survive, thanks to her ability to make a mental link: sometimes shadows signify predators.

Making links can be valuable. Even life-saving. Our brains have self-trained through millions of years of evolution to see patterns. Those who could spot patterns and make mental links enjoyed certain advantages over those who couldn’t. Those advantages include such things as staying alive and propagating their lineage with offspring who could also potentially spot patterns.

Making sense of complex information enhances your ability to identify connections and to demonstrate these connections to others who haven’t spotted them.

In the 21st century, more occupations rely on pattern recognition than ever before. Data analysts infer meaning from large datasets. Doctors rely on pattern recognition for medical diagnoses. Investment managers seek trends in the movement of market prices. Criminal investigators look to link crimes to perpetrators. Marketing professionals use patterns to identify consumer behavior and preferences. In each of these professions, the ability to spot patterns improves decision making and creates opportunities for success.

When you open your eyes, you see all manner of visual stimuli. You see colors, textures, contrast, lines, shapes, and movement. The brain’s visual cortex kicks in. It processes this barrage of information, seeks to make sense of it and determine if it recognizes familiar objects or patterns.

Your visual cortex is working right now as you read this sentence. It is connecting the words into sequential order to infer meaning and, hopefully, formulating comprehension of the ideas that I’m trying to transport from my mind to yours.

Your visual cortex stays busy throughout the day. You employ it so liberally, in fact, that you even use it during certain stages of dreaming. During REM sleep the brain activates several regions of the brain, and the visual cortex is thought to contribute to the vivid, often surreal visual experiences of your dreamscape.

Spotting patterns is comfortable. It is reassuring. It converts complex stimuli into tidy mental categories. It corrals the chaos. It borders the boundless. It familiarizes the foreign.

Your brain is so accustomed to spotting patterns that you even see them in places where they don’t exist. You often see faces in randomness. Some people see the face of Jesus in their toast. Others see a face on the surface of the planet Mars. One woman recognized the face of the Virgin Mary charred into her grilled cheese sandwich, and allegedly auctioned the holy sandwich for a cool $28,000. Her prayers were answered. I guess the buyer saw that face too.

This tendency to see images in random stimuli is called pareidolia. It occurs when the brain tries to make sense of information by interpreting it as something recognizable.

When processing stimuli, if the brain successfully identifies a familiar object, image or idea, it may complete the perception by filling in missing information. This allows the brain to create a coherent interpretation of the stimuli.

While this process can be useful, it often gives birth to flights of fancy such as urban legends and conspiracy theories. Consider the connections between the assassinations of presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy. The following coincidences are commonly associated with the assassinations.

• There are seven letters in “Lincoln” and “Kennedy.”
• Both were elected to Congress in ‘46 and then elected to the presidency in ‘60.
• Both assassins were born in ‘39 and had three names (John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald).
• John Booth fled from a theater and was apprehended in a warehouse; Oswald fled from a warehouse and was apprehended in a theater.
• Both assassins were killed before they were put on trial.
• Both presidents were succeeded by vice presidents named Johnson, who were born in ‘08.
• Both were shot in the head on a Friday.
• Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy, and warned him not to go to the theater; Kennedy’s secretary was Lincoln and warned him not to go to Dallas.

This list of coincidences has led many to allege there’s a conspiratorial connection between the two assassinations. After all, they wonder, how else could anyone explain such a long list of coincidences?

First, although the list is long, some of the “facts” are simply false. Lincoln’s secretary was not named Kennedy; Booth was apprehended in a barn, not a theater; Booth was born in 1838, not 1839. The fact that these falsehoods have remained among the facts reminds me of the expression, “A lie races twice around the world befor the truth has even laced up its shoes.” Falsehoods aside, there are nine accurate coincidences in the list above, which is still a long list.

Second, you probably shouldn’t be surprised that lists of this length could be teased out of randomness. Think about it this way. Let’s say you gathered every possible detail about each of the presidents, including their lives, circumstances, dates, trivial quirks, what they ate for breakfast on the day they were shot, as well as those details of the people who were close to them. You might identify several thousand details for each president. With several thousand details to choose from, it shouldn’t be so surprising if you were able to identify nine common details. Spotting one or two commonalities for every 1,000 details isn’t particularly noteworthy.

You may be skeptical. If so, consider this. If we sat 23 random people in a room, what do you think the odds are that two of them share a birthday? The answer is 50-50. If you’re interested to understand the math, check out The Birthday Paradox.

The important lesson of the presidents is that our brains see a long list of common details (including some details that are accurate and some that are inaccurate) and then some people make a link where none is proven to exist: that the two assassinations were somehow connected. This is an example of the human brain doing its job to try to identify patterns. It’s the brain taking incomplete information and filling in the missing details.

Sometime this filling-in-the-gaps process can be very useful. It gives you the ability to make abstract associations. Here’s example that I saw on a bumper sticker: “There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.”

Make the connection.

In some situations, seeing patterns in randomness can be terrible. Think, for instance, about medical examiners who look at a patient and see evidence of a disease where no disease is actually present. This misdiagnosis could have many unwanted repercussions.

In other situations it may be perfectly acceptable or even advantageous to see patterns in randomness. Think, for instance, about artists who get inspiration from viewing patterns in random arrangements of lines or clusters of dots. That Jesus toast could spawn an entire artistic career!

In other words, it’s the context that determines whether to embrace or reject patterns you see in randomness.

Revisiting our story of Lucy three million years ago, she survived by correctly connecting shadowplay with danger. If she had been wrong about the danger at that moment, and instead the shadowplay had been caused by the harmless movement of branches, the mistake would have been inconsequential. She would have been scared off unnecessarily. In either case, she would live another day. Her ability to make connections gave her an edge.

Which is more than we can say about her companion. All we can say about him is, he helped to propagate the survival of his predator.