Acccording to the speaker, human beings tend to think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet, he argues, much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. Dr. Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in the human brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. Says Gigerenzer: "More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more." His talk is part of an ongoing series on "Behavioral, Social and Computational Sciences Seminars" organized by the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), which aims to bring the benefits of computational science to disciplines that have largely been by-passed by the information-technology revolution until now. More information on this and other talks in the series can be found at http://bscs3.calit2.net. Gigerenzer, a leading expert and author on heuristics, won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. His books on heuristics include Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics- UCSD
Bio
Gerd Gigerenzer
Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has also published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics.
In psychoanalysis, the part of the psychic apparatus that does not ordinarily enter the individual's awareness but may be manifested by slips of the tongue, dreams, or neurotic symptoms (seeneurosis). The existence of unconscious mental activities was first elaborated by Sigmund Freud and is now a well-established principle of psychiatry. The origin of many neurotic symptoms is said to depend on conflicts that have been removed from consciousness by repression and maintained in the unconscious through various defense mechanisms. Recent biopsychological explorations have shed light on the relationship between brain physiology and the levels of consciousness at which people retain memories.