Our Model Driven Brain

             Million years of evolution gifted us a beautiful and most powerful cognitive machine in this universe which is none other than our 3 pound brain. Each one of them is unique based on environment in which it is grown and intelligently adapts to the different situations by correlating it with the past experience.

        Here I tried to list few interesting everyday situations where we use our past experience as a model to predict the outcomes. In some cases our models are life saving and sometimes it can risky to trust only our models. And this happens when we do not have sufficient experience(Training!) . That is one of main reasons why we learn from our more experienced  elders.

       As with any model driven system there are some limitations. There are times where we use brain-models to predict the outcomes of events which depends on many external factors and is way beyond of our control.

Useful brain-models while

• Navigating: 

          A very simple act of walking or driving involves lots prediction. We try to predict where we will be in next few seconds based on our current speed and orientation. Simultaneously we predict the position our fellow travelers in the road in next  few seconds. Our eyes are the feedback mechanism through which our brain-models are validated in in real time. When we are at collision course our brain immediately corrects the orientations, thereby reducing the error.

•  Limits: We are prone to make more errors when are travelling at high speeds, since we are limited by  our reaction times. Most of the accidents happen during this time.  

       

• Socializing: 

           Our brain-model comes handy during social conversations. When we are talking to group of people, we will try to predict the response of the audience. Here again eyes reads the facial cues from people faces which acts a feedback mechanism and changes our tone or topic of our conversations.

• Limits:When the audience are large in number we are overwhelmed by information overload. This is the one of the main causes for stage fright.

• Estimating: 

            Another useful brain-model that we use daily is to predict the time to complete a task. Here our predictors will be the complexity of the task (High, Medium ,Low) and current     state of mind (Energetic or Tired). 

• Limits: Yet again we will tend overestimate or underestimate if the task is totally new to us(Unseen sample) or beyond our capability(Outliers).