Luck, chance, destiny, beliefs, and optical illusions, our brain does a bit of what it wants and ultimately plays tricks on us “without our full consent,” as evidenced by the success of lottery games and other bets that a multitude of skeptical, incredulous people indulge in.
Our brain is tossed around by luck, as much in a lottery as in the uncertainties and ambiguities revealed in vision by optical illusions.
To the point that we can attribute to a malicious mind the fact that the toast falls on the jam side or that the USB cable plug is always the wrong way round.
Lotteries Play with Our Brain
Between sports betting, online gambling, scratch cards, and multimillion-dollar lottery, games of luck have always played an important part in our lives. They can quickly become addictive and surprisingly reveal the dependence between luck and ancestral mechanisms of how our brain works. For example, in a lottery, we are ready to gamble a little money to win a lot, even if we know full well that, as it is very rare to win, we are guaranteed to lose almost every time!
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Law of Series Bias
Yet our brains push us to indulge in this irrational pleasure, a form of “drug-free addiction”. In theory, the rules are pre-established, and long-term gains can be predicted. With a little hindsight, we can see that some strategies presented by specialist journals, such as the so-called “law of series,” have no basis in pure logic.
The Atlantic magazine invokes Gambler’s Fallacy, in its article “The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain”: The gambler’s fallacy makes us absolutely certain that, if a coin has landed heads up five times in a row, it’s more likely to land tails up the sixth time. In fact, the odds are still 50-50. Optimism bias leads us to consistently underestimate the costs and the duration of basically every project we undertake.
For example, in a lottery, we are ready to gamble a little money to win a lot, even if we know full well that:
The Odds of Winning are Extremely Low:
○ For national lotteries, the probability of winning the jackpot is often around 1 in 14 million.
○ For smaller scratch cards, the chance of winning a significant prize is equally rare.
Rational Strategies Have No Impact:
○ Common strategies like the “law of series” or picking “lucky numbers” have no basis in pure logic.
○ Drawings are independent events, making any patterns purely coincidental.
The Brain Perceives Patterns Where None Exist:
○ A rare occurrence, such as drawing consecutive numbers, can create a strong cognitive bias.
○ This bias is reinforced by unconscious beliefs that certain patterns are more likely.
From Luck to “Beliefs”
Cognitive biases are not only revealed in statistics on frequencies of occurrence of events such as those encountered in the lottery, but the brain also seems to manipulate forms of complex “beliefs” about its environment. But in this context, how do we define such a “belief”?
A major contribution of Antoine-Augustin Cournot is to have demystified an origin of chance that allows us to better understand this notion. As an economist, he studied during the 19th century the processes of establishing economic monopolies. Questioning the hazards disturbing his experimental data, he made this simple proposition: what if the impression of chance, rather than being linked to autonomous processes, came from the observer’s ignorance of the origin of the data?
Go Players
For example, if you observe two Go players while you know nothing about the rules of the game, you will have the impression that the moves are played randomly, whereas, for experienced players, this game does not involve luck at all but a high level of strategy.
Probability Defining Belief
At the theoretical level, probability theory, a branch of mathematics, allows us to define a “belief” as a precise mathematical object assigning probabilities to different possible events.
For example, imagine that you are trying to determine the orientation of trees in a forest: the trunks are mainly oriented vertically, but some are leaning or twisted. Equipped with our theoretical tool, this physical measurement can be represented by the likelihood probability of each of the possible orientations. Often, we can represent this probability distribution by its most probable value and by the dispersion around this value. This type of formalization allows in particular, to manipulate different degrees of “belief” by rules called “inference”.
A Dynamic Process
Recently, we were able to directly interrogate biological neurons on this hypothesis. We focused on the primary visual cortex, a region on the surface of the brain that is essential for vision.
Key Findings from These Experiments:
Neurons Gradually Build a Representation:
○ Neurons respond dynamically, adjusting their perception based on new stimuli.
○ Precision of orientation influences the speed and nature of these adjustments.
Beliefs Are Integrated Based on Confidence:
○ Precise inputs (e.g., clear edges) are processed more rapidly.
○ Less precise inputs (e.g., texture) are integrated more slowly, indicating a hierarchy of confidence.
The Brain Constructs Visual Representations Fragment by Fragment:
○ Like a painter adjusting brushstrokes, the brain refines its image of the world.
○ Understanding this mechanism may bridge the gap between biological and artificial intelligence.
To intuitively understand this dynamic mechanism, we can imagine that, like a painter adjusting a touch of paint on his work, the overall representation of our visual environment is gradually built from these fragments. In the future, new experiments are needed to better understand these mechanisms. In particular, we want to understand how we integrate information dynamically in the incessant flow of stimuli that our sensory system must process.
Jessica has a flair for writing engaging blogs and articles. She enjoys reading and learning new things which enables her to write different topics and fields with ease. She also strives to break down complex concepts and make them easy for anybody to comprehend.
