Does biology play dice?
Some thoughts on nature, nurture, and chance in development
There’s something deeply unsatisfying about randomness.
Humans, like other animals, are attuned to cause-and-effect. A lot of the work of being a baby is building a causal model of the world: If I drop this fork, then what happens? We seem to come pre-loaded with a toolkit for statistical inference. There’s research, for instance by Alison Gopnik, suggesting that children playing with unfamiliar devices are good little scientists: they adjust their expectations about how the device will behave given the results of their “experiments” in roughly the way that Bayes’ Rule, the holy scripture of probabilistic reasoning, would demand.[1] A certain strain of cognitive science — Karl Friston’s free energy principle and its many spinoffs — even asserts causal modeling as the one true purpose of the brain (and maybe life itself).
Our ability to not just experience but also explain the things that happen to us is what makes our species so good at navigating and exploiting the world. And as humans, this knowledge is not confined to the mire of the animal implicit. We have language. Armed with words, the animal causal modeling instinct takes on new life as the human storytelling instinct.
Elise Cutts
Every human culture has its fables and folktales. But story in a more general sense — a narrative structure of cause-effect links running from beginning to end — seems so fundamental to human cognition that it’s hard to imagine thinking without it. The driest mathematical proof follows a linear progression from beginning to end, each step enabled by the ones before. Making plans and predictions rests on our ability to concoct mental fictions. And story might even underpin memory. Between 4 and 7 years old, kids get much better at both remembering things and telling stories. And today, researchers published a study of 77 kids in this age group showing that youngsters who could tell more cohesive stories about silent cartoons were able to recall more factual information about the videos one week later. To quote the study authors:
Young children’s memory may be limited in part by their lack of the semantic knowledge necessary to construct narratives, and/or by their impoverished understanding of narrative structure in general.
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