My Brain’s View of my Brain

I am seventy-five years old. I have outlived the traditional Three Score Years and Ten. Hooray!

Like most humans my concept of time changes. I had no concept of time at the time I learned to stand. I had little concept of time when I was four. At age eighteen I believed I would live forever, and drove as if that was true. Now I hope for another twenty years.

I can look back twenty years and remember what I was doing in 2001

Hmm.

We cannot avoid thinking in terms of our own life, of human lifetime. My brain is the apex of evolution in terms of how it processed data. My brain (and your brain) has evolved to think in terms of lifetimes. I know that there was a time when my mother was a good-looking young woman courting, to her, an attractive young man, because I am the result of that attraction.

I know too that my mother’s parents and my father’s parents, I met all four of them, must likewise have been just like me when I met a good-looking woman back in 1965. ‘Twas ever thus. All the people in my life are measured in terms of “my lifetime” and I cannot avoid this. It is how my brain has been built through pressures of evolution.

Rationally I can contemplate the year 1461; I can read about it in a history book, but I have no basis on which to found a period of five hundred and sixty years. Oh, sure, twenty-eight generations, give or take, but then we are right back to using a lifetime, or a breeding-cycle as a unit of time.

We can talk about “the bad winter of 878”, but we will end up comparing it to “the worst winter I have ever known” (in terms of weather).

We are trapped in a time-warp within our own minds.

So it is that we panic when we read Arctic Circle's record high temperature sounds 'alarm bells' .

The “record high temperature” means of course, the highest temperature read from some man-made recording device (could be pencil and paper) at some specific place on the earth’s surface.

That period for the “record high temperature” is perhaps as far back as five generations. We are right back to using a lifetime, or a breeding-cycle as a unit of time. That period is significant to us humans, because we stand between those two awful eternities of “before we were born” and “after we die”.

But the period of our lifetime is nothing in the eye of the universe, or even the solar system, or even the period of life on earth, or even the period of homo sapiens. Let alone The English-speaking Nations.

Snap quiz: How long did the trilobites live? That is, for how many years might you have been able to observe a living trilobite, had you been alive at the time?

You have no idea! (footnote 1)

Inside your mind you cannot know how long the trilobites lived. For you that period is zero years. You suspect that it was longer than no time at all, but for you, the period is non-existent because you do not know,

Trilobites were among the most successful of all early animals, existing in oceans for almost 270 million years .

Even the number 270,000,000 has no meaning in your mind. Our brains evolved to spotting the one or two easiest antelope in the herd of tens of thousands; no other antelopes mattered, and we had to choose which of the two vulnerable antelopes to chase. “Two” was a sufficient concept.

Two, three at most, is the highest number our brain can manipulate without resorting to school-taught arithmetic. We need a learned skill to count to ten, and at age three we are so proud that we can do that. A year later we bore everyone to death with counting to a hundred. The precocious amongst us then go on to count out loud backwards from a hundred. (“Alright Christopher; that’s enough; now go on reading your book ...”)

Back to that record high temperature: We are coming off the wettest November on record .

More panic. But why? This is only “the wettest” within recorded history, which is at most five lifetimes, anywhere in the world. During my first year in Bonavista I lived through sixteen weather records: The coldest, driest, warmest and wettest spring, summer, autumn and winter since I moved to Bonavista. Sixteen records broken within twelve months! Surely the world is coming to an end.

You see the futility of considering records in terms of experiences in a human lifetime. For what it is worth, I have lived through all sixteen records in Toronto Canada; Perth Western Australia, Newcastle New South Wales, Adelaide South Australia, London England, Paris France, ...

Here is another misleading chunk of data for your brain to process:-

(see link above for “wettest November”)

Soil moisture, right? Makes you think of rainfall, right? Blue makes you think of water (strangely, because the oceans, seas and lakes are blue because they reflect the blue sky!) Deeper blue means deeper (or “more”) water, right?

Some of us know just how vast the dry Australian deserts are. Australia is the same size/area as the mainland USA - I could write “three million square miles” but that “million” has no basis in your mind.

Some of us have flown across Australia (or the USA) and think we know how big it is, but we still have no real idea. We climb into a box (taxicab) and then climb into a barn (airport terminal), then we climb into a cigar (aircraft cabin) and sit and then we climb back into the barn and into another box and there we are. But at no time at all have we experienced the length and breadth of the 3300 kilometres from Sydney to Perth

But look at how much wetness there is right across this arid continent.

“Highest on record” brays the chart legend.

But what does “Highest on record” mean in this context?

If the “soil moisture decile range” leapt from the bright red to the red range, are you likely to be able to launch your canoe?

If the “soil moisture decile range” leapt from the “8-9” to the “10” range, are you likely to be able to launch your canoe?

I know that you could not find a place to float your boat on a regular basis in the bulk of Western Australia. A puddle might form after a thunderstorm, but I have watched such puddles of water form and then disappear while drinking a single mug of tea.

When your brain reads that chart it thinks “Wet”, but the truth is “very, very dry, in any year”.

Just search for news articles on tourists who die of dehydration once they get off the main roads.

Our brains are fooled again.

(Footnote 1) The answer is, of course, “Three Score Years and Ten”

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