Two Packets of Sugar

Quinn, I was thinking about the speaker we had last week at the library who talked about fast and slow thinking.

Oh, I really liked that talk. I’ve been noticing that in myself ever since. Hold on a sec. Our coffees are ready, Sasha. Same cream and sugar?

Yes, thank you.

Yeah, in driving here, I realized how little attention I paid to my driving.

I noticed that when you picked me up last time. Maybe it’s time we have “the talk” about possibly selling your car — in the interest of the public’s well-being.

No, seriously. I think my driving operates using my brain’s System 1 “fast” mode. Don’t you sometimes arrive at your destination and think, “How did I manage to get here?”

Oh, sure. Two packets of sugar, always opened the same way, emptied one at a time, then stirred three times. But never with your cream added. Honestly, I don’t know how you drink it like that.

It’s called “habit.”

You’re right. I’d be lost without my habits.

But look at us now, analyzing it like we’re watching the Zapruder film frame by frame. That must be System 2 “slow” thinking.

I remember taking my driver’s test with a state trooper in the car. I was so focused on the task that I could count my rapid heartbeats. I was hoping the officer wasn’t paying close attention like that. Now, my driving makes me feel, at times, like I’m a step away from being a rider in one of those self-driving cars. And when I do focus on something, I’m momentarily blind to everything else.

Not good, my friend.

What?

I said, “Not good… never mind.”

Oh, you’re right. Not good at all. But it’s how we’re wired, don’t you think? Didn’t the speaker say something about how focusing our attention can blind us to other things? You know, all that “Invisible Gorilla” stuff, where they found that if a person’s attention was focused intensely on one thing — like how many times a team of players touched the basketball — most would miss seeing the person in the gorilla suit walk into their field of view.

Right. And there was that experimenter who did a similar experiment with radiologists, focused on finding nodules in the CT scans of lungs, and managed to slip into the final scans a faint image of a gorilla. It went undetected by over 80% of those trained radiologists.

That certainly caught my attention. I wrote that down in my notebook. I wonder if they tried this with other animals or objects. Maybe we just don’t see gorillas.

I was reading an article trying to explain how these AI chatbots work, and it brought up a research paper titled “Attention Is All You Need.”

Well, not if you’re hunting gorillas, apparently.

Yeah, right. But in that “Attention” article, attention (I think they called it “self-attention”) was a way of considering the surrounding context of the words in a sentence as a biasing factor in predicting the next word. For example, if I say “I was at the bank,” you’re not sure what I mean unless I add, “to deposit my…”

“Gorilla!” Sorry, I was — what’s the word? “primed”? — and couldn’t resist. Of course, the word “bank” has multiple meanings out of context. It’s the surrounding context that favors choosing one meaning or another. Don’t you think?

Oh, sure. I think that a similar bias that leans us in a direction is that kind of priming you mentioned. The context — the other words in the sentence or sentences — primes the AI to pick the next word in the sentence. That’s why we think “check” and not something else, unless you’ve been taking your gorilla with you to the bank, and I haven’t noticed.

But priming in humans can sometimes induce a blindness in our ability to predict something like what we’re seeing in the moment.

Do you think that in order to be clear with each other on what we mean, we’re priming with our words in such a way that we momentarily blind the listener to other possibilities?

Do you mean, are we rigging the person’s prediction mechanism so that they will more likely construct the meaning we want them to construct in their mind?

Exactly! Well, maybe not “rigging,” but we are definitely putting our hands on the neuronal scales to produce our desired outcomes.

“Neuronal scales”? Did you read that somewhere, or are you just making word salad again?

I thought I heard that from one of the library presentations. I don’t know. Maybe I made it up. But you understand, right?

No, I get it. Try this. Say “silk, silk, silk.”

What?

No, go on. Just say it. “Silk, silk, silk.”

Oh, really? Okay — silk, silk, silk. What’s your point?

What do cows drink?

Milk. … Oh geez, you got me.

Pretty cool, huh?

Yeah, pretty cool. Now, let me try one.

“I prime you, You prime me, We both prime too easily, Too easily to let it show. [something, something…] And that’s all I know.”

Wow! Now, I’ve got Art Garfunkel’s song playing in my head with the wrong words. It’s definitely his voice, but you’ve got him singing about priming. Thanks a lot.

You’re welcome. Yeah, nobody but us has heard that album. But if priming is key to how we construct meaning, then that last line about knowing seems to be wrapped up in this. But right now, you primed me with that song, and I can’t think of anything else for all the music playing in my head. Maybe more coffee will help. Want some?

None for me, thanks. I’m meeting a gorilla by the riverbank.