Thinking Beyond Science

If I make you drink twenty glasses of iced tea, each with a different amount of sugar in it, and ask you to sort them into categories according to sweetness, you’ll only be able to divide them into six or seven different categories before you begin to make mistakes. Or if I flash dots on a screen in front of you very quickly and ask you to count how many you see, you’d get the number right up to about seven dots, and then you’d need to guess. “There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,” the psychologist George Miller concluded in his famous essay “The Magical Number Seven.”

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

Most of us remember, at one time, only a fraction of the day-to-day details and histories of our family life. But we know, implicitly, where to go to find the answers to our questions – whether it is up to our spouse to remember where we put our keys or our thirteen-year-old to find out how to work the computer or our mother to find out details of our childhood. Perhaps more important, when new information arises, we know who should have responsibility for storing it. This is how, in a family, expertise emerges.

Teenage smoking is one of the great, baffling phenomena of modern life. No one really knows how to fight it, or even, for that matter, what it is. The principal assumption of the anti-smoking movement has been that tobacco companies persuade teens to smoke by lying to them, by making smoking sound a lot more desirable and a lot less harmful than it really is. To address that problem, then, we’ve restricted and policed cigarette advertising, so it’s a lot harder for tobacco companies to lie. We’ve raised the price of cigarettes and enforced the law against selling tobacco to minors, to try to make it much harder for teens to buy cigarettes. And we’ve run extensive public health campaigns on television and radio and in magazines to try to educate teens about the dangers of smoking.

The teen smoking epidemic does not simply illustrate the Law of the Few, however. It is also a very good illustration of the Stickiness Factor. After all, the fact that overwhelming numbers of teenagers experiment with cigarettes as a result of their contacts with other teenagers is not, in and of itself, all that scary. The problem – the fact that has turned smoking into public health enemy number one – is that many of those teenagers end up continuing their cigarette experiment until they get hooked. The smoking experience is so memorable and powerful for some people that they cannot stop smoking. The habit sticks.

There are a number of theories as to why smoking matches up so strongly with emotional problems. The first is that the same kinds of things that would make someone susceptible to the contagious effects of smoking – low self-esteem, say, or an unhealthy and unhappy home life – are also the kinds of things that contribute to depression.

More tantalizing, though, is some preliminary evidence that the two problems might have the same genetic root. For example, depression is believed to be the result, at least in part, of a problem in the production of certain key brain chemicals, in particular the neurotransmitters known as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. These are the chemicals that regulate mood, that contribute to feelings of confidence and mastery and pleasure. Drugs like Zoloft and Prozac work because they prompt the brain to produce more serotonin: they compensate, in other words, for the deficit of serotonin that some depressed people suffer from. Nicotine appears to do exactly the same thing with the other two key neurotransmitters – dopamine and norepinephrine.

The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. In their history, Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.

We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over so times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categories we can make and the number of people we can truly love and the number of acquaintances we can truly know. We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma. All of these things are expressions of the peculiarities of the human mind and heart, a refutation of the notion that the way we function and communicate and process information is straightforward and transparent.