Cone Biopsy Pregnancy

nonsense

Part1: I want an explanation!
Why Have sales fell this week? How is it that has lost 0.01% of market share this month? I do not know if you noticed, the job should always have a ready explanation for everything that happens, including random stuff obviously. Fortunately we do not ask the explanation to be unwieldy and less to be verified. Just find one that is sufficiently coherent and reasonable. Basically this need an explanation for anything important is happening around us is universal: we are biologically programmed to interpret and find meaning in things, even when they do not.

In a famous experiment of the 1970 women were asked to judge the quality of various nylon stockings on display before them. In reality, these stockings were strictly identical, but they did not know and have provided more than 80 different reasons for preferring a particular low in terms of color, texture or elasticity. Do not laugh too quickly macho bands, no one escapes the post hoc rationalization, it is stronger than us. Just browse through the financial press to convince the conflicting explanations do not scare anyone when he must explain the course playing with a yo-yo. Nassim Taleb mischievously recalls in "The Black Swan" that when Saddam Hussein was arrested in 2003, Bloomberg broadcast two flashes in quick succession. The first, at 1:01 p.m. headline: "Rise in U.S. Treasuries, the arrest of Saddam Hussein could not stop terrorism." The second, a half-hour later: "Fall of U.S. Treasuries, the arrest of Hussein accelerates the perception of risk". At least these ladies had the good taste not to contradict themselves in their explanations, they!

Need Universal ...
All societies have in common to have invented a particular mythology, a founding narrative that explains why the sun rises, why we die, where does life etc.. "A civilization begins with the myth and ends with doubt," wrote Cioran ... This mythology is the original signature of a company identity and source of all its rituals. As in this passage irresistible Men in Black2 (after Cioran, the fall was brutal, forgive me) where a race of little aliens trapped for generations in the criminal record of a station is living in ignorance of what is happening on the other side of the door, and worships strange objects locked in the locker:

This urge to find rules and rituals to stall does not even own the rights. In an experiment conducted in 1948 American psychologist BF Skinner locked up a pigeon in a box equipped with a distributing food at regular intervals. Pigeons have been content to wait until the food falls on its own, but not at all! Three out of four times, the animal is tempted to attribute the outbreak of the food distribution to the action it is doing stack at the time. By repeating this action, he receives new food. Inevitably, since it is distributed at regular intervals whatever happens, but the pigeon does not know and this success encouraged him to repeat the maneuver. By dint of repeated reinforcements, he self-condition for this behavior totally absurd. Some pigeons turn on themselves, other pat the body to a place most accurate, shake their heads, flap their wings, lift their legs and so on. The pigeons are becoming superstitious literally!


The proof of the optical illusion
It does nothing, says Skinner, when, bowling his body is inclined instinctively to the left when you come to launch the ball a little too far right, as if moving her body after the fact would correct the trajectory. We are all pigeons in all, programmed to detect ever-causal relationships, to decode the world around us. Some optical illusions illustrate well our irrepressible tendency to find meaning to noise. In the Kanizsa pattern (left) for example you probably can not prevent you from seeing a white triangle in the middle of the figure because this triangle ghost gives meaning to the figure, explaining both the slots of the three black disks and interruptions in the path of the central triangle. Image of Peter Ulric Tse (right) will probably see a cylinder phantom in relief and black figs you find necessarily in 3D. On another note, we have a natural bias to see faces everywhere. As these baby birds recognize their mother at the red spot on its beak, it is enough to see two points at the same height with a horizontal line immediately below to receive a face :

(source : here )

The most surprising in this case is not so much our ability to detect a face, our inability to not see one. It is the experience of the mask of Chaplin, we can not see upside:

No wonder then, that the irregular shapes of clouds, constellations, or planetary surface is a fabulous playground for our obsession to detect known forms.

(source: Wikipedia )

In 2002 the Swiss neuroscientist Peter Brugger wondered if it was a link between the sensibilities of people defending esoteric or supernatural theories and their propensity to distinguish visual forms even when there is none. To find out, he presented to 20 people believing in the paranormal and 20 others more skeptical, very quick flashes of images and letters representing-or non-faces and words. Bingo! The first thought distinguish faces and many more words than there were in reality, and conversely the latter have found much less.

The origins of the need to explain
Whence comes this obsession to constantly search of cause and effect? One might think that such an instinct is an adaptive decisive advantage when it identifies faster prey, a predator or a sexual partner with the help of very subtle clues. In areas fished, the fish are more wary than elsewhere, as they belong to the same species. Qu'hominidé as we would have simply pushed to the extreme this innate tendency to find rules.
From a purely psychological, give meaning to everything around us gives us also the reassuring sense of control the situation, especially when things go wrong. We saw in this post how patients with neurological syndromes important reassuring invent stories to explain their condition. A simple explanation makes difficult situations more bearable and moreover the conspiracy theories and other esoteric beliefs never as successful as during crises.
But the assumption that satisfied me most is that we could reap such large amounts of information if it had not rules to keep them easily. Our brain is a computer capable of storing millions of data independent of each other. To assimilate new information we need to connect to the network of knowledge already in place. These logical links or imagined can more easily embed these new data into the fabric of our existing knowledge. The rules are also the way The most effective way to reduce the amount of information to remember: how would you do if you had not joined the law which requires that all objects naturally fall to the ground, or that which makes us perceive as a distant object smaller? Find a rule can therefore hold more in less labor to the brain. To stay in the metaphor of the computer memory, "making sense" is both indexed and compress information.

The sense of beauty
Go, while I myself am looking for full effect, I launch into a Xochipithèse a little bold. You've probably experienced a sense of beauty before an incredibly powerful theory, a formula or a perfect fit particularly elegant demonstration. Well let's say so. I express the hypothesis that this sense of aesthetic emerges from the contrast between the brevity of the result and the wealth of information it represents. If the formula S = k log W is engraved on Boltzmann's tomb and that it such a cult dedicated to the famous equation E = mc ², Einstein is without doubt that one is struck by the scope lapidary formulas also immense. The beauty come from the extreme condensation of complexity. The principle of Occam's razor (which prohibits the use of unnecessary assumptions) would be of a nature as aesthetic and philosophical.

Some sentences make me the same effect in all areas of psychology ("Humor is the politeness of despair"), law ("No person may invoke its own wrongdoing," the famous "Nemo auditur ... "), politics (" To govern is to believe ") etc.. A theory or formula becomes beautiful when you can not simplify it (that is to say make it more concise) or better (that is to say to increase its scope). I do not know how this idea applies to the world of Art, where brevity is not a cardinal virtue. Yet we can also consider that a poem is beautiful when it is completely irreducible, when you can not remove or modify any of his words without altering the impression. So I read Paul Valery's aphorism - "Nothing good can not be reduced." In any case, I think there probably is something to dig ...

Next time, I will discuss the biological mechanisms behind this. In the meantime, I leave you to enjoy this great video from Michael Shermer who inspired me on this subject:


Other source:
Nassim Nicholas Thaleb: The Black Swan (Chapter 6)

Related posts
Very valuable self-justification: on the complex relationship between our decisions and motivations.
Prodigies and dizziness analogy - the remix : which is another example of the same phenomenon