Whether kluges outnumber perfections or perfections outnumber kluges, kluges tell us two things that perfections can’t. First, they can give special insight into our evolutionary history; when we see perfection, we often can’t tell which of many converging factors might have yielded an ideal solution; often it is only by seeing where things went wrong that we can tell how things were built in the first place. Perfection, at least in principle, could be the product of an omniscient, omnipotent designer; imperfections not only challenge that idea but also offer specific forensic clues, a unique opportunity to reconstruct the past and to better understand human nature. As the late Stephen Jay Gould noted, imperfections, “remnants of the past that don’t make sense in present terms — the useless, the odd, the peculiar, the incongruous — are the signs of history.”
And second, kluges can give us clues into how we can improve ourselves. Whether we are 80 percent perfect or 20 percent perfect (numbers that are really meaningless, since it all depends on how you count), humans do show room for improvement, and kluges can help lead the way. By taking an honest look in the mirror, in recognizing our limitations as well as our strengths, we have a chance to make the most of the noble but imperfect minds we did evolve.
2. MEMORY
Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you — and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
MEMORY IS, I BELIEVE, the mother of all kluges, the single factor most responsible for human cognitive idiosyncrasy.
Our memory is both spectacular and a constant source of disappointment: we can recognize photos from our high school yearbooks decades later — yet find it impossible to remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. Our memory is also prone to distortion, conflation, and simple failure. We can know a word but not be able to remember it when we need it (think of a word that starts with a, meaning “a counting machine with beads”),[5] or we can learn something valuable (say, how to remove tomato sauce stains) and promptly forget it. The average high school student spends four years memorizing dates, names, and places, drill after drill, and yet a significant number of teenagers can’t even identify the century in which World War I took place.
I’m one to talk. In my life, I have lost my house keys, my glasses, my cell phone, and even a passport. I’ve forgotten where I parked, left the house without remembering my keys, and on a particularly sad day, left a leather jacket (containing a second cell phone) on a park bench. My mother once spent an hour looking for her car in the garage at an unfamiliar airport. A recent Newsweek article claims that people typically spend 55 minutes a day “looking for things they know they own but can’t find.”
Memory can fail people even when their lives are at stake. Skydivers have been known to forget to pull the ripcord to open their parachute (accounting, by one estimate, for approximately 6 percent of skydiving deaths), scuba divers have forgotten to check their oxygen level, and more than a few parents have inadvertently left their babies in locked cars. Pilots have long known that there’s only one way to fly: with a checklist, relying on a clipboard to do what human memory can’t, which is to keep straight the things that we have do over and over again. (Are the flaps down? Did I check the fuel gauge? Or was that last time?) Without a checklist, it’s easy to forget not just the answers but also the questions.
Why, if evolution is usually so good at making things work well, is our memory so hit-or-miss?
The question becomes especially pointed when we compare the fragility of our memory with the robustness of the memory in the average computer. Whereas my Mac can store (and retrieve) my complete address book, the locations of all the countries in Africa, the complete text of every email message I ever sent, and all the photographs I’ve taken since late 1999 (when I got my first digital camera), not to mention the first 3,000 digits of pi, all in perfect detail, I still struggle with the countries in Africa and can scarcely even remember whom I last emailed, let alone exactly what I said. And I never got past the first ten digits of pi (3.1415926535) — even though I was just the sort of nerd who’d try to memorize more.[6]
Human memory for photographic detail is no better; we can recognize the main elements of a photo we’ve seen before, but studies show that people often don’t notice small or even fairly large changes in the background.[7] And I for one could never ever recall the details of a photograph, no matter how long I sat and stared at it beforehand. I can still remember the handful of phone numbers I memorized as a child, when I had loads of free time, but it took me almost a year to learn my wife’s cell phone number by heart.
Worse, once we do manage to encode a memory, it’s often difficult to revise it. Take, for instance, the trouble I have with the name of my dear colleague Rachel. Five years after she got divorced and reverted to her maiden name (Rachel K.), I still sometimes stumble and refer to her by her former married name (Rachel C.) because the earlier habit is so strong. Whereas computer memory is precise, human memory is in many ways a recalcitrant mess.
Computer memory works well because programmers organize information into what amounts to a giant map: each item is assigned a specific location, or “address,” in the computer’s databanks. With this system, which I will call “postal-code memory,” when a computer is prompted to retrieve a particular memory, it simply goes to the relevant address. (A 64-megabyte memory card holds roughly 64 million such addresses, each containing a single “word” made up of a set of eight binary digits.)
Postal-code memory is as powerful as it is simple; used properly, it allows computers to store virtually any information with near-perfect reliability; it also allows a programmer to readily change any memory; no referring to Rachel K. as Rachel C. once she’s changed her name. It’s no exaggeration to say that postal-code memory is a key component of virtually every modern computer.
But not, alas, in humans. Having postal-code memory would have been terrifically useful for us, but evolution never discovered the right part of the mountain range. We humans rarely — if ever — know precisely where a piece of information is stored (beyond the extremely vague “somewhere inside the brain”), and our memory evolved according to an entirely different logic.
In lieu of postal-code memory we wound up with what I’ll call “contextual memory”: we pull things out of our memory by using context, or clues, that hints at what we are looking for. It’s as if we say to ourselves, every time we need a particular fact, “Urn, hello, brain, sorry to bother you, but I need a memory that’s about the War of 1812. Got anything for me?” Often, our brain obliges, quickly and accurately yielding precisely the information we want. For instance, if I ask you to name the director who made the movies E.T. and Schindler’s List, you might well come up with the answer within milliseconds — even though you may not have the foggiest idea where in your brain that information was stored.[8] In general, we pull what we need from memory by using various clues, and when things go well, the detail we need just “pops” into our mind. In this respect, accessing a memory is a bit like breathing — most of it comes naturally.
6
Which is not to say that no human being could do better. A number of people, far more dedicated to the cause than I ever was, have managed to learn thousands, even tens of thousands, of digits. But it takes
7
Google for “change blindness” if you’ve never seen a demonstration; if you haven’t seen Derren Brown’s “person swap” video on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFaY3YcMgiT), you’re missing something special.