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For making better bets,
brains depend on Bayes
Life is all about playing the odds.
Making choices is seldom an exact
science. Usually you can’t compute
all the possible ramifications of
deciding on one course of action or
another. You have to guess which is
best. It boils down to assessing the
likelihood of various possible outcomes
for a given decision, weighing current evidence in the light
of previous experience.
Fortunately, brains are pretty good at rendering such
probabilistic judgments. That’s because brains are Bayesian.
Bayesianism is not a disease named for the doctor who
first diagnosed it, but a mathematical philosophy named
for the English clergyman who first articulated it. The Rev.
Thomas Bayes, in a paper published in 1764 (three years
after he died), described mathematical methods for combining expectations from experience with new data to compute
a probability. While widely accepted for a while, the Bayes
approach was held in disrepute for much of the 20th century,
thanks to the superior PR apparatus of a competing statistics
philosophy known as frequentism.
Nowadays Bayesian statistics is enjoying a resurgence in
popularity, thanks to its superiority in actually doing statistics.
(If you’re a subscriber to Science News, you can read more
about that in my column, available at http://bit.ly/SNBayesian,
from the September 26 issue of Science News Prime.) But in
a sense, Bayesian statistics has been the most popular form
of influential reasoning all along, extending back long before
Bayes was born. As Laura Sanders reports on Page 18, the
human brain itself seems to observe the Bayesian prescription for mixing experience with new evidence to produce
accurate guesses about probabilities. Scientists have suggested that brains employ Bayesian methods in all sorts of
tasks, from performing visual searches to solving simple
math problems.
It may very well be that the process of science itself —
the gathering of experiences about the world leading to
explanations about how it works — exploits cognitive capaci-ties that are built on Bayesian principles (even for scientists
who are devotees of frequentism). Bayesian inference seems
to be the best way to cope with the real world in real time.
Evolution’s choice of Bayesianism as the best way to bet
suggests that today’s textbook science ought to embrace it
more enthusiastically. — Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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