I have been meaning to get hold of a copy of Gary Marcus’s “Kludge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind” ever since I read about it in Neuroanthropology. I may be wrong, but I suspect that there may be some strong connections to to some of ideas I have been exploring in purposive drift.
In the meantime (again thanks to Neuroanthropology) here is Marcus’s take on why we often find ourselves doing something different (and often seemingly stupid) from what we planned:
“In the mental machinery that governs our everyday decisions, kluges abound. Take, for example, the scenario described in the beginning of the essay — the fellow who forgets his errand on the way home. His problem is clearly not in finding his way to the grocery store — it’s in remembering to go in the first place.
The problem is that evolution failed to realize that remembering goals is not like recognizing objects. When your brain sees a lion, the thing to do is to decide, lickety-split, to get out of the way. Run first; ask questions later. We’re programmed for just that kind of split-second decision; just about every creature on the planet is built such that it can identify things like predators and prey very rapidly. We’re not programmed to remember precise episodes from the past. Why not? Because remembering the exact date on which you last saw a lion is not particularly helpful when you’re trying to get out of the way.
Alas, evolution didn’t have the foresight to realize that different kinds of tasks require different kinds of memory, and it used the same basic sort of memory for everything, not just for remembering what lions and tigers look like (in which general tendencies suffice) but also for cases — like tracking our goals — where a bit more precision would have been helpful. As a result, trying to remember what to do next can be a little like trying to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday: There are too many breakfasts and too many yesterdays for our biological memories to keep track of.”