As we’ve emphasized before, our neuropreferences don’t lock our fates. People across the spectrum are often highly successful at the same tasks. We’re just successful differently.
Tradition suggests the best poker players succeed using the combination of the associative processor and the symbolic processor. These players operate in a highly intuitive way, carefully reading “tells”: the nonverbal physical cues all of us naturally express whether we mean to not. Amarillo Slim described this strategy earlier. Players using this strategy consciously and unconsciously process the responses of the players around them as their expressed in the current moment, and the associative process almost instantaneously embeds these observations in a context that informs the betting position. People learning to master poker in this tradition try to match the physical response of the opponent with opponent’s level of confidence in the bet.
At the same time, physicists, it appears, are especially good poker players. They’re organized to learn the rules of whatever game is in play and they’re trained in probability theory so don’t get fooled into betting against the odds.
Physics progresses in large part though thinking that looks for rules and patterns of operation: in short, the sequential process.
What makes physicists especially competent players, however, is they don’t just intuit another players behavior from tells. Physicists naturally begin to study the behaviorial patterns of each player over time and the statistical pattern to their play. They assess other players understanding of probability theory, the player’s level of risk aversiveness, the pattern of attention and inattention, and integrate those factors into the conventional set of rules.
In short, to a physicist, each fellow player introduces a subset of rules into the larger rule set, and all the players interacting together produce another subset of rules. This allows a probability theory that enlarges the standard probabilities.
While most of us are just playing the standard game, physicists are responding to the deeper subsets of probabilities that are specific to this game and this group of players. This deeper understanding allows them to make accurate predictions of successful plays.
This reliance on overall probability means they often resist the temptation to follow intuition on a specific bet even if they lose that one, and, instead, rely on the overall probability to carry them to success over the long term.
As humans, the ability to choose a statistical probability over salient data at the moment is particularly difficulty. Our brains are designed to recognize patterns – even when patterns don’t exist. The classic example is the coin flip. We know there is a 50-50 chance of the flip beingheads or tails. However, when we do a series of flips and, say, three heads appear in a row, our brains are organized to see the next flip as being more likely to emerge tails than heads. We can get people to bet money it will be so.
In reality, however, the coin has no memory of the last flip. Nothing has changed about the coin to make tails more likely than heads. The next flip remains equally likely to be heads or tails.
This ability to resist this intuition depends on the ability to resist symbolic processing. The associative processor wants to predict the future based on visible patterns. The symbolic processor interprets meaning residing in objects or events. The visible pattern says tails is the next most likely element in the pattern. The symbolic processor interprets the coin as being the agent of change.
Resistance isn’t futile, but it’s really hard. Our brains are doing what they are designed to do. Our brains aren’t organized to readily accept probability theory.
It’s hard for us see the invisible pattern which says any next element is random, the pattern only emerges over time. And it’s hard for us not to invest objects with symbolic meaning. We wear wedding rings. Store owners frame the first dollar they make.
Probability theory requires the ability, by training or neuropreference, to do two hard tasks at the same time: quiet the associative processor and quiet the symbolic processor.
All of us can learn to do this. Those of us with a neuropreference for sequential processing and a lowered neuropreference for symbolic processing have brains more naturally organized to quiet the visible patterns so the invisible patterns can become apparent. Those of us with a high preference for both associative and symbolic processing have a much harder time quieting or filtering the data gathered and made salient by those system