Phil Fernbach

That's a really wonderful question.

And I think it gets to what cognition is really all about and what it's for.

Why did we evolve the ability to think?

We evolved the ability to think so that we can act more adaptively in our environments.

And storing a ton of detailed information isn't necessarily that useful because in the world that we live in, we're faced with very different situations that might have some deep structure in common across different situations, but the details are often different.

So what we really need to be able to do is extract the more fundamental principles that allow us to behave adaptively in new environments.

And retaining all of that detailed information might not necessarily help us.

I think that's right.

You know, that's just one area of life.

And if you think about trying to maintain a giant database of complex information about every area of your life, it quickly becomes really intractable.

And that's why human society has experts in different domains because one individual can't possibly master everything.

That would be futile.

That's exactly right.

So we live in what we call communities of knowledge where the expertise is distributed across the community.

And what we found in our studies is that just by virtue of participating in that community of knowledge, we come to feel that we understand things that are actually understood by others in our community.

You know, a good example of this is politics.

If you think about whatever the complex issue of the day is, when we hear people talking about it, we sort of nod along as if we ourselves understand.

And that process of nodding along with our community members and knowing that the information is out there in other people's minds sort of gives us a little bit of an inflated feeling that we ourselves understand.

I think that's right.

The fact that we have all of human knowledge in our pockets, it's the most amazing community of knowledge that's ever existed on planet Earth.