Blame the Human Brain

Writing in today’s Los Angeles Times, Karen Kaplan talks about a University of California (Davis) study about brain reaction time. Some may remember tennis star, John McEnroe’s legendary temper tantrums when Wimbledon referees would, in his opinion, miss-call balls as “playable” or not, when they fell onto that fuzzy white line area. Maybe John was right, it seems. After all, those balls were traveling at about 100 miles an hour.

“It takes about 100 milliseconds for the image of an object to travel from the retina to the visual cortex and a little longer for the brain to become aware of it. The brain compensates for that delay by anticipating the object's location,” Kaplan noted. “David Whitney, a vision scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, and his colleagues studied 4,457 points from the 2007 Wimbledon championship and zeroed in on cases in which the ball landed on or close to the out-of-bounds line. Using slow-motion replays and Hawk-Eye, the tournament's computerized ball-tracking system, the researchers identified 83 erroneous calls.”

Of the erroneous calls, most of them involved calling balls “out” when they were really “in.” “This is not a problem with referees,” Whitney was quoted as saying. “This is a problem with human visual perception.” Ah yes, problems of visual perception in the acuity skills of the professional judges and referees hired to call the biggest tournaments in sports. The people we hire specifically for their ability to exercise good judgment. Hmmm? I wonder?

Could there be a fundamental perception problem – an analytical blind spot – in the brains of experienced investment bankers or professional economists, maybe because they were born with this defect or perhaps they developed it from years of callous disregard for individuals necessary to restructure a company – not one imminently about to fail unless drastic steps are taken – because you can make so much more money by breaking up the assets, get rid of people and making a pile of cash? Not sure what the causes might be, but I’d like to find out.

Clearly, as the JP Morgan Chase experience illustrates, not all bankers have lost sight of social responsibility or the plight of ordinary human beings caught in an economic maelstrom. Just the experienced investment bankers and professional economists we have running the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The gentlemen’s “predictive” track records, their economic prognostications, well before the huge market crash, were pretty “dead-off.” The results after the crash appear even worse.

I wonder if U.C. Davis would consider some brain studies of a few more professionals who render critical judgments on close calls and narrow (and even very wide) misses? Maybe there are some tests to prevent such “wrongful hirings” ever again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are just days from the most important election in modern history! Vote!