In his Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things, Laurence Gonzales writes that the key to surviving in a world filled with unknowns is keeping a constant posture of “curiosity, awareness, and attention.” But, says Gonzales, we are not naturally inclined toward these characteristics. Partly, says Gonzales, our brains work this way. We take experiences from our past and learn lessons—often the wrong lessons—from them. Specifically, we expect that whatever has been in the past will be the same in the future. That leads us to ignore “real information coming to us from our environment.”
