The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes

by David Robson

The second sacrifice may be an eye for detail. As the expert brain chunks up the raw information into more meaningful components, and works at recognizing broad underlying patterns, it loses sight of the smaller elements. This change has been recorded in real-time scans of expert radiologists brains: they tend to show greater activity in the areas of the temporal lobe associated with advanced pattern recognition and symbolic meaning, but less activity in regions of the visual cortex that are associated with combing over fine detail.27 The advantage will be the ability to filter out irrelevant information and reduce distraction, but this also means the expert is less likely to consider all the elements of a problem systematically, potentially causing them to miss important nuances that do not easily fit their mental maps.