I mentioned this on the air-last night, but for those of you that don't catch our show you need to hear this one. A poster here on vpFREE recommended I listen to a show on Stochasticity by Radio Lab a couple of months ago. I just heard it and was blow away by several orders of magnitude.
http://www.radiolab.org/2009/jun/15/
I can't say this strongly enough: If you are a sentient oxygen breathing carbon based life form you need to hear this.
In the show they cover attention bias and our tendency to overrate improbable events. They tackle the sports myth of the hot hand. There's a discussion of the effects of dopamine in the brain and how it influences pattern recognition and gambling addiction. Interviewed was a Parkinson's disease sufferer that developed a gambling problem when prescribed a particular medication. The story is heart warming/breaking. They even go into how real randomness differs from perceived randomness and how our our own biological systems are far more chaotic than scientists ever imagined.
It's one hour long and just amazing.
Just take my word for it and give it a listen.
Optionally, don't take my word for it and listen to it yourself.
~FK
