This year’s co-winner of the Nobel Economics Prize, Elinor Ostrum works on a topic familiar to many Institute social complexity scientists: the tragedy of the commons. While this is a fascinating issue from the standpoint of human social behavior, I wonder to what extent our brain’s own cognitive resources (taken as a whole) are subject to something similar as we shift our attention from one thing to another. Isn’t cognitive overload essentially a tragedy of the neural commons? And is the entire cognitive attentional machinery a means of trying to avoid tragedy of the neural commons?
I keep thinking back to the terrible fix that the pilots of Air France Flight 447 must have been in as they entered an area of extreme thunderstorm activity with multiple system failure warnings, degrading of the jet’s fly-by-wire system into a “safe” mode, and whatever else cropped up in the deadly minutes before disaster. The cockpit is potentially always a place for tragedy of the neural commons.
Discoverers and Discoveries 