Generalise or Individualise?
A Sleepless Night, a Chair, and a Lesson on the Brain
It was one of those sleepless nights. No matter how hard I tried, sleep wouldn’t come. So instead of lying in bed, tossing and turning, I decided to get up and walk around the room, at least I’d clock a few extra steps and burn off some restless energy.
With the lights off, I paced the room, lost in thought. That’s when something unexpected happened.
The Moment That Sparked It All
In the middle of my dark, absent-minded pacing, I suddenly bumped into something with my leg. Instinctively, I thought I’d knocked over a child. I bent down quickly; only to realise, with a jolt, that I was alone in the room. In fact, I was alone in the house.
It was just a chair.
The moment passed in under a second, but it unleashed a cascade of reflection that lingered long after.
Where Did That Thought Even Come From?
Why did my brain immediately jump to the idea that I’d hit a child?
As I probed my own reaction, a memory surfaced; one I hadn’t thought about in years. When I was around 13 or 14, I was visiting a temple. Distracted and deep in thought, I accidentally bumped into a small child. The child hit my knee, fell, and began crying.
That forgotten moment, stored somewhere deep in my subconscious, had been instantly retrieved and replayed in this new, unrelated situation; simply because the physical sensation was similar.
What amazed me was not just the memory itself, but the speed at which my brain pulled it up. It took me minutes to write this down, but the realisation unfolded in under a couple of seconds.
But Why Didn’t My Brain Know Better?
As I marvelled at this, a new question hit me: if my brain is so brilliant, why didn’t it also remember that I am alone, and that no one has been around me?
I recalled something from a Stanford lecture by Prof. Robert Sapolsky, Introduction to Human Behavioural Biology. He explains that our brain deals with massive amounts of information every day by creating categories and shortcuts AND it’s a survival feature, not a flaw.
As an engineer and former coder, this resonated deeply. In large databases, filters and categories are key to speeding up searches. For example, if you’re looking up one person’s academic record in a country of 1.45 billion, you don’t search every record. You narrow by gender, age, location etc; each filter shrinking the pool and making the search faster.
Our brain does something similar. It categorizes.
The Brain: The Ultimate Memory System
Old computers, with terabytes of storage, can take seconds or even minutes to run large searches. But my brain? It matched a physical input (bumping my knee) to a 13-year-old memory, inferred the context, and even suggested a behavioural response (“look down - is there a child?”) — all in under a second.
That’s the astonishing power of categorization. But here’s the catch: fast doesn’t always mean accurate.
The Deeper Lesson
This experience reminded me that the brain’s snap judgments aren’t always right. Acting on instinct can sometimes be helpful, but sometimes, it can lead us astray, especially when the categories we rely on no longer fit the present reality.
The key is awareness. If we can pause, examine the current situation, and ask: Is this reaction truly helpful here? - we can avoid falling into the trap of automatic, biased thinking.
A Wake-Up Call From the Hiring Room
I saw the same pattern show up when I was hiring for my company a couple of years back.
Before interviews, I realized I was already forming unconscious categories about candidates. If someone fit into my mental “good” category, I’d overlook mistakes. If someone made a small slip, I sometimes unfairly derailed the interview.
The moment I became aware of this bias, I knew I needed to step back and reassess how I was making decisions.
Why I’m Sharing This
This post is a message to myself, and maybe to you, too.
Our brains are incredible, but they’re not infallible. They take shortcuts, generalize, and create categories to help us navigate a complex world. But those shortcuts can also create biases, misjudgments, and missed opportunities.
If we want to become more thoughtful & open-minded people as leaders, colleagues, friends, or simply as humans; we need to challenge our own instant reactions.
Next time you’re faced with a decision, pause.
Ask yourself;
Am I acting on the situation in front of me, or on a category my brain pulled from the past?
That small moment of reflection might just help us all become better, kinder, and more self-aware.