I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

One of the stories I love is when A&W Restaurant was trying to take on McDonald's, the quarter

pounder. So they came up with a hamburger that was bigger and was cheaper and they figured

what would be better than that and when they released it on the market it was a colossal

failure. And after the fact they did a market analysis and they realized that their hamburger

which was a third of a pound. People thought it was less meat. Three is less than four so

I'm not going to pay more money for a third when I could buy a fourth.

That's James Zimmering. His new book, Partial Truths, Entertainingly Explores How Easily

We Can Be Confused, Even Misled by Fractions. And how it's almost always best not to jump

to conclusions. Which is a lesson I failed to learn as an 11 year old when I saw what

I thought was a dead rattlesnake and poked it with a stick. This should be a really

interesting conversation because I get from your book that as clever as we humans think

we are so much more rational and thoughtful than all the other animals. We have a common

way of thinking that leads us to many errors. A fast stab at things without getting all

the data. Yeah, you know, the human brain is bombarded with information constantly from

all quarters from our senses. And if we tried to process it all, if we tried to drink

the world whole, we would just be a quivering ball of gray matter. We couldn't even take

our first step. So our minds filter information and our reasoning takes shortcuts. And usually

it does pretty well. Usually we don't step in front of cars and leap off buildings.

But it does get things wrong and sometimes tragically. It sounds like you're saying we probably

evolved in a way where it was useful to us, usually keeping us alive to make snap decisions

about whether this animal is going to attack us or be friendly. But now we're in a much

...