Risk, probability, and how our brains are easily misled

The World Science Festival's panel on Probability and Risk started out in an unusual manner: MIT's Josh Tennenbaum strode onto a stage and flipped a coin five times, claiming he was psychically broadcasting each result to the audience. The audience dutifully wrote down the results they thought he had seen on note cards, and handed them in when the experiment was over. Towards the end of the program, he announced there were low odds that even one person in the audience had guessed the right order of results. When he announced them, however, about a dozen people raised their hands, saying that was what they had written down. viaRisk, probability, and how our brains are easily misled.