Looking at things this way deals with two things that have always bugged the old model.One is sensitivity to timescale.The other is computational tractability.The timescale problem is that cause and effect may be separated by milliseconds (switching on a light bulb and experiencing illumination), minutes (having a drink and feeling tipsy) or even hours (eating something bad and getting food poisoning).Looking backward, Dr.Namboodiri explains, permits investigation of an arbitrarily long list of possible causes.Looking forward, without always knowing in advance how far to look, is much trickier.This leads to the second problem.Sensory experience is rich, and everything therein could potentially predict an outcome.Making predictions based on every single possible cue would be somewhere between difficult and impossible.It is far simpler, when a meaningful event happens, to look backwards through other potentially meaningful events for a cause.In practice, however, it is hard to distinguish experimentally between the two models.And that is especially true if you do not even bother to look - which, until now, people have not.Dr. Jeong and Dr. Namboodiri have done so.They devised and conducted 11 experiments involving mice, buzzers and drops of sugar solution that were designed specifically for the purpose.
