We live in a vast universe that spans enormous scapes of time and space. But humans evolved to understand information in relatable quantities at a human scale. We conceive landscapes mostly in chunks we can easily walk, connected loosely by strands of distances we can comfortably drive. We live in the now, but relate to the future in terms of a past that we dimly remember. We can make plans just within a very narrow scope of time — days, perhaps weeks. The future is always elusive and vague. We don’t comprehend spans of time outside of our experience. The span of a million years, ten million, a hundred million, or even just a thousand are concepts which we can intellectualize about but can’t really feel. Even in our interactions as members of a species, we can each just maintain a web of a few dozen relationships. Space, time, and human interactions are limited for us.

We don’t process and, thus, don’t truly comprehend, information of large or very small scales that are beyond our direct experience. It’s not who we are as humans. This has all sorts of ramifications beyond the obvious. It’s why it’s easy for us to fall for logic traps that equate our family budget, for example, with that of a country. And it’s one of the reasons we need lawyers and politicians who are trained to think about the complexities of the system of laws that we’ve enacted; we are not nimble at navigating the restrictions we have placed on ourself to help us live in a world far larger and more complex than we are capable of truly comprehending as individuals.

There is a discipline called “human scaled design.” In essence, it’s about creating functionality in terms that make sense to most people, making things comfortable and intuitive. When presenting information using this approach, it often works — we weigh information based on our own notions of common sense. But sometimes this presentation approach yields very strange results as, for an example, when the presenter struggles to find relatable units of measurement. I’ve collected a few examples: measuring asteroids in units of giraffes, sinkholes in washing machines, poop loads in billiard balls, and personal space in deer body lengths! I’ve seen lots of Empire State Buildings and whales used for this purpose, but the giraffe measure is quite persistent; for a great example of a good use of the giraffe measure, see this XKCD article on how high humans can throw something. But the truth is that humans are bad at estimating even human scale units of measure.

Human limitations give rise to lots of human mistakes. We frequently misremember what we’ve observed. We mix in our emotions with our senses. If we’re frightened, we see things as bigger, darker, and more threatening than they really were. And we change a recollection as we relive our memory of it. It’s one reason why humans make such bad eye witnesses.

But this human fallability and our tendency to reduce complexity to terms we can easily relate to creates wonderful situational comedy, full of misunderstandings — a gold mine for writers. It makes for pretty good drama, too. Knowing how susceptible we all are to such errors makes reading such stories more fun. Here’s to reading about human limitations in time, space, and relationships!

Here’s a great example: