According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, the brain is designed to prevent a person from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly.
"as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to say, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly." (said at 0:00:30)
The speaker attributes this specific thesis to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham. In his seminal book 'Why Don't Students Like School?' (2009), Willingham argues in Chapter 1 that the human brain is not primarily designed for deliberate thinking, but rather for seeing and moving, relying on memory and automatic routines because deliberate thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. While the broad cognitive neuroscience literature recognizes that deliberate thinking and cognitive control are inherently costly, computationally constrained, and avoided when possible (often characterized as cognitive miserliness or the 'law of less work'), modern neuroscience typically conceptualizes this cost in terms of computational capacity constraints, opportunity costs, and aversive cognitive effort rather than raw physiological/metabolic energy savings alone.
In the 1950s, Air Force cockpit design research measuring physical dimensions showed that virtually zero pilots fell within the middle 30 percentiles across even three basic body measurements.
"And this young lieutenant that they commissioned to study it went and started taking body measurements and realized there is no such thing as the average pilot. Like if you took even three measurements on someone, you know, arm length, thigh circumference, and height, it was like 3% of people who would even be in the middle 30 percentiles just with those three measures. So, in designing this cockpit for the average pilot, they had actually designed it for no one." (said at 0:59:43)
Gilbert S. Daniels conducted a famous 1952 study for the U.S. Air Force ('The "Average Man"?', WADC Technical Report 52-279) evaluating 4,063 military personnel across 10 physical dimensions. Daniels defined the 'average' range as the middle 30% of the distribution (within ±0.30 standard deviations of the mean) for each dimension. When evaluating across multiple traits sequentially, Daniels found that roughly 3.5% of men were within the middle 30% on just the first 3 traits (stature, chest circumference, and sleeve length), less than 2% across 4 traits, and 0 out of 4,063 men fell within the average range across all 10 dimensions. While the speaker's numbers and core takeaway ('no such thing as the average pilot') accurately reflect Daniels' findings regarding 3 and 10 dimensions, the claim slightly mixes the phrasing ('virtually zero' across 3 traits vs. exactly 0 across 10 traits, though stating ~3% for 3 traits in speech).
The design concept of universal design originated from the disability rights movement in the 1960s.
"the idea of universal design, it came out of the disability rights movement in 1960s. But the idea was that if you design for the most constrained users—let's say those are people who are young or old or big or small or pets, whatever, or have disabilities—you'll often be identifying user problems that are just extreme versions of problems that many more users have." (said at 0:56:33)
The core premise is historically and conceptually grounded: the universal design philosophy grew out of the disability rights and accessible design movements to solve challenges for people with disabilities in ways that broadly benefit all users. However, while the barrier-free design and disability civil rights movements originated in the 1960s, the specific term and formal framework of "universal design" emerged later (coined in the 1980s by architect Ronald Mace and developing through the 1970s–1990s) to distinguish 'design for all' from separate or specialized accommodations.
- context: Conceptual Challenges Between Universal Design and Disability in Relation to the Body, Imp… (METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 2011) · cited 26x in the literature
"Universal Design (UD), which is grounded politically and sociologically in the long historic struggle of the anti-discrimination and disability rights movements in the United States that occurred between 1970's and 1990's and the market-oriented necessities of an aging society, has been defined as 'design for all' people to the greatest extent possible, differentiating it from earlier concepts of adaptable, specialised or accessible design." (abstract, background, passage verified)
openalexfull study (doi) - supports: Co-Designing with Extreme Users: A Framework for User Participation in Design Processes (Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 2023) · cited 23x in the literature
"The demand for user participation in design processes is increasing, and there is a need to formulate guidance on how to involve disabled users and their representative organisations. Their participation contributes an extreme user perspective to the design process." (abstract, background, passage verified)
openalexfull study (doi)