“It’s Binary, My Dear Watson.”

Key points

The human brain is both a binary and analog processing machine.

People often get caught in binary traps that have a bearing on their emotional well-being.

One example of a binary trap is mistaking a preference for a necessity.

Sherlock Holmes might as well have said, “It’s binary, my dear Watson,” instead of “It’s elementary.” We are immersed in a world of dichotomies comprising binary categories, such as true or false, real or fake, night or day, open or closed, win or lose, in or out, up or down, and the list goes on and on. Even digital technologies run on binary combinations of 0s and 1s. This includes AI chatbots, which harness the intellectual capital of seemingly countless strings of 0s and 1s.

Binary processing is not limited to machines. The human brain functions