Your Mind is a Liar

 A few years ago I read Stephen Novella’s The Skeptic Guide to the Universe. Novella is an academic neurologist at Yale whose Wikipedia entry is a worthwhile read itself. His book is a compendium of how our brains are hard-wired to delude us as we experience the world. It consists of short chapters on a myriad of cognitive biases that all of us possess.

A good example is pareidolia, defined as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern”. This is why we see such things as the man on the moon or faces on Mars, as this image captured by the Viking I spacecraft in 1976 as it flew past Mars:

Our ancestors evolved as a vulnerable species on the savannas of Africa where it was better to alert to potential dangers rather than to fail to alert and become a meal. I sometimes amuse myself by peering closely at the marble countertops in our apartment and “seeing” a face in miniature peering back at me. Of course, this is all randomness perceived by the brain as something real. 

Ben Yagoda wrote a great article in The Atlantic in September 2018 entitled Your Lying Brain: The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain. I still recommend Novella’s book but this is a shorter read which will put you in the frame of seeing how our brains deceive us to our great disadvantage in a world unlike the world in which they evolved. It includes a link to another fun Wikipedia article that lists the many biases that exist. Suffice it to say the list (with many links to other references) is quite long and in some ways depressing; it includes the G.I. Joe fallacy which is the tendency to think that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it. 

Humans of course are not simply biological creatures because as we have evolved so has our culture. As Julie Beck wrote in her article This Article Won’t Change your Mind, we are social beings, and accepting the group we belong to matters more than anything else. I guess in some ways this is the brain division between the more primitive parts of the brain (the fast-thinking part per Daniel Kahneman) and the slower-thinking frontal lobes. This tribal division has innate problems, of course, as we see in the United States today where we have political divisions that threaten our country. Of course, we are not alone in the world. Recognizing the numerous fallacies inherent in human thinking is a start. There is a lot more to do to dig out from under these biases as the G.I. Joe fallacy shows. We might do well in our country to begin by recognizing the truth in the Declaration of Independence that all Men (and Women) are created Equal. We are all humans. We also are all Americans. We all bleed red.