Title: Your Deceptive Mind

Author: Steven Novella

Lecture 1: The necessity of thinking about thinking
Aliens exist?
Metacognition
Thinking about thinking
Unexamined life not worth living
Need to evaluate claims e.g. exercise machine only by 4 mins
How to evaluate these claims?
How we run our civilization?
This course premis: We are our brain
Self aware organ, feel, believe, extrapolate,
our greatest strength, but also defective
Human nature
We are not logical but highly emotional, we follow the pathway
of least resistance
We are not born the master critical thinker just like not a violinist or
a soccer player
We make a lot of error while thinking, thinking plagued, think we
know to be true but are false, memories unreliabile, heuristic, need
sense of how relieable conclusions are
Sceience
Lead us to conclysion that are actually true
Not going after a particular conclusion but the process
Natural effects have natural causes
All conclusion are provisional i.e. all beleifs have error bars,
open to revisions when new data comes in
Conspiracies, False claims, panic with earthquake
One we invest in a conclusion we twist,
We are living in the age of misinformation rumors, urban myths,
friend of a friend story, malicious stories, capitalistic society,
marketing manipulation, deception, fraud, sort through deceptive
claims

We tend to be compelled by stories e.g. powerband - no effect

whatsoever when blinded to the study
Critical thinking
Examine all premise, facts, assumptions
Examine the logic, is it biased
Examine motivations people are good are rationalizing their
beliefs think if this belief is true then what else has to be true
Check with others - you may not know what you dont know
Be humble know your own limits, nobody can everything
Level of uncertainity
e.g. flawed evidence => big foot walking in America, all we have is
hoax e.g. imprints of feet, how reliable are eyewitness accounts,
excusing the evidence e.g. it can disappear at well, thus, look out
for hoaxes
UFO
Why do people believe we are visited by aliens?
Critical thinking
Can be learnt
Emperical test our beleifs by comparing it to the world
Liberates us from mutually exclusive beleifs
It is a defence mechanism from the fraudulent world we live in

Lecture 2: The neuroscience of belief

Sherlock homes
Understood critical thinking but believed in spiritual thinking
Brain
Believing machine
What drives this motivation to believe?
Default mode use emotions to arrive at beleifs then use
reasoning to justify them
Emotions make quick decisions fear, love, disgust, happiness
rather than calculating the risk
Abraham Maslow psychological needs emotional needs
Feel safe, loved, self esteem self actualization
Reward/Punish section of our brain
Our brain wants desire for control
Superstition e.g. athlete wearing a special shirt, not
having control gives us the illusion of seeing patterns in random
events
Simplify and oversimplifying

e.g. simplest diagnosis for complex symptoms (noise)

Also want universe to have meaning - comfort
To make sense all complex things in life, reality stuff
just happens, we want to believe big events must happen big cause
(conspiracy)
Need for self esteem
Because we are social animals, need to develop social
skills causes us to interpret the world in a way that is favorable to
us aka Fundamental Attribution Error good at rationalizing away
inconsistencies to protect our selfesteem
Want to make our own behavior seem consistent with others
e.g. mother and blind daughter (stem cells) convincing herself
that her decision was not a mistake
marketers explot this human need to stay consistent e.g. final
objection, would you say this product is useful
Congnitive dissonance theory: When we have 2 believes, we dont
like this feeling, we tend to rationalize away the way the belief that
we dont want (make up stories)
Resoprocity (jmorality or ustice)
One track there is one person other track 5 person most
people switch the track but not throwing the person on the track
Wearing a cardigan worn by a serial killer sense of disgust or
essence, it is spiritually contaminated, it doesnt feel right to us
We process living things different from non-living things
Supernatual
Need for meaning
Strenghtened by confirmation bias
Children are not good at hiding their emotion because their frontal
lobe is not developed
Adults only good at rationalizing the decisions

Lecture 3: Errors of Perception

Believing is seeing not seeing is believing
How our brain activity is constructive and destructive? E.g. red
panda sighting
You cannot trust anything you see
Our brain constructs reality based on all sensory activity that comes
in

Brain
Has to make assumptions to what is being seen
e.g. optical illusions 3d images from 2d inputs
shades and sizes, constructing images in more than
way,
moon horizon illusions, no one is immune to these
illusions, cube illusion, lighting from above illusion, old/young
woman illusion
Our brain good at connecting the dots
Different senses can affect each other e.g. white wine with red
dye was perceived as red wine
Our brain adjusts the mouth movements depending on what
you hear
Sound and seeing constructed illutiosn because brain knows that
they are meant to be synchronized
As long as the sound and sight are with in 80 ms of each other
(27m), your brain will perceive them to be synchronous
After 27 m it will become asynchronous
Our brain also sees into the future i.e. catching the ball
accounts for 80 ms delay
Seneshesia one sensory information from one area to the
other e.g. hearing smell, or smelling light
We filter out most of the sensory information; intentional blindness
(only middle of thumb), changed blindess changing one person to
another,
Multitasking
Research shows people cant do this
People shift attention from one task to other
Dividing cognitive resources
Thus, eyewitness testimony is erroneous
People think added perceived pieces are reality
Brain fills in the gaps
We have imperfect view of reality