You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

When a stimulus in the past affects the way you

behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on, it is called priming. Every perception, no matter if you consciously notice, sets off a chain of related ideas in your neural network.

You construct reality from minute to minute with memories and emotions orbiting your sensations and cognition; together they form a collage of consciousness that exists only in your skull.

In addition, your brain hates ambiguity and is willing to take shortcuts to remove it from any situation. If there is nothing else to go on, you will use what is available. When pattern recognition fails, you create patterns of your own.

Thanks to this, if a situation is familiar you can fall back on intuition. However, if the situation is novel, you will have to boot up your conscious mind.

Once you know priming is a fact of life, you start to understand the power and resilience of rituals and rites of passage, norms and ideologies. Systems designed to prime persist because they work. Starting tomorrow, maybe with just a smile and a thank-you, you can affect the way others feel—hopefully for the best.

Whatever surrounds the blind spot is copied and pasted into the hole in an automatic imaginary bit of visual hocus-pocus.

You do this so much and so often that you can’t be sure how much of what you consider to be the honest truth about your past is accurate.

You are a confabulatory creature by nature. You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes to the effects in your life, and you make them up without realizing it when you don’t know the answers.

You are a story you tell yourself.

Those with Cotard’s syndrome believe they have died.

The flow of consciousness is one thing; the recollection of its course is another, yet you usually see them as the same. This is one of the oldest concepts in psychology and philosophy—phenomenology.

qualia,

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter.

you want to be right about how you see the world, so you seek out information that confirms your beliefs and avoid contradictory evidence and opinions.

In science, you move closer to the truth by seeking evidence to the contrary. Perhaps the same method should inform your opinions as well.

When you learn things you wish you had known all along, you go ahead and assume you did know them.

You tend to believe anecdotes and individual sensational news stories are more representative of the big picture than they are.

The availability heuristic shows you make decisions and think thoughts based on the information you have at hand, while ignoring all the other information that might be out there.

Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

To accept that things like residential cancer clusters are often just coincidence is deeply unsatisfying. The powerlessness, the feeling you are defenseless to the whims of chance, can be assuaged by singling out an antagonist. Sometimes you need a bad guy, and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is one way you can create one.

You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It’s just how the math works out.

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences.

This is sometimes called present bias—being unable to grasp that what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them.

The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them.

Thinking about thinking—this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial: Want never goes away. Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don’t have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

you have a tendency to interpret strange and alarming situations as if they were just part of business as usual.

Normalcy bias is stalling during a crisis and pretending everything will continue to be as fine and predictable as it was before. Those who defeat it act when others don’t.

tonic immobility.

thanatosis.

Ripley calls this moment when you freeze “reflexive incredulity.”

According to Wilson, when you are faced with a decision in which you are forced to think about your rationale, you start to turn the volume in your emotional brain down and the volume in your logical brain up.

Sometimes, introspection is simply counterproductive.

It also makes things like focus groups and market analysis seem less about the intrinsic quality of the things being judged and more about what the people doing the judging find to be plausible explanations of their own feelings. When you ask people why they do or do not like things, they must then translate something from a deep, emotional, primal part of their psyche into the language of the higher, logical, rational world of words and sentences and paragraphs.

Believing you understand your motivations and desires, your likes and dislikes, is called the introspection illusion.

The old adage “I’ll believe it when I see it” is the availability heuristic at work.