Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success (The Scott Adams Success Series)

by Scott Adams

Fear of embarrassment is the main reason people don’t like to admit they are wrong. And that’s what causes cognitive dissonance. When you discover you were wrong about something important, your brain fixes that for you by hallucinating you were right all along—for reasons that will sound to others like word salad. But imagine if you were never embarrassed in life, about anything. If you were wrong about something, you would simply say so and never fret about it again. If your friends mocked you for being wrong, you would join in the fun. The opposite would happen if you were susceptible to shame and embarrassment. In that case, your brain might insta-generate a hallucination that you were right all along, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, if you imagined you were a subject matter expert and some non-expert annihilated your opinion in an undeniable way, that would trigger a hallucination. You might hallucinate that your critic is a foreign spy and dismiss them as a troublemaker. You might hallucinate that you “keep answering the question” while never doing anything of the sort. A hallucination can take any form, from a false memory to the false belief that the words you’re saying make sense.