Neuroscience and Critical Thinking: Understand the Hidden Pathways of Your Thought Patterns- Improve Your Memory, Make Rational Decisions, Tune Down Emotional ... Expectations (The critical thinker Book 3)

by Albert Rutherford

Examining your thoughts like they're a scientific subject will help you find what science always works toward: the truth, rather than what we want to be the truth.[ii]

In 2007, Richard Wiseman conducted an experiment called "Total Recall" to test exactly that—how much humans have the ability to remember. He did this by showing two volunteers (both female) 10000 images in two days, then testing them to see how many of the images they could remember. This type of experiment was not new; Lionel Standing first conducted this memory test in the early 1970s in Canada, where he found that his subjects could remember 70% of the images—or 7000 of the things they'd seen for only seconds at a time over just a couple of days! The problem with this study was that it was hard to replicate. Wiseman was the first to try. Wiseman found that the subjects were, on average, better able to remember images if there were fewer of them, but he still found an amazing remembrance rate—on average, 98 percent for 612 images and 65 percent for 10,000 images.

Fallacies are the defense mechanism the brain uses when it wants to feel right and validated in its conclusions.

It is easy to spot a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy because they will rarely have any sort of credible evidence to support them. There might be correlation present, but this is not the same as causation. To determine causation, all confounding factors have to be removed—environmental, social, circumstantial—and an experiment has to be carefully conducted. This is why the scientific method is so important;

There is a whole industry built on exploiting people's brain chemistry, cognition, and biases to get them to buy things: marketing. This entire field developed around the idea that there are specific strategies that will get people to spend money on things they don't necessarily need.

Hofstadter believed that conspiracies were a type of psychopathology, almost like a mental illness that caused paranoid delusions.

example, people with mental illnesses like schizophrenia have less-rigorous reality testing than people without the illness, because their brain chemistry diminishes their ability to perceive and process the reality people without the illness recognize. Therefore, people with hallucinatory or delusionally patterned mental illnesses tend to be more susceptible to conspiracy theories,

Confirmation bias, for example, is a big part of conspiratorial thinking, because it is the brain's tendency to cherry-pick the evidence that supports a foregone conclusion.

Conspiracy theories often develop into "closed belief systems," or ones that can't be changed based on evidence and arguments that refute them. This is because their beliefs and cognitive processes evolve to defend their ideas from outside dissent instead of being receptive to other information. Anything that would contradict their beliefs is dismissed as untrue or twisted into further evidence of the beliefs themselves being true;

Late in Woodrow Wilson's second term, there were rumors that the President had suffered a stroke that prevented him from governing, so the First Lady took care of most official business. Edith Wilson, his young wife, did indeed take care of most of his business for several months after he had a stroke, but the government kept the whole thing quiet out of fear of political instability. Although Edith always said that she had only acted as a sort of secretary, most historians agree that she was essentially acting as President by reviewing state matters.

People theorized that in the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. government was stealing dead bodies to do testing on the effects of nuclear fallout. This really did happen—in an operation called Project SUNSHINE, government agents collected the body parts of dead children and infants from around the world for testing, without notifying or asking permission from their families.

A Canadian conspiracy theory stated that their government was so concerned about gay people "infiltrating" government bureaucracy that they developed an actual "gaydar" test. This is true—the government hired a scientist in the 1960s to develop a machine that tested whether potential civil, military, or police employees' pupils widened when they viewed homoerotic imagery. The Canadian government fired or refused to hire hundreds of people as a result of this test.

Some people have theorized that the Dalai Lama is a CIA agent. Well, he is on their payroll! The CIA paid him around $180,000 as part of their funding of the Tibetan resistance movement against the Chinese government in the 1960s. This was meant to hamper and disrupt the influence of Communism in the country.

true. Grand conspiracy theories can be useful tools, as long as you use them as a benchmark for bad logic—instead of blindly following them—and use their example to improve your own thinking.