How Your Brain Deceives You
Your brain possesses some incredible abilities, from recalling conversations with close friends to tackling complex math problems with ease. At times, it may even overlook critical information, resulting in errors that could be bad for your well-being or health. .
One of the biggest shortcomings of your brain is that it can get lazy. When trying to solve a problem or make a decision, your mind often falls back on solutions that have worked in the past. While using shortcuts can be a useful and effective approach, they can also trip you up and cause you to make mistakes. For example, maybe you're terrified of flying because you can think of several tragic, high-profile plane crashes. In reality, traveling by air is much safer than traveling by car.
Moreover, your brain might fail to detect significant changes occurring in your surroundings, a phenomenon referred to as change blindness. —otherwise, it will get overwhelmed. Seemingly not like a huge problem, it can have major consequences according to some research. For example, people who have jobs like air traffic control can make potentially disastrous errors as a result of change blindness.
In the process, we twist reality to protect our self-esteem—in other words, we don't want to own up when we mess up. Why do we participate in the blame game? Researchers believe it's to safeguard our self-esteem and shield ourselves from the fear of failure. When adopting this mindset, we attribute negative outcomes to factors beyond our control.
A. Your brain has to prioritize what it pays attention to.
B. But it is not that perfect and open to imperfections.
C. This realization can carry you through some unnecessary errors.
D. However, you can avoid some of these errors by acquiring a better understanding of them.
E. It goes without saying that your brain is incapable of processing all information at the same time.
F. When something goes wrong, your brain instinctively seeks someone or something to hold responsible.
G. However, your brain is using a mental shortcut to fool you into believing flying is more dangerous than it is.
