What you read and who you hang out with matters... a lot.
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Your brain, which consists of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections, is a neural net, just like an LLM, and it’s trained on whatever you show it over and over again. Train it on negative news like the “Crisis News Network” (my name for CNN) and you’ll be in a state of fight or flight, which is a terrible way to prepare for the future.
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Is your newsfeed a constant barrage of doom and gloom? Do you inadvertently surround yourself with people who believe the world is spiraling out of control?
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You're not alone. And more importantly, you’re being manipulated by the news media and our default human mindset from 200,000 years ago.
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Let me explain.
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Our brains evolved to keep us alive on the African savanna, not to thrive in today's information-saturated world. Our "default operating software" is optimized for fear and scarcity. It's great for avoiding lions, but not so great for navigating the complexities of modern life.
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At the center of our challenge is a portion of the brain called the amygdala—our brain's early warning system. It's constantly scanning for danger, but in our world of 24/7 news cycles, it's on a perpetual high alert. The result? A negativity bias that causes us to pay 10 times more attention to bad news than good.
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And the media? They're not helping.
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Their job is to deliver “your eyes to their advertisers” and as a result, the old adage is truer today than ever: "If it bleeds, it leads."
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But here's the key point: this pervasive pessimism doesn't reflect reality.
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(Read the rest of my newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/gixv7X8)
