Has your brain been hacked?

By guest author @Amy Day of @Clarity4Action.

Do you remember your life when Covid started? How was it possible that everyone was obsessed with toilet paper? Shelves were emptied, people were frantic, and stores put limits on purchase quantities.

Of course, panic was at play, but why toilet paper? Underneath the dramatic scarcity messaging from 24/7 news stories and social media bombardment, our human brains connected to the drama and vivid imagery of empty store shelves, especially in the personal hygiene section. Our brains were actually being tricked into incorrect catastrophic thinking because of the Salience effect, one of many cognitive biases, so we ran out and stocked up on toilet paper!

WHAT IS A COGNITIVE BIAS?

So, what is a cognitive bias? Let’s start with a little brain science grounded in the work of Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, and his colleague Amos Tversky. They discovered that our brains contain a systematic sorting system, called heuristics, that create mental shortcuts for processing the continuous onslaught of information we receive moment-by-moment.

Heuristics miraculously allow us to almost instantly categorize, plan, and act on life’s inputs. When these hardwired heuristics are appropriate to a situation, they are great. But they can also activate inappropriately, creating cognitive biases. These biases are simply glitches in this brain system; they show up when we inadvertently sort information incorrectly. Depending on the situation, cognitive biases can have a small or profound impact on our planning, decision thinking, and ultimately on the choices we make. So often we blame ourselves for these glitches, as if it’s our fault, instead of thinking about them as programming bugs that we can intentionally re-code.

We simply don’t know what we don’t know, but with awareness we can make invisible cognitive biases visible and do something about them. Continue reading>>