Science Proves You're Stupid

[kennyc]

Science Proves You're Stupid
Written By: Joe Quirk
Date Published: January 16, 2011


You can't understand your brain unless you break it. Without brain damage, you are incapable of acquiring any insight into how your mind works, because your brain is sublimely designed to trick you into thinking you have a clue.

Your memories are fiction.

Robert Burton describes an experiment in his book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not, which everyone with a strong opinion should read. ...

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors...s-youre-stupid

Book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Being-Certain-.../dp/0312359209

[DixieGal]

$16.39 at Amazon. I'm not that stupid!

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

$16.39 at Amazon. I'm not that stupid!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

$16.39 at Amazon. I'm not that stupid!

Ha!

[nohmi2]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

$16.39 at Amazon. I'm not that stupid!

[kennyc]

Yeah, but the used paper version is $3.83

[Katti's Cat]

Originally Posted by kennyc

You can't understand your brain unless you break it. Without brain damage, you are incapable of acquiring any insight into how your mind works, because your brain is sublimely designed to trick you into thinking you have a clue.

Ha - knew it would come handy one day. Saved $16.39 - off to do some book shopping now

Oh, and I didn't need a scientist to proof the bleedin obvious :-)

[Killing Floor]

On my "to read" list, but I'm not paying $16.39 either! Thanks for posting. Looks very interesting. Gonna get copies for all my siblings.

[WT Sharpe]

I didn't see any information in the review with which I was unfamiliar, but it's nice to see it all in one book; although somewhere there's probably a better review for that book than the one Joe Quirk offers. I personally found his everyman style of writing to be off-putting. It was my first experience with him, although if Robert Burton's On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not is as good as Quirk says it is—and I have no reason to doubt it—this is a book which, in his words, "everyone with a strong opinion should read."

A little knowledge of how the mind actually stores, processes, and retrieves data can be humbling. It's not as exact a process as most people assume. Do you really recall where you were and what you were doing when the Challenger exploded? Those 106 students who wrote reports on their personal experience of the tragedy for psychologist Ulric Neisser thought they did, yet those reports, written in the immediate aftermath, contradicted their recalled memories of the event when interviewed 2.5 years later, to the point where one student actually said, "That's my handwriting, but that's not what happened."

I do believe in an external reality, but for each of us, our perception of it, and our recollections of past events that occurred in it, are in large part our own creation, and realizing that can go a long way toward making us more tolerant of human imperfections, both in ourselves and in those around us.