Your Brain Lies To You

The article refers to "source amnesia". In the comic, Calvin is pretending to have actual amnesia. The point is: I love Calvin.

The New York Times posted an article written by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt on June 29, 2008 entitled "Your brain lies to you". READ IT. CLICK HERE. YOU'LL LOVE IT. I know it's not a TEDx video, but it's still worth something in my eyes.

False beliefs; this is the premise of the article. This article was written, remember, back in the summer of 2008, when current President Barack Obama was still a just a senator on a campaign. And on this groundbreaking campaign of his, he was faced with many an obstacle. One such obstacle was the accusation that he was a "Muslim". Now, I know. It sounds dumb to discriminate against someone because he/she is a Muslim. But, you know... Discrimination is odd and fears are irrational. Anyways, the point is that 10 percent of the citizens in this country believed Obama to be a Muslim even though he's Christian. How is this possible? Well, the brain is a weird and complex thing. (It's not as weird and complex as Americans,  but it's cutting it close.. ;) ) 

The article goes on to describe how brain stores information. Facts are stored in the hippocampus, but every time we recall information, our brain writes it down again. It is reprocessed. In time, the fact is gathered in the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. Do you remember how you learned every fact you know? Do you think you could trace all your known-facts back to their sources?  This phenomenon is known as source amnesia; because of this, people might be lead to forget whether a statement is true or false- even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer.

Misremembering gets worse over time. "A false statement from a non-credible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage." Have you ever found yourself believing something to be true when you knew the source wasn't credible? Campaign strategists use source amnesia to spread misinformation. Over time, when repeating a falsehood, people may back it up with "I think I read it somewhere" or something like that. The more you're exposed to a falsehood, the more likely you are to believe it and give it credibility. The article then quotes the Stanford study with the students who either opposed or favored capital punishment. Hey! That was in the book! Fun! But in the book it focused on how we like to believe things that favor our opinions. Indeed, so does the article- "ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods." Are you quicker to believe ideas that you agree with? Be honest! 

Things to think about:

What does it take to get people to listen to ideas outside their personal beliefs?

Do you think source amnesia is dangerous?