There really isn't anything the human brain can't do, and that's aside from all that marvel-of-the-universe, super-computer stuff, like the ability to paint the Mona Lisa, or send a rocket to the moon or write Hamlet. No, the truly great stuff your brain does for you, is to protect you from reality. Your mind loves you like a mother should: it convinces you that what you can do well (balloon animals, say) is important and what you're hopeless at (parallel parking, perhaps) is trivial; that you're better-looking and smarter than most and destined to stay that way forever.
Good thing too, as English psychologist Cordelia Fine explains in A Mind of its Own, her lighthearted tour through recent research. The category of people who come closest to objective truth about themselves (as measured by outsiders) are the clinically depressed...
Fine divides up the tricks played by our loving organ into various categories. The so-called vain brain, for instance, is so preening that research has shown it finds the very letters of your name more attractive than other letters. It obscures the statistical improbability of near-universal ideas about the self (almost 100 per cent of subjects rate themselves as better than average on any ordinary task like driving a car -- a mathematically impossible outcome). Under the emotional brain, Fine cites tests that show how gut instinct makes many decisions that we think are reasoned. It's only after we've opted for one side of the question that our cognitive faculties -- in a manner so smooth we don't notice which came first -- provide the rationale....
It all adds up, Fine sombrely concludes, to a vulnerable brain. It's both disconcerting and bracing to learn all the ways our minds distort reality. But it's all in the cause of giving you a reason to get up in the morning, says the aptly named "terror management theory." Concocted by a dour psychologist named Tom Pyszczynski, that concept argues that the brain's tricks are a vital defence against any "awareness that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe, destined only to decay and die."
Cheery folks. Perhaps we’ll just ask how the same brain that tells me such fairy tales about myself can be so dependably accurate in what it says about you, and then we'll let you develop your own migraines.
2 comments:
It obscures the statistical improbability of near-universal ideas about the self (almost 100 per cent of subjects rate themselves as better than average on any ordinary task like driving a car -- a mathematically impossible outcome).
But why would we think that people could make an accurate assessment of their driving skills compared to all other drivers. They would need to have all the same data that the auto insurance companies have about the rest of the drivers and themselves, and noone has that data. This idea that people can apply reason and logic to every decision in their lives ignores the fact that people just don't have the facts that they need to make well-reasoned decisions. Life can't wait for the facts. None of this surprises me.
...a vital defence against any "awareness that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe, destined only to decay and die."
Which is also presumably why we have musicals.
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!
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