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Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.

Preferring Coherence

Article

The concept of cognitive dissonance gets flogged online. It’s always this malevolent feature of our minds lurking back there making us do outrageous stuff. But cognitive dissonance isn’t really this. It’s just another example of bias—optimising us for certain features of a messy world so we can get on with things. Of course this doesn’t always help. But actually most of the time it does. And people don’t often talk about the fact that we don’t always worry about conflicting cognitions. But we don’t—sometimes we’re open to the noise too.
Cogntive dissonance often describes a bias towards seeing ourselves as coherent. Sure, it’s sneaky and prevalent, but entirely necessary. And, other times we tolerate how noisy we are, keeping us open to new insights and better equipped for a complex world.

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Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the <em>discomfort</em> we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over <em>dissonant</em> cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.

Cognitive dissonance isn't discomfort

Article

I’ve never written an article about the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, even though I’ve referenced it a lot. It’s so mainstream that I assume everyone knows what it is. But, actually, people don’t. And even the guy who came up with it was a little disappointed by where the literature around it went. So I thought we’d revisit it, and keep it short and fun.
Cognitive dissonance is often thought of as the discomfort we have with conflicting cognitions. But it’s really about how the brain will smooth over dissonant cognitions, whether they’re uncomfortable or not. It happens a lot.

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Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.

Language is a barrier to communication

Article

To make the leap from someone else’s idea to your own understanding of it is often troubled by something I call ‘the language problem’. Most of the time this is because of a difference in experience. Knowledge is sometimes a barrier to learning, and this is almost always related to the language problem. Let me show you what I mean.
Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.

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Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.

Anticipation beats reward

Article

A lot of people reckon the brain treats rewards quite differently from the anticipation of rewards. And, in fact, the anticipation of reward seems like the bigger driver of our behaviour. And this little tidbit is one of the few places where human behaviour is actually explained well by exploring the brain. So let’s explore it.
Basically, reward and ancipation both use the same system, but differently. Anticipation seems to come in through the senses and get sent throughout the brain, but pleasure seems to come in from more evaluatey bits—maybe to help us learn what’s rewarding.

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The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.

Addictive Work

Article

It’s very trendy to say stuff like ‘start your day by making your bed and something something life is better’. But this is usually some kind of comment about the value of small and simple acts in promoting a sense of order and discipline. I’m not so interested in that. I’m more interested in those small and simple acts that make you addicted to those acts. I like other things that people say are addictive, so this sounds much more my speed, when it comes to productivity.
The neural reward circuit implies that small, rewarding tasks that share environmental context are going to be the most addictive, so break tasks into small steps that end in a clear good feeling and optimise for a shared environment.

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