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on-thinking-and-reasoning

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On Thinking and Reasoning

stuff On knowing things, and how we get there

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article

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.

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betterment collective-architecture connection gratification on-being-fruitful on-leadership on-thinking-and-reasoning wealth-architecture

article

Brain networks are groups of brain regions that work together. There are only a handful of interesting ones, but you can actually use them to understand human behaviour.

Not brain regions, brain networks

Article

Brain regions are often oversimplified in popular discourse. The amygdala isn’t just the fear centre, and the prefrontal cortex isn’t solely the ‘smart’ bit. This silly approach to talking about the brain hides the really cool stuff. So let’s talk about those instead.

Brain networks are groups of brain regions that work together. There are only a handful of interesting ones, but you can actually use them to understand human behaviour.

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betterment on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

If you look closely, you’ll see that our ability to speak just hides the fact that other processes are running the show. Find a way to cut the language regions out, and you see other little consciousnesses start to take over.

Mini-brains inside the brain

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People love to talk about brain regions, but usually that’s silly. Brain regions usually don’t tell you anything about how the mind works. That’s not true of the language regions though. The language regions tell you something quite weird about the mind, and it has nothing to do with language.

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betterment on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

Everyone is suggestible, not just children or the easily hypnotised; our memories and behaviours are heavily influenced by external suggestions, more than we like to acknowledge.

Everyone's Suggestible

Article

There’s this idea that some people are more suggestible than others—more susceptible to psychic influence. These people are the ones that do wild stuff at a hypnosis show, or are more susceptable to misinformation online. What this idea misses is that suggestion is actually something that works on all of us.

Everyone is suggestible, not just children or the easily hypnotised; our memories and behaviours are heavily influenced by external suggestions, more than we like to acknowledge.

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betterment on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture

article

Bias reduces noise—if you know <em>roughly</em> what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

Bias is good

Article

If you haven’t heard of System 1 and System 2, you’ve probably heard one of its analogues. People who say ‘don’t let your amygdala hijack your frontal lobes’, or ‘get out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system’, or ‘something something vagus nerve’ are using pseudo-brain science to get at the same thing. But the thing everyone seems to have taken away from this book is the thing we always take away—System 1 stuff, a.k.a. bias is a bad thing. This is not what Kahneman was going for. Kahneman was trying to show us how both System 1 and System 2 have their place.

Bias reduces noise—if you know roughly what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

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betterment gratification on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

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