Yes, your mind is playing tricks on you!

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I read this article, titled "8 Common Mistakes in How Our Brains Think and How to Prevent them", and the number one common mistake was: Confirmation Bias...

Away from psychology jargon that you may not be interested in as I am, confirmation bias is "when we proactively seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs". That hit me too closely that I had to tweet about it:

 

If when we believe in something, our brain only let us see what further supports our belief, how can we even call ourselves "open-minded"? Which lead me to this other quoted tweet:

I have always been fascinated with the world of psychology, with understand how the human mind works and how to take advantage of its strengths and avoid its pitfalls... More than anything, like any one of you I assume, I am interested in learning the tricks of the mind, which would allow me to live life happy and not fall into a trap where I am my biggest enemy and make my life miserable while being convinced it's just my bad luck, instead of actively trying to overcome my own mistakes.

Our minds play tricks on us, and it's most destructive when we don't realize it. But once we realize it, shouldn't that automatically make things better and make us overcome those tricks? Remember back to when you were a kid and saw your first magic trick... You were probably amazed, puzzled and believed it's more of magic than an actual trick. But once you grew up, and learnt how that trick is done, the "magic" was gone and you can now see things for what they really are... An entertaining and simple demonstration is seen in the following video:

But apparently, the mind is more treacherous than we realize. It is stubborn in sticking to its bad habits, even when we have come to acknowledge how bad they are. 

Then what we need is not only to know what the trick is, but why we choose to believe it in the first place... That underlying cause/motive/drive is the key to it all, and it's not something that can be easily uncovered... Some people spend years and years in psychotherapy in order to uncover such truths, and even then, the road to recovery is difficult and lengthy.

Without further rambling on, I want to commit to myself that:

1. I try to seriously look at the pure facts, instead of what my mind interprets of a happening. 

2. I separate myself from my mind in the times it tries to play tricks on me, and acknowledge the tricks even if I can't stop them from happening. 

3. Eventually, hopefully, perhaps, I trick my mind into not tricking me!

Is your mind playing tricks on you? And how are you trying to overcome them, if you are?

Who thought of it first?

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I just read a status that my friend, let’s call her Sarah, wrote that was a “sort of a” deep reflection on an aspect of life. The thought in the status was more or less the same thing that another mutual friend I have, let’s call her Linda, had been repeating recently. Now, Sarah and Linda know each other well, and they have engaged with each other more lately. And the thought expressed by Sarah, whom I am familiar with pretty well, didn’t seem like something she would say... So I started thinking:

Whether we realize it or not, many of us are very impressionable. As social creatures, we tend to look for things in our surroundings to guide us in the way we think or act. Yes we often reflect on things on our own, but even that solitary reflection is often spurred by something we saw or someone we heard. Many times, we see ourselves repeating in our heads something other people had said. Whether we are agreeing to it, or denying it, the fact remains that we are driven and affected by it. Maybe it was something we were subjected to today, or maybe it was many little things we were subjected to over a span of years that we don’t even remember anymore, but they are there in our heads, guiding how we think.

Being impressionable is a double-edged sword... It can be used for good or for evil. For example, we want children to be impressionable by good behavior, to deduce their own thoughts of “we should be/do good”. But likewise, they are vulnerable to bad impressions and can end up with "bad" thoughts. Think of it in terms of trends... How trends come to happen is that one or a few people create or think of something, which leaves a very big impression on so many highly-impressionable people, and they follow it and spread it around. (Read more about this here: Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”). But even those who seem to have “originated” the thought, were mostly inspired (got the impression from) by someone else who got it from someone else, and so on and so forth. So I ask:

1- Do you believe that there is anything as an “original” thought anymore, or are all our thoughts just bits and pieces from others here and there?

2- Which do you think travels faster: a good thought or a bad thought? And how can you motivate a good thought to travel while refraining a bad thought from traveling?

Please share your thoughts to the questions above in a comment below. And if you have enjoyed reading this, I hope it "impressioned" you to subscribe to my blog, and share this post! Thank you ^_^