Reflection 42 – One Of The Dangerous Tricks Your Mind Will Play Against You

Birds, Ketchup, Traveling, Iron, Shoes, Babies, and Sharks!

What do all of these words have in common? Take a minute or so and try to figure it out. Know that around 95% of those before you got the right answer in less than a minute! Ha, did you get it? No worries, I‘m waiting!

Probably you came up with something innovative, but let me bring you the bad news : YOU ARE PROBABLY WRONG . I just tricked you into believing there was a relationship between these terms when there is NONE! Did you see how easy it is for an amateur like myself to bluff you. But don’t worry, you are not alone (in Michael Jackson’s voice ). Our minds are wired to think in such a way. We very easily and too quickly make associations and draw conclusions when they don’t exist! Sometimes, this can be so detrimental when we start associating certain events with specific types of people. How many times did you initially think of that long-bearded, tough-looking Muslim as soon as you heard of that explosion that took place somewhere in Antarctica?
These cognitive biases, as psychologists like to call them, play out in our lives in different forms. In specific, they are magnified dramatically in media outlets where journalists and news reporters bombard us with such unrealistic associations. They make people think in very simplistic ways; if X, then Y! See how simple life is . And by nature, we tend to be lazy if we don‘t force ourselves to think deeply and critically. I feel I first began to encounter this as a PhD student, and after reading (based on my supervisor’s recommendation) The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Life events are way more complex than this binary articulation. Once you have this at the back of your head, you can start looking at things differently ; basically in a more nuanced and holistic way. It becomes more of a lens with which you can see events. You learn to be humble, acknowledge your ignorance, and not to jump into hasty associations and conclusions!
Personally, all of this played out very clearly in my academic life and even throughout my ALS journey. I would sometimes hear how certain doctors would come up with certain confident conclusions and deep down inside I would know it‘s crap! Most people very easily assume correlations and infer certain conclusions when there is NONE! For example, can you imagine in the US, physicians usually never address nutrition with their patients whatsoever!! The reason simply is that most of our academic disciplines train their students in such a narrow way. Academic disciplines in and of themselves are a clear display of this rather narrow-minded way of looking at things. I believe that our life events should be looked at in a more holistic manner; one that acknowledges possible associations between certain phenomena but that also forces us to think more deeply and doesn‘t rush into simplistic conclusions.
Having said all of this, now you can return back to the beginning of the article and try to find out the commonalities between the terms at the beginning (kidding of course ).