Why you should not trust himself

The British philosopher, social activist and mathematician Bertrand Russell have the famous expression:

The problem of the world is that fools and fanatics are always confident, and intelligent people are full of doubts.

For years I kept saying how it is important to get used to doubt, to question the most cherished beliefs and dreams to practice skepticism, everything - and ourselves in the first place - to expose the hard analysis. I have often pointed out that our brains are fundamentally unreliable, that we sometimes have no idea what he is talking, even when we think we understand everything.

But I never gave specific examples and explanations. So keep. Here are eight reasons why you can not trust yourself.

1. You are prejudiced and selfish and not even know it

In psychology, there is such a thing - fundamental attribution error. This is when people explained behavior of others of their personal qualities and their own actions justify the influence of external circumstances. In fact, it means that we are all scum.

If you see that someone passes the intersection at a red light, you are likely to find him selfish scumbag that endangers other people in order to save a couple seconds.

But if you drive through a red light, then imagine you will find many excuses: "It's an innocent mistake", "tree blocking traffic light", "Such a violation, and no one ever really did not hurt."

The actions are the same, but when does someone else, he - a terrible person, but when you do, it is justifiable error.

We all do. Particularly in conflict situations. When we are talking about someone who angered us, we often describe the actions of the man as meaningless, reprehensible and malicious. But if we hurt someone, and we will find a lot of arguments in defense of our reasonable and justifiable action.

People believe that they had no choice, and they can do only so much to do. The damage that they cause to others is regarded as insignificant, and all charges - as unfair and unreasonable.

Both points of view may not be correct. More precisely, both views are wrong. Psychologists have found that the two - and the perpetrator and the victim - exaggerate the situation, relying on their own stories.

Steven Pinker (Steven Pinker), scientist and popularizer of science, specializing in experimental psychology, calls this space moralizing. This means that after the conflict we overestimate their own good intentions and underestimate others'. This creates a downward spiral where, in our opinion, others deserve more severe punishment than we are.

All this, of course, unconsciously. People think that their actions are justified and objective. This is not true.

2. You have no idea about what makes you happy or unhappy

In his book "Stumbling on Happiness» (Stumbling on Happiness) Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert reveals to us that our ideas about how we felt in the past, and how we will feel in the future, often do not stand up to scrutiny.

If your favorite sports team loses in a big game in the championship, you get frustrated. But it turns out, the memory of how badly you feel, do not converge to the fact that it was actually. The memory has a tendency to exaggerate the bad to worse, and good - to be desired.

And it's our ideas about the future. We overestimate how much happiness will bring us good things, and then, however unhappy we did poorly. In fact, we often do not understand how we feel at the moment.

This is another argument in favor of not chasing happiness for the sake of happiness. All the evidence points to the fact that we do not even know what happinessAnd have no idea how to handle it, if we become happy.

3. You make it easy to take a bad decision

If you ever come across in the center of the city with people, handing out free brochures or books, you know how Only you take this, they will stop you, will try to persuade somewhere to start, or to give them money for what they do. Do you want to answer "no", but you can not: you have received a gift. You do not want to be an ass and you feel very uncomfortable. On this count donors.

It turns out that decision-making is easy to manipulate. One way - to present a gift to man, before asking for a favor: it ensures that the request will be executed.

If you want to drive a wedge in turn, ask vperedistoyaschego, whether in front of him, and bring any argument. Experiments show that the explanation will give you about 80% more likely to cut the part, than their absence. The most surprising fact is that the explanation can be anything.

Behavioral economists argue that you can easily sell on buy something without any reasonable cause. For example, on display are a number of bottles of wine of different value: on one shelf are two of them, on the other - three.

On the left, the price difference seems to be unfounded. But add a bottle of 1500 rubles, and spending 900 rubles seem reasonable and even profitable.

4. You use logic and common sense to protect the already existing views

Researchers have found that some people with damage to areas of the brain responsible for vision, can see, but do not know it. These people are blind, and they will tell you they do not see their own hands. That's just more often they indicate correctly which side of the light source, although think it is random guesses.

This illustrates the fun fact about the human mind: the knowledge and the feeling that knowledge - two completely different things.

In the same way, like blind men, we can know about something, I do not feel that we know. But the opposite is true: it is possible to feel that we know something, even if any knowledge we have.

This is the basis for all kinds of misconceptions. And they are becoming more if we do not recognize the difference between real knowledge and a sense of knowledge.

5. Emotions distort your perception is stronger than you think

If you are not different from the majority, tend to make wrong decisions based on emotions. Suppose a colleague jokes about your shoes, you will become very unpleasant, because these shoes gave your dying grandmother. You think, "They went all" and fired. Not too rational decision.

But wait, I have not yet finished off.

It turns out, just avoid making important decisions when you are on emotion, not quite right. Emotions affect your decisions even after a few days, weeks or months, even after you have cooled down and seemed to have analyzed the situation.

Even more surprising and paradoxical that even relatively weak and short-term emotions sometimes can influence decision-making in the long run.

For example, your friend wants to meet at the bar. But for some reason you start to doubt. You do not agree immediately, even if you like the person you would like to talk with him. You are very cautious, but do not know why.

The fact is that once you had a friend who was at first interested in communicating with you, and then cooled. Nothing special, just a couple of times he did not come to meet you. Sometimes one can be irresponsible. Life went on, and you have completely forgotten about the case.

In fact, the act of the man slightly hurt you and caused slight irritation. You do not become enraged with anger, but upset and subconsciously these archived emotions. And now your fuzzy and generally unconscious memories make you be on guard with a new boyfriend, despite the fact that it's a completely different person and a different situation.

Emotions that you do not even remember, can affect you.

Speaking of memory ...

6. Your memory - lies Factory

Elizabeth Loftus (Elizabeth Loftus) - a leading researcher in the area of ​​memory. She first tells you that your memory is imperfect.

She found that memories of events can be easily replaced on the other, more old or new. It Loftus made everyone realize that the testimony of witnesses in the courtroom is not the most valuable information.

Loftus and other investigators found:

• Our memories of the events are overwritten, and eventually become more open to misinformation.
• Warning people that their memories may contain false information, does not always help eliminate it.
• The stronger our ability to empathize, the more likely that we build false information in his memory.
• Possible not only partial, but complete replacement of our memories.

It turns out that our memories are not as reliable as we thought.

It may seem that Mother Nature has screwed with the human memory. Would you use a computer that constantly loses or modifies files, after you finish work?

However, our brain does not store spreadsheets, text files or SIFCO with cats. And our memories help us learn from the past, which theoretically allows to make better decisions in the future. But the memory has another function, which we rarely think. This function is more important and complex than simply storing information.

We need to understand who we are to be guided in difficult social situations. Memories help us to create our "I", giving us stories from the past.

So no matter how accurate memories. The important thing is that in our minds there is a story that helps us understand who we are.

Instead of finding completely accurate version of memories, easier to use vague and spaces immediately fill parts corresponding presentation about yourself.

Maybe you keep the memory of your brother and his friends run into you. For you, it is obvious that it is the cause of your neurosis, worries and alertness. But perhaps it will not harm you as much as you think. Perhaps the memories of what your brother to dig up to you - it is the emotions that you are experiencing now, imposing their veil on old memories, and nothing to do with his brother they do not.

But now these memories of the evil brother who constantly make you feel bad and match your personality - a little neurotic and embittered - keep you from committing acts that may cause you pain and humiliation, which will be stronger present. As a result, it justifies the strategy, which you follow for life.

You may wonder: "So, then, what I see myself - it's just a handful of stupid ideas?"

Yes. Exactly.

7. You're not the one who consider yourself

Consider an example? The way you express yourself and demonstrate, say, Facebook ...

To put it mildly, this is not quite the same way in which you exist in reality. The way you conduct yourself in the presence of his grandmother, likely very different from what you and your friends. Set your "I" - is "I'm at work," "I'm home," "I'm with my family," "I am one," and many other "I" that you use to turn and to survive in this complex world. But where do you present?

You may think that one of these versions of the "I" is more real than the others, but I repeat: all that you are doing is related to your self-image. And it can be said, was fabricated.

Over the past few decades, social psychologists began to dig up what many of us difficult to accept: samoosnova - unchanging, permanent "I" - is an illusion. The new research is just starting to reveal how the brain constructs a self-the "I" and how hallucinogens can temporarily change the brain, dissolving this "I" that illustrates the impermanence and the illusory our personality.

The irony is that these fancy decorative fonts experiments published in fashion magazines and books fashionable people. Standard set bukovok repeats what was said eastern monks for several millennia. And all that did the monks - it sat for years in the caves and nothing thought.

In the West, the idea of ​​the ego - the basic idea of ​​the many cultural systems (say nothing about the advertising industry), and we are so immersed in finding out who we really are, that we rarely stop and think about the benefits of this. Perhaps the idea of ​​our identity and find itself prevents us as much as it helps. Maybe it limits us more often than releases. Of course, it is useful to understand what you want or what brings you pleasure, but you can continue to dream and achieve goals, rather than relying on a rigid conception of himself.

In general, as the great philosopher once said Bruce Lee, "Be water, my friend».

8. Knowledge gained through the physical perception of the world, not too real

The man is incredibly complex nervous system, which constantly sends information to the brain. According to some estimates, our sensory systems - sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste - sent about 11 million bits of information in the brain every second.

But even this - is negligibly small piece of the physical world around us. The light that we can see - a ridiculously narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Birds and insects are able to see those parts of the spectrum that are not perceived by our eyes. Dogs can hear sounds and smell of whose existence we do not even suspect. Our nervous system is good as a machine to filter the data, rather than their collection.

Our consciousness is able to process about 60 bits of information per second, when we are engaged in intellectual activities (reading, playing a musical instrument). At best, we are aware of only about 0.000005454% of the already heavily modified information that the brain receives every second until we do not sleep.

For comparison, imagine that in the article there are still 536 303 630 other words that have been written, but you can not see them.

This is an exemplary diagram of how each of us live day by day.