CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Parapsychology, Wishful Thinking, Confirmation Bias
2 Nov 2018
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Evolution would not waste energy building vast parts of your brain you. If any part of your brain gets damaged, you will suffer deficits don"t use. Brains use 20% of our energy, 2% of body mass. People like to believe in the paranormal. People want to make money from you. People can lose whole hemispheres and still function relatively normally. If we removed 70% of your neurons randomly, we"re not sure how badly off you"d be. Recommended: susan blackmore"s book adventures of a parapsychologist. There are several cognitive biases that make us believe that it"s real. We believe it because we hope it"s true. The effect is small, short-term, and only based on arousal. You can get the same effect from hearing a scary passage from a stephen. If they were biased, they would underpredict later success for certain groups, and overpredict for others (this doesn"t happen)
