CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Parapsychology, Wishful Thinking, Confirmation Bias
17 Feb 2018
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We only use 10% of our brains: we use all of our brains. If any part of your brain gets damaged, you will suffer deficits: evolution would not (cid:498)waste(cid:499) energy building vast parts of your brain you don"t use. Why would we believe that: availability cascade, wishful thinking, people like to believe in the paranormal, people want to make money from you. Psychic powers are real: the brain has redundancy. 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: confirmation bias, neglect of negative results, wishful thinking.
