Did you misremember that correctly?

Would you have a few minutes for some slightly deeper thoughts?

 

Do you trust your memory?

Your memories are unreliable and often flat-out wrong, especially when it comes to remembering how you felt at a certain time or place.

Your ability to predict your thoughts and feelings in the future is even worse.

 

Did you notice that your memory is egotistical?

You might think it’s an accurate record of things that have happened to you or stuff you’ve learned, but it isn’t. Your memory often tweaks and adjusts the information it stores to make you look better.

Everything you are is a feature of your brain, and as such much of what your brain does is dedicated to making you look and feel as good as possible. And one of the ways it can do this is by modifying your memories to make you feel better about yourself.

That’s generally a very good design feature.

One you should be aware of.

 

Are you aware that your trusted brain apparently thinks logic is a precious resource to be used only sparingly?

If you had to weigh up every possible outcome for every choice you have to make, it would be extremely time and energy-consuming.

Thus, for most of the time, our brain “conserves energy” and resorts to mental shortcuts, called heuristics, to produce decisions or judgments. Such effects are called cognitive biases.

These cognitive biases, they exist in everyone, all the time. You’re not a bad person for having them just as other people aren’t necessarily bad people for having them either. They’re just human. And you’re just human.

As a human, your attention naturally only focuses on things that already agree with your pre-existing beliefs.

This is why two people can watch the exact same event and come away with two completely contradictory memories of it (think of two opposing football fans both convinced they saw the ball land in or out of bounds or a foul worth a red card vs a fair and clean tackle in the World Cup Finals).

 

Have you realized that your brain is like your cluttered storeroom?

The brain is still an internal organ in the human body (is AI up to change that soon?), and as such is a tangled mess of habits, traits, outdated processes and inefficient systems.

In many ways, the brain is a victim of its own success; it’s evolved over millions of years to reach this current level of complexity, but as a result, it has accrued a great deal of junk. Like a hard drive riddled with old software programs and obsolete downloads that interrupt basic processes. Like those cursed pop-ups offering you discount cosmetics from long-defunct websites when all you are trying to do is read a profound blog post.

 

Why don’t we understand better how our own brain works?

Science is hard at attempting to untangle the mess up there. Well, science itself exists thanks to our intelligence, and now we use science to figure out how our intelligence works?

This is either very efficient or circular reasoning, I’m not smart enough to tell.

There’s a famous quote that says, “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” (claims on who said it first are still up to debate, maybe because of the biased memories of the person who claims to have said it first)

 

The manner in which the brain perceives the world around us, and which parts it deems important enough to warrant attention, is something that illustrates both the awesome power of the human brain and also its many imperfections.

 

By now I hear you mumbling, “All good, I got it. So? What’s the lesson here, TACOMOB?”

Don’t use lazy mental shortcuts and biases to make important investing decisions. Think and then act for the long-term.

Just because something reminds you of something else doesn’t make it more than superficially similar. Bats aren’t birds and most fish aren’t fish any more than an elephant is a koala bear.