3-Cs of Thinking: Critical Thinking (How Your Brain Deceives YOU)
Not Quite the WYSIWIG You’d Expect
Let’s be honest, before the actual title revealed itself, after clicking the play button on the video above (WQNDFBS QE PFBCFPTLQN), I’m sure your read WONDERS OF PERCEPTION without hesitations. This is because our brains are masters at filling in blanks when necessary and, of course, this ability of your brain to fill in missing information isn’t a bad thing. It can help us understand things that seem incomprehensible at first. Try to read the following message:
Maybe you had a bit of a stumbling start but you can read it, right?
Just in case:
This message serves to prove how your brain can do amazing things! Impressive things! In the beginning this was hard to read but now, on this line, your mind is reading it automatically without even thinking about it, be proud: you can read this!
See, our brains are truly amazing. However sometimes they can lead us astray and this is where the skills of critical thinking comes in. Critical Thinking is the kind of thinking in which you question, analyze, evaluate and make a judgement about what you see, read, hear, say, or write before blindly accepting it as the truth. The term critical comes from the Greek word κριτικός or kritikos which means “to be able to judge or discern”.
Being a critical thinker does not mean being negative or only focusing on faults. It means being able to clarify your thinking so that you can break down a problem or a piece of information, interpret it and use your interpretation to arrive at an informed decision or judgement. In addition to this, thinking critically will help you stay clear from visual misinterpretations and logical fallacies. In this article, I’d like to show you a couple of examples where your brain tricks you into seeing things and hearing things that aren’t actually there and how sometimes you struggle making the right decisions, even though you know better.
Seeing What’s Not There
I’d like to begin with a little trick where your brain creates movement when there is none. In the video below you’ll see the famous painting Starry Night by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. Once you press play, a spiral will appear on your screen and I’d like you to concentrate on the centre of this spiral until it fades away which will be about 20 seconds. Try it!
Did you see the sky move after the spiral disappeared? If not you are really one-in-a-kind or you didn’t concentrate on the spiral very well. For most of us, the sky will seem to have danced a little. It didn’t but your brain put the movement of the spiral into the painting. Weird, right?
Confusing Your Eyes (?)
Okay, now let’s mess around a bit with how your brain connects different pieces of information. For the next slide, I would like you to say to yourself not the words you read on the image below but the colours they are printed in, i.e. red, blue, purple and green. That wasn’t very difficult, was it? But now try to do the same thing with the next set of words (just hoover over or tab the image to reveal the words).
Another issue with our perceptions is that our brains cannot process colours separately if there’s an unusual contrast in colours. An example of this is the following illustration, known as the Adelson Checkerboard Illusion. If you carefully look at the squares labelled A and B, which one would you say is darker? I assume you’d agree that the A square is the darkest. But actually, both squares A and B are the same shade of grey. Don’t believe me? Just look at the GIF below.
As you can see, they are the same shade of grey. The reason why our eyes see different shades is because of the perceived shadow of the green pillar and the light-dark pattern of the checkerboard. To give a more meaningful representation of what we really see, your brain corrects the shade of square B to better match its surroundings and; therefore, it appears to be lighter than it really is. In short, we can’t really rely on our eyes without some critical awareness.
Confusing Your Ears (?)
How about your ears? Can our hearing be deceived as well? Let’s try this following experiment. I’d like to listen to a sound clip and write down as many words as you are able to identify. If you’re not a native English speaker you may struggle a bit but, as a point of reference, most people are able to identify anywhere between 40 to 60 words. So get a pen and paper and give it at try.
So how many words did you get? Actually there are none. What you heard was a slightly distorted voice repeating the name Boris over and over again. Because this name is made up from two syllables, your brain is able to match any two-syllable word into the space. So the more two-syllable words you know, the more words you would have been able to identify, you could also have done it in any other language as well.
How Your Brain Deals With Critical Thinking
Well, that’s it for perception. I think the most important lesson to be leant here is that perception and reality don’t always match. Let’s now look at some cognitive biases that muddle our thinking. A cognitive bias is a structural deficiency or limitation in our thinking, it’s a flaw in judgement that arises from errors of memory, social attribution, and unintentional miscalculations. Some social psychologists believe cognitive biases are an evolutionary development which helps us process information more efficiently, especially in dangerous situations. Cognitive biases might have been a great tool in prehistoric fight-or-flight encounters, in today’s complex societies they often cause serious errors in judgement.
Okay, let’s have a quick look at where or fight-or-flight intuition comes from. This is the brain. The top front part of your brain is your Cerebral Cortex, often referred to as your grey matter. It is divided into four lobes, the Frontal, Parietal, Temporal and Occipital lobes. These are the parts of your brain where your actual intelligence sits. It is also important for determining your personality, handles your motor functions, processes sensory information and deals with languages. In short, it is the part of your brain that makes you who you are.
Below the Cerebral Cortex are the Basal Ganglia, they are a more primitive part of your brain which involves itself mostly with movement and your ability to learn.
The Thalamus is a mostly grey matter structure that busies itself with relaying sensory and motor signals to your Cerebral Cortex and regulates your consciousness and alertness.
Then there’s the Hippocampus, the place where you store and organize your long-term memories and also connect certain sensations and emotions to these memories. It’s one of the reasons why music and smells are such powerful triggers for memories.
Next there’s the Amygdala. This is actually the star of this explanation, so I’ll get back to it in a minute. The last brain element in this overview is the Hypothalamus whose function it is to release hormones into your system, control your appetite and to regulate your emotional responses.
But back to the Amygdala. Also often referred to as the reptile brain, the amygdala is best known as the part of the brain that drives your “fight-or-flight” response. Basically, it’s a survival-oriented area of your brain primarily involved in the processing of emotions and memories associated with fear. Now, there was a time when this was very useful. When our ancestors were roaming around the savannah and perceived a possible threat, the ability to make a split second decision to fight or run away would have kept them alive longer.
Cognitive Biases
However, in our modern world, where things have become so much more complex, the unconscious fight or flight reaction causes us to develop all kinds of cognitive biases. That is, we often misinterpreted information because of our little reptile brain.
There’s not a whole lot you can do about this as most of it happens in your unconscious mind. What you can do is become aware of the biases which may fall victim to and every now and then step back from a decision you’ve made to evaluate if it was really the best option.
There are hundreds if not thousands of cognitive biases that may influence your decisions, if you’d like to learn more about these biases, check out this article about the 12 most common cognitive biases I wrote some time ago.
[T]here you are.
