Does Our Brain Make Right Sense?

Sometime ago, I stumbled upon this particular documentary programme on Discovery Channel which talked about how our brains make sense of our world. The programme features some of the most impressive works done by neuroscientists, and I'm particularly caught by this demonstration below (you can try this demonstration on someone else to test if it's true too).

Let’s look at how the brain works to help us make sense out of what we see. Can anyone read this?

I'm sure most of you would read the words as "JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS". Right?

 

Well, not exactly right. The actual words half-covered by the blue box are "IUMRINC TQ GONGLUSIQNS", which are words that don't make any sense at all.

 

So here, we see that the brain is using words it has learned to make a guess about what is written. Usually, this is really helpful like when we can’t read all of a sign or when we do crossword puzzles, but it is not perfect. We can fool it, and when we fool it, we can easily see that this filling in the blanks is going on.

In other words, what our brain sees are not always exactly accurate. Our brain depends highly on information stored from our previous experience to make judgements.

I tried to understand more about this, therefore I googled and found this "Top 5 Ways False Memories are Formed" at the Discovery Channel website: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/5-ways-false-memories-formed.htm

Apparently, the "trick" that your brain has pulled on you as you went through the demonstration above is called "Inference".

If you tend to remember all the cheerleaders from high school as having blonde hair and the football players as being dumb jocks, you may be a victim of inference-based memory error, or bias. These types of false memories often occur in memory reconstruction: Put simply, when we pull out memories with holes in them, we simply patch them up with things that seem to fit. While these makeshift reconstructions are sometimes accurate, they're more often distorted by our current knowledge, feelings and beliefs rather than being true representations.

False memories due to bias usually result from a desire to reduce psychological discomfort by having one's thoughts and memories remain consistent. As a result, people tend to rely on inference in a wide variety of situations. Along with the stereotype bias alluded to in the first paragraph, studies show that people also infer they've seen an event's cause when they've really only seen its effect. People will also remember that they felt a particular way in the past that coincides with how they feel in the present, or even that they were worse off many years ago to make themselves feel better about where they are now.

Upon completing a study skills course, for instance, students remembered their initial study skills as being lower and their later test grades as higher than did students not taking the course. In another study, people presented with a list of names supposedly belonging to criminals recently in the media were almost twice as likely to "remember" seeing stereotypically black names as they were other names.

I have always heard this saying,

"F.E.A.R is False Evidence Appearing Real."

Now with this piece of scientific information, I can see really see where this is coming from.