{"id":4753,"date":"2020-02-22T19:18:17","date_gmt":"2020-02-23T00:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/?p=4753"},"modified":"2020-02-22T19:18:17","modified_gmt":"2020-02-23T00:18:17","slug":"i-wish-i-didnt-know-about-mindbugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/2020\/02\/22\/i-wish-i-didnt-know-about-mindbugs\/","title":{"rendered":"I Wish I Didn’t Know About Mindbugs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d heard of mindbugs before and was always sort of freaked out by them, so I had never considered them an advantageous product of evolution. I didn\u2019t know that at least visual mindbugs were a result of the retina processing things in two dimensions instead of three dimensions and then automatically converting them into three dimensions in order for us to navigate and survive in a three dimensional world. What freaks me out about mindbugs isn\u2019t the fact that we don\u2019t realize two tables are the same size, but that it shows how much work our mind does in processing without our knowledge or active effort.<\/span><\/p>\n

Knowing more about mindbugs, it makes what I had known about eye witnesses being extremely unreliable. Our brain jumps to conclusions and fills in the gaps in our memory without us realizing it, so the likelihood that two people will remember the same event accurately and identically is extremely low. I knew implicit biases were a thing but never really considered why they existed. I assumed it had to do with the environment you were raised in or something along those lines. I had never considered that mindbugs would be part of the explanation. Since we don\u2019t know everything about an individual by looking at them, we use their appearance as a basis of sorting them into a social group and then judging them and acting upon that judgement – all subconsciously. I hate knowing that there\u2019s so much brain activity that we can\u2019t control. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d heard of mindbugs before and was always sort of freaked out by them, so I had never considered them an advantageous product of evolution. I didn\u2019t know that at least visual mindbugs were a result of the retina processing things in two dimensions instead of three dimensions and then automatically converting them into three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}