{"id":685,"date":"2010-11-28T15:38:23","date_gmt":"2010-11-28T22:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=685"},"modified":"2010-11-28T15:38:23","modified_gmt":"2010-11-28T22:38:23","slug":"brain-1-history-and-thanksgiving-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/?p=685","title":{"rendered":"Brain 1 – History (and Thanksgiving) 0"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been plowing through a stack of books about the brain … how we process information, store it, understand it, and incorporate that information into our lives.\u00a0 There’s no shortage of them.\u00a0 The brain and its vagaries are hot topics, especially if you are in the behavioral marketing or communications sciences (that would be me).\u00a0 I just finished a great read by Robert Burton<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 It was the title that got me:<\/p>\n

“On Being Certain:\u00a0 Believing your are right even when you’re not”<\/p>\n

Of course he wasn’t talking about you and me.\u00a0 To steal the tag line from the late Senator Long, he was talking about “the person behind the tree”.\u00a0 You and I … well, we’re sure we’re right.\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n

Wrong.<\/p>\n

Fact is, what we THINK happened in the past likely did not … at least not in the way we think.\u00a0 We didn’t party as much (or as little) as we think we did in high school and college.\u00a0\u00a0 We weren’t as cool (or dopey) as we thought we were in our twenties.\u00a0 And that summer road trip wasn’t as fun and bizarre (or mind stultingly boring) as we imagined.<\/p>\n

Indeed … the road trip may not have even happened!<\/p>\n

Fact is, after you finish reading Burton’s book you begin to rethink everything about what you think you know.\u00a0 Because according to him a good chunk of it is something we made up along the way.<\/p>\n

Burton explores the ‘hidden layer’ of the brain that enables us to – among other things – reinterpret history.\u00a0 It is this subconscious layer that makes us certain about things that either allows us be certain about things that are either (a) dead wrong; or (b) didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>He gives the example of Ulric Neisser<\/strong><\/a>‘s famous Challenger explosion study.\u00a0 Ulric, a professor and psychologist, the day after the Challenger study asked his students to write down the details of that day.\u00a0 Two and a-half years later he asked them again and guess what.\u00a0 In a mere 30 months less than 10 percent told the same story.\u00a0 A quarter of the participants told a ‘strikingly different’ story.\u00a0 Most interesting was this – when shown their own original account many clung to the ‘new version’ of history.\u00a0 As told by Burton:<\/p>\n

“Many expressed a high level of confidence that their false recollections were correct, despite being confronted with their own handwritten journals.\u00a0 The most unnerving was one student’s comment, ‘That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m imagining it is why all those politicians – both left and right – say stuff about themselves that isn’t true.\u00a0 Maybe it is why Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have – as noted recently in the New York Times<\/strong><\/a> – created their own myth about the origins of Thanksgiving and the demise of American socialism and rise of American capitalism.<\/p>\n

Doesn’t have much to do with truth.\u00a0 But for them it has become their reality.\u00a0 The past is metastasized, digested and recast.\u00a0 And viola!\u00a0 Out pops a new reality.<\/p>\n

This is a sad reality for people like me that are in the communications business.\u00a0 Every day someone can wake up and decide that they are going to change history.\u00a0 Their ‘hidden layer’ is going to process the next wave of information and decide that you’re no longer cool.<\/p>\n

Shoot, they may even decide that you are downright evil (e.g. you may have THOUGHT that those Pilgrims were nice folks yearning for religious freedom in funny hats but in reality they were communist, collectivist, fascist zealots that were only saved when unshackled from their socialist roots and given a heavy dose of capitalism and an across-the-board tax cut.)<\/p>\n

Seems we have to work hard just to keep history the same.<\/p>\n

Doesn’t leave much time to make for a better future.<\/p>\n

\n

Fact is, what we THINK happened in the past likely did not … at least not in the way we think.\u00a0 We didn’t party as much (or as little) as we think we did in high school and college.\u00a0\u00a0 We weren’t as cool (or dopey) as we thought we were in our twenties.\u00a0 And that road trip wasn’t as fun and bizarre (or mind stultingly boring) as we imagined.<\/p>\n

Indeed … the road trip may not have even happened!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been plowing through a stack of books about the brain … how we process information, store it, understand it, and incorporate that information into our lives.\u00a0 There’s no shortage of them.\u00a0 The brain and its vagaries are hot topics, especially if you are in the behavioral marketing or communications sciences (that would be me).\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,1],"tags":[151,8,10,94,96,81,95,156],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jerrysjuicebar.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}