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This mechanism was originally designed to improve the survival rate in the crisis-ridden primitive era. After all, in the primitive era, the most important thing was to “predict the environment” and “react”. If you question yourself today, and the world tomorrow, you are likely to have been eaten by the beast.

butIt is also this set of mechanisms that makes our brains closed and stubborn, not easy to be persuaded and changed, always stubbornly arbitrarily, digging into the corners of the horns, and deepening in the wrong direction.

It’s not just rumors, this mechanism is playing a role in every aspect of our lives, making us step by step narrow and stubborn.

I think you must have experienced this “difficult to communicate” scenario in your life:

“Why don’t you get married when you’re 30? I’m doing it for you. You don’t understand now, and you won’t be able to regret it in the future.”

“Okay, don’t fight, I know what you want to say, but I’m settled on it, everything is up to me.”

“Why are you talking for xxx? Which side of your ass is sitting on?”

And, no matter how you put the facts and reasoning, the opposite is covering your ears and not listening or not listening to me …

The essence behind these phenomena is actually the same, all of which are “stability mechanisms” at work.

However, I don’t want to discuss “how to communicate” today-I’ll leave it for later. What I want to chat with you is:

How to understand the mechanism behind this narrowness and paranoia, and how to put a “patch” on it to avoid becoming such a person.

1

Let ’s consider a question: Why does the brain prefer simple information over complex information?

The reason is very simple. In order to survive better, the brain has a characteristic: it will save as much energy as needed.

So, the simpler the information, the easier it will be absorbed by the brain-because it is “brain free” to receive. At the same time, the brain will also tend to simplify complex information, thereby reducing cognitive costs.

How to simplify it? The common pattern of the brain is to compress a piece of “facts” into a “point of view” with high information density.

Take a simple example: In this set of rules, which may subvert your three perspectives, I mentioned that behavioral geneticists have found that from the statistical data, the role played by native families in human differences The effect is almost zero. This conclusionIn two broad categories of experiments:

1) Identical twins raised separately are similar to identical twins raised together without any difference.

2) The degree of similarity between unrelated individuals who grew up together is not higher than random strangers on the street.

Also, here are two other important points:

1) In the experiment, all families were “sound” and “good”, at least above the passing line.

2) These conclusions are the laws of group statistics. For individuals, there is a lot of floating space.

But many people may not remember such complicated information, what will they do? Simplify these experiments and conclusions into:

Native families are useless for human growth.

This is a process of conversion and compression from facts to perspectives.

Then, in further communication, it may become: Do you know, Mr. L said that the original family is useless …

(I am helpless too.)

This is the first mistake we make most easily: oversimplification.

The brain has difficulty remembering complex facts, so we tend to “compress” facts into a high-density view. However, in this process, it is easy to broaden the scope of application of the point of view, causing mismatch before and after the conversion.

So, in the comment area of ​​many articles, I always see this message: “Summary” “In short” “Simply put” … I actually do n’t encourage such a way of thinking because This can easily cause “oversimplification.”

It’s hard to know if your simplification will lose information, and even harder to know how important your lost information is.

2

Next, let ’s look at the next point.

Suppose you saw a piece of news today: a celebrity scolded a reporter and hit a reporter. You may make an impression in your heart: 啧Alas, this celebrity is really incompetent.

(Let’s give this poor celebrity a name, just call him “cauldron.”)

Note that at this point, it is actually a bit oversimplified. Because you don’t know the truth, you don’t know the truth, so you make a rash decision.

But what’s more important? Your “cauldron is really incompetent” thoughts may take root in your heart (Although you do n’t realize it yourself) , over time, becomes “I don’t like cauldrons.”

Why? Because “The cauldron scolds reporters and has no quality” is still a very “complicated” message-it has details (calling reporter, no quality) .

But in life, we have a lot of things to deal with, in contrast, it is not so important. Therefore, the brain will continue to simplify it, and then simplify it.

How to simplify it? Remove the details and use more abstract and general terms to describe, that is, “I don’t like him”.

So, over time, you will form an idea: I don’t like cauldrons.

Note: The cauldron scolds the reporter → No quality → I don’t like him-this is a whole causal relationship, which we call “the chain of reasoning.”

But what happens when you form the concept of “I don’t like him”? You may have completely forgotten about “he scolded a reporter”, and just remember your “conclusive conclusion” on him.

In other words, this chain of reasoning is broken.

This is our second mistake: isolated memory.

Our ideas do not arise out of thin air. They must have incentives. These incentives are often a series of facts. But in the long run, we will forget about these incentives, leaving only the final idea, stored-this is isolated memory.

These isolated ideas may account for most of our ideas.

For example: in your heart, you always feel”House prices in City A are really cheap”-why do you think so? The reason may be that a few months ago, your friend told you that I bought a suite in the suburb of City A, the location is relatively biased and the price is very cheap.

But over time, these details are easy to lose, leaving only an isolated concept of “House prices in City A are really cheap.”

After we have formed the concept of isolated memory, even if these incentives are overturned and renewed-for example, you find that the thing that the cauldron scolds journalists is fake news-it is difficult to change our concept. Because this chain has been broken.

It is difficult for us to retrospect these ideas, and it is more difficult to re-establish the chain of reasoning to update our ideas.

3

Once a long-term, stable idea is formed, the problem comes: a very powerful “switch” is turned on.

This switch is called “confirmation bias”.

What do you mean? In short: we will unconsciously value information that is “consistent with the original concept” and ignore information that is “consistent with the original concept”.

Like the previous example. After you have formed the “I don’t like cauldron” concept, when you see positive news about him again, you may feel that these positive news are not very credible.

Similarly, if your friend tells you that he likes the cauldron; you may also lower the evaluation of this friend silently in your heart.

Conversely, when similar caustic news happens again in this cauldron, even if it is actually not very credible, you will notice and use it to reinforce your “I don’t like him” concept.

Why? Because the brain has a basic need: maintaining cognitive consistency.

What do you mean? In short: our brains have difficulty accepting “conflicts.” When two cognitions conflict, the brain feels uncomfortable, so it must resolve or alleviate the conflict by doing something.

This is the classic “cognitive disorder.”

The classic example is smoking. When a smoker smokes, his behavior is (I am smoking) and cognition (Smoking is harmful to your health) , which constitutes a conflict and causes cognitive dissonance.

How to alleviate it? Because changing behaviors is very difficult (have formed a habit) , smokers will adjust their cognition to alleviate conflicts-that is, tell themselves: Smoking is not necessarily harmful to health; this is a small probability event, don’t be afraid; the old forest next door smokes every day and doesn’t live to 85 …

Similarly, when “I don’t like cauldrons” and “cauldrons are good people,” because the former is a long-term concept, we tend to sacrifice the latter and tell ourselves “this news is not credible.”

So, once a concept is formed, it is difficult for us to change it: it is constantly strengthened, stubbornly strengthens itself, and forms a long-term, stable “belief.” This is our third mistake.

4

Is it over here? nonexistent.

Further, if we are constantly exposed to the “conflict information” environment, a stronger effect may be produced: the backfire effect.

What do you mean? If you often receive the message “The cauldron is a good person”, do you think you will change your beliefs? will not. The thoughts you are more likely to have are: These are the navy and the script you bought …

In other words: Frequent and insufficiently powerful negative information will not only change your beliefs, but will further strengthen it.

Why is this happening? Because: When a belief grows and grows in your mind, and grows stronger, it will slowly become a part of you.

You will start to use it to think about the surrounding issues, and use it as your “thinking framework”, or even as part of your personality, attitude, and worldview-this is called “internalization”.

So, what does it mean to overthrow this belief? You have to deny your own part.

This is a very painful thing.

What is the response of the brain? Activate the “defense mechanism”This situation is regarded as an “attack”, forming a “shield” around yourself to resist this denial of self.

This phenomenon will continue to grow with age.

So, the older elders around us often seem very stubborn. Believe that “tradition is good” “I am here for you” “what do you know” … this is not to blame them. The main reason is that to deny their beliefs is to deny their lives and experiences in the past decades.

That ’s why I said, The richer your knowledge system, the better it is, but the more likely it is to hinder you .

This is an internal mechanism of “maintaining stability”:

It is through this mechanism that the brain maintains our faith and survival.

5

Looking back, after understanding this mechanism, many problems were solved.

Take marriage, for example.

In the era of small farmers, the prosperity of families and human beings is particularly important. If people are not prosperous enough, they are likely to be bullied or even exterminated-but these factors are too complicated. After word of mouth, generations of people will reduce them to: Marry and have children to continue the incense.

Over time, an extremely stable concept will be formed: marriage and childbearing, righteousness.

After forming such a concept, everyone who is not married around them often belongs to a different number. Due to their unique personality, the ending is not very good. But the elders can easily understand them as: because XX does not get married, so old is nowhere to stay, miserable …

Then, if you use “freedom” to refute, it is difficult to change their minds, and it will only be considered as “challenge authority” “noObedient “” This child is not saved “.

So, the so-called “difficult to communicate” is often just because the worlds of two people are different, so the understanding of the world and the beliefs formed are also different.

It is difficult for you to ask someone to suddenly give up your beliefs for decades, to accept the impact of new ideas, to question and deny yourself.

Like ourselves, it’s hard to accept giving up what we believe in for decades.

Like in my previous articles, I have put forward some more subversive points of view. I often see “incredible”, “feeling that my world has been subverted” and “I need time to understand and accept” …

So, I often say that the purpose of argument is not to convince people-you can never allow others to change their established views in a short time.

More often, it is through exchanging information and ideas to let the two parties know that it is possible to have such an understanding, and to have such an idea.

In short: open a door.

As for closing the door, peeping out, or opening the door to go out, it will take time.

6

Finally, let’s talk. Based on the above mechanism, what can we do to strengthen the brain’s “immunity”?

1. Adapt your brain to complexity

As you can see from the foregoing, from facts to ideas, the “compression” and “simplification” are actually based on one point: Save cognitive resources.

So, if we can get into the habit of making our brains “complex,” then it won’t be easy to “oversimplify.”

Therefore, I often say: try to read as many systematic articles as possible, understand more profound thoughts, memorize more complex information, and reduce the intake of information that is effortless and effortless. Over time, the process of brain training.

What your brain looks like and how you shape and process information.

2. The chain of memory reasoning

I said before: All our ideas and viewpoints are not rootless. There must be a whole chain of reasoning behind them.

However, we often cut off this chain and only remembered the final conclusions. We forgot the series of facts, arguments and logic that support the conclusions. Thus, letting this single, solitary “conclusion” keep fluttering and constantly Generalization and extremeization.

An immediate approach is: When we receive information, we should not only remember the conclusions, but also the “facts” of the conclusions.

For example: When you read my article, do n’t just memorize the “root cause” and “method” given by me, but also remember “how these reasons come from” “the principle behind these practices” “.

In this way, we can always maintain the “accuracy” of conclusions and ideas, and keep it within a moderate and reasonable range.

3. Explore diversity

There is an “experience openness” in the Big Five personality. Different people have different tendencies. Some people like new things, and some people like to stick to rules, but in any case, one thing is the same: more exposure to different possibilities is never a bad thing.

I mentioned the “information cocoon room” many times in previous articles. How to break the information cocoon room? In fact, it does not necessarily require how strong your thinking ability is, as long as you ensure “information diversification”.

The simplest way is: don’t get information from a single source, and expand the source of information, even if you accept some repetitive, opposing information, it will be very helpful to yourself.

When your mind can accommodate more possibilities, you will not just stay in this false binary opposition of “support me” and “oppose me”.

You will see that there is not one standard solution to all problems in this world.

4. Looking at the problem from a holistic perspective

How to get rid of the “right and wrong”, “right and wrong”, “winning and losing”, and dispel the “I want to win or lose” mentality?

Let’s try to think from a holistic perspective and think about the causes and structure behind the problems and disputes that we can’t see.

When you can substitute for the other party ’s position, think about the “rationality” of the other party ’s thoughts and ideas, and seek where the other party ’s “reasonable”; When you can cast aside contradictions and conflicts, seek consensus and balance Harmony-many problems are not a problem.

This article today is a systematic review of this cognitive loophole in the brain.

I hope to encourage you to avoid becoming such a person together.

This article is from the public number: Mr. L said (ID: lxianshengmiao) , author: Lachel