Our “anecdotal” brain sucks up all the sensational news a media (vying for higher ad revenues) can muster. This results in some skewed gut feelings of what we should be afraid of.
Wired’s book review of Dan Gardner’s The Science of Fear includes a quiz that is worth taking.
Scientific American Magazine - July 25, 2008
By Michael Shermer
Neuroeconomics
A new school of economists is controversially turning to neuroscience to improve the dismal science
July 22, 2008 in Mind & Brain |SciAm.com
Human evolution
Feb 21st 2008 | BOSTON
From The Economist print edition
From this article I have concluded that if you’re on a diet, you shouldn’t be looking through Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition before dinner. But if you run a restaurant, that’s a good magazine to leave in the waiting area. 
By Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience
posted: 10 June 2008 ET
From Scientific American:
Mind Matters - June 3, 2008
By Alan G. Sanfey and Luke J. Chang
Blame it on evolution — we’re not perfect! Some quotes from the article:
“Our brains have evolved to live in the moment…”
“Most pleasure springs from the ancestral, reflexive system…”
“Thinking of the brain’s pleasure system as a kluge…”
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Interesting article from Scientific American, reproduced below.
IMHO there is a part of our brain that allows us to make very quick decisions, which has to rely on short and effective heuristics to make quick decisions when there is not enough information and/or time to make rational decisions (called implicit bias in the article below). This is all done instinctively, and as such, we will never be able to get rid of it. But heuristics, although better than nothing, will often lead to erroneous conclusions due to its simplicity, so we need the rational part of our brain to gather more information and evaluate the situation properly whenever there is a chance to do so. Real prejudice and bigotry (explicit bias as they call it in the article below) stems from not performing this second step.
The article below points out that we can modify our implicit biases (that’s like creating new heuristics for the instictive part of our brain). In addition to deliberately performing that second step to make sound long-term decisions, it is in our interest to recognize our implicit biases and improve our heuristic rules to make more accurate quick decisions.
We are all discriminated against in our lives one way or another (some more than others). I think it is also in our interest to recognize this implicit bias in others (including the subconscious body language), and rather than shout discrimination immediately, give the other person a chance to bring in their rational decision making process, and maybe even help them to do so.
It’s especially important to recognize how the media influences our heuristics, and mostly in a negative way. For example, most usually form an incorrect heuristic of “it is more dangerous to fly than to drive” because plane crashes (being rare and highly newsworthy) end up on the front page of newspapers more often than the commonplace car crashes, when statistics clearly shows that flying is a lot safer than driving. So next time you see a muslim suicide bomber on the news, remind yourself to the real statistics of what an incredibly tiny percentage of muslims are actually terrorists.
Anyway, here’s the article:
By Siri Carpenter
Although it started out as a means of practising expressing myself, this blog is turning out to be more of a compendium of interesting information I come across. One of these days I’ll have to actually write something as opposed to cut and paste.
