Two excellent resources: “Your Deceptive Mind” and “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe”

I am a fan of Dr. Steven Novella’s work as well as his fellow skeptics.

The first title, “Your Deceptive Mind” is a course created by Dr. Novella that takes a critical look at how our mind filters and creates our thought processes as well as ideas and beliefs about the world and issues we find important.

As you know from your own life experience, human perception and cognition is highly fallible. This is troubling. Our minds create our own sense of reality based on the way our brains are structured, how we perceive information from the physical world through our senses and how our brain filters this, cognitive biases, habitual patterns of thought, beliefs, opinions, our untrustworthy memory that reinterprets events as well as many other factors. There are a lot of factors, this is an incomplete list.

In his course Dr. Novella makes it clear that the solution is to be aware of how our mind is deceptive, and engage the world with critical thinking skills and a healthy acceptance of humility. We should assume we are wrong and periodically check what we know as new information comes in. You should assume that you are the easiest person to fool.

Overall, the course is excellent. The only thing that could be added would be a few lectures from the perspective of modern psychology as this is relevant and highly useful information.

His book “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe” covers similar ideas but it is also worth reading.

What is difficult though about conceptualizing these concepts and keeping them in mind is that the number of ideas covered as well as the extent that our mind can play tricks on us is a very large topic. There are numerous ways that our thinking can go wrong. All the more reason to be aware of this.

Some more resources:

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe (a weekly science podcast)