Lecture: Cognitive Myths

Question 1

We only use 10% of our brains

Answer 1

• We use all of our brains.
• If any part of your brain gets damaged, you will suffer deficits.
• Evolution would not “waste” energy building vast parts of your brain you don’t use.
• Brains use 20% of our energy! (2% body mass)

Question 2

Why would we believe that we only use 10% of our brains?

Answer 2

• Availability Cascade
• Wishful Thinking (people like to believe in the paranormal/untapped potential)
• People want to make money from you

Question 3

What is true about the brain?

Answer 3

-People can lose whole hemispheres and still function relatively normally
-The brain has redundancy
-If we removed 70% of your neurons
randomly, we’re not sure
how badly off you’d be.

Question 4

Psychic powers are real

Answer 4

• Unfortunately, its not
• Recommended: Susan Blackmores book adventures of a parapsychologist
• There are several cognitive biases that make us believe that its real:
• Confirmation bias (noticing things that support what they already believe in)
• Neglect of negative results
• Wishful thinking

Question 5

Listening to mozart makes babies smarter

Answer 5

• We believe it because we hope its true
• The effect is small, short term, and only based on arousal.
• You can get the same effect from hearing a scary passage from a Stephen King book.

Question 6

IQ tests are biased

Answer 6

• If they were biased, they would unpredict later success for certain groups and over-predict for others. This does not happen.
• Huge panels of scientists with widely varying viewpoints concluded that they are not biased
• Item analysis is used to identify bad test questions

Question 7

Money and Happiness

Answer 7

-Money correlates with happiness until you’re making about 105k per year (in western society) then it levels off. People who are financially unstable do get more happiness from money.

Question 8

What doesnt effect happiness that much?

Answer 8

• Life events don’t affect happiness much
• Winners of lotteries and people who became paraplegic have happiness changes that only last months. When measured a year later their happiness levels are the same
• Things that do affect us: divorce, getting fired

Question 9

How much of happiness is genetic?

Answer 9

-Much of your happiness (roughly 60%) is genetic

Question 10

What are the 2 kinds of happiness?

Answer 10

• Pleasure day to day (hedonistic, e.g., sex and food)
• life satisfaction (may not be happy every moment of the journey but youre proud, working out and seeing results ).
• Last one is controversial: Meaning (children don’t make people happier but they do make their life more meaningful)

Question 11

Myth: child abuse leads to psychological disorders

Answer 11

• Single instances of abuse are very weakly correlated (.09)

- A conflict ridden home is much more likely to cause anxiety, depression, eating disorder etc.

Question 12

Myth: Artificial intelligence is a failure

Answer 12

• Moving goal posts (try to kick football through goal post but when you kick the goalpost moves, e.g., when computers could do chess, chess was no longer associated with being a genius); mysterians
• “Almost implemented”
• Our economy would probably collapse without the findings of AI researchers

Question 13

Myth: The full moon makes people act differently

Answer 13

• Confirmation bias
• The bankrupt gravity explanation: A mosquito on your arm has more gravitational effect on you. The fact that you’re mostly water has nothing to do with it

Question 14

How does science work?

Answer 14

• Generation of a theory: A theory is an explanation that typically suggests the existence of theoretical entities that cannot be measured directly
• Theories make predictions about the real world
• These predictions become hypotheses that can be tested with experiments and quasi experiments
• Experiments have control over participants and conditions. They manipulate something (gold standard)
• Quasi experiments are observations in the real world. Most political science lessons are learned from quasi experiments

Question 15

Results and statistics

Answer 15

• Hypotheses and falsifiability.
• Sig. means probably not due to chance < .05 is the typical threshold or alpha level. This means that 1 out of 20 experiments will turn out finding significance just by chance
• We cant look at a huge list of numbers and know if they are different that’s why we need statistics

Question 16

What is science as a culture?

Answer 16

• Replicability
• Sciences self correcting nature: Publishing makes it public. Other scientists will attempt to disprove your theory. This is good.
• Science as an epistemology: No other knowledge generating enterprise (e.g., religion) has a rigorous, self correcting mechanism.