The CORONA crisis – and in fact
any other personal or collective crisis for that matter - represents a golden
opportunity to notice the disintegrated dance and numerous circus parades
animated by human cacophonies and misinterpretations. As humans we have an innate
tendency towards distortions, we like them so much, we embrace them to such an
extent that they become engrained into and indistinguishable from our nature. Humanity
has always entertained a deep connection with cognitive distortions, so deep
that we have identified our beings, our lives, our careers, our friends and
even our family with them. We are made of flash and blood, neurons and synapses,
not of 0 vs. 1 dichotomies. We get animated by emotions, remember or misremember
past events, and tend to use personal experiences when interpreting new
situations. Which is fine up to a certain point; but the results of our
interpretations end up to be, well, idiosyncratic,
how else? The mere fact that some of you started skeptical about my abrupt and
critical assertions on the ubiquity of cognitive distortions, on the frailty of
human interpretations, and on the sheer popularity of various cognitive cacophonies
we all easily embrace (and sometimes refuse to let go) only prove that there is
some grain of truth in my approach.
False
beliefs or subjective undeserved trust in unsupported conclusions (the ancient name
used for what we now label as cognitive distortions) represents actually quite
an old and unresolved issue for humanity. I’ll only briefly mention a few hints
that greater minds than mine alluded to during the recorded history. Observing
the world and how humans behave in it Aristotle noticed that: "The
ignorant strongly affirms his convictions, the scholar doubts his conclusions,
and the wise man (the philosopher) reflects on what he sees." Confucius,
four centuries BC, believed that "True knowledge comes from knowing the
dimension of your ignorance." Charles Bukowski mentioned that the problem
with our world is that intelligent people are full of doubts, and others… are
full of confidence. You see, the same undeserved trust in unsupported
conclusions was noticed long before humans invented the word psychology or came
up with more objective methods designed to test apart the truth from the untruth. Nowadays we use the evolving
and complex scientific methods for that purpose, and we partially succeeded to
put aside some unsupported ideas about us as humans and about our world. But
unfortunately, science cannot remove our appetite for cognitive cacophonies
that only scream wilder in uncertain situations.
Underestimating the danger of getting
infected with CORONA and/or its possible consequences for your health could be
equally damaging as it is overestimating them and being constantly anxious and
on guard. Other cognitive cacophonies we uses more often than intended are: jumping
to conclusions, disqualify the positives, thinking in black and white terms,
mislabeling, expecting to live in a just world (fairness fallacy), to have total
control of our life (control fallacies), to exert real change on others (change
fallacies), while our decisions are biased (or primed) by unrelated anchors, by
recently activated memories, by aversion loss, by the framing of the problem at
hand. I’m not going to enter into much detail here regarding each cognitive
distortion, but if you are interested I can provide some references.[1] Daniel Kahneman, a
well-known professor from Princeton University who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002), released a book where he analyses our
thinking processes: Thinking fast and slow. Here he mentions that even experts
in their field entertain cognitive biases and make errors (which Kahneman finds
to be funny). And that’s because subjective
confidence, which is closely related to the probability of being
correct, is not a judgment, but an
emotion. If the explanation or story we made up in our minds seems well-articulated
and coherent we can’t help but feel positive about it (it feels right!) and we ascertain
higher scores for its confidence. But the problem is that we can come up with coherent
stories out of very little information that is in fact unreliable. And the
quality of the story (its credibility!)
depends little on the quality and quantity of the basic information used to
construe it. So we can be confident of our conclusions having little reasons to
support this, because confidence represents an unreliable sensor for trusting anything.
And if this story about subjective
confidence as an emotion is not enough, I could add another argument that relates
to how our memory works. It was proven that when we think of past events we don’t
just retrieve the information from memory (as a video tape would do), but we rather
reconstruct it from the raw materials that are the most accessible for us at
that moment, and our reconstructions are, obviously, not accurate. You don’t
have to believe me for that thesis, just read Daniel Schacter’s book The Seven Sins of
Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. And
just as another example, neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin described memory as
"a puzzle with many missing pieces. We rarely retrieve all the pieces and
our brains fill in the missing information with creative guesses, based on
experience and patterns of matching. This lead to many unfortunate missrecollections,
often accompanied by the stubborn belief that we are recalling accurately. We
cling to this missrememberings, storing them to our memory bank incorrectly,
and then retrieve them in a still-incorrect form and with a stronger
(misplaced) sense of certainty that they are accurate" (see Successful aging Ch. 2 Memory and the sense of "you", p. 33)
So these cacophonic distortions
seem to have been part-and-parcel of human cognitive processes long before I
was born and will probably continue to be so long after I will stop typing
about them. Any attempt to correct-them-all
and to be totally-free is such an impossible
endeavor that even perfectionistic champions, with little to no tolerance for
their ambiguity, end up exhausted and finally surrender to their continuous
attacks. That’s because attempts to get free-of-ALL-cognitive-distortions
are simply vain and futile. We are not entirely helpless in this fight, that’s
true; and we can mend a few cacophonies here and there. We can identify our
most common cognitive distortions and try to decatastrophize them, we can
differentiate facts from opinions or hypothesis (and eventually test our
hypothesis), we can be skeptical about our own conclusions, we can learn to discern
and rely on scientific evidence (and not on subjective confidence), and we can
understand how culture, education, religion and experience have shaped our
world-view. But compared to the sheer number of distortions assaulting us on a
daily basis, it’s like one gun-man fighting an entire battalion of Chinese
army. If the gun-man is motivated and smart enough, he can put down a few
caporals. But the continuous nature of the fight (i.e., our incessant cognitive
processes) makes his job unsustainable. While on duty, the gun-man has to eat,
sleep, talk to his friends, make love, raise his children, buy groceries, satisfy
his hobbies, enjoy the weekend, and go on vacations. Not to mention his frequent
attention slips and long boredom intervals while actively watching. And any
breaches are immediately speculated by one or more of the cunny cacophonic
soldiers or caporals who risk their lives to sneak in and do their filthy job. In
time, these soldiers (and sometimes even generals) end up moving inside and
having a permanent residence in our minds. That’s how cognitive distortions got
so ingrained in the myriad of information processes entertained daily by our
brains, representing such a core part of our imperfect cognitions that the only
way we can stop-them-all is to stop our thinking process all together. Somber
as it may be, if we were to preserve our cognitive functions we have no choice
but to accept their less-than-perfect functionality as an inescapable fact of
life, and get on with it.
[1] Cognitive
distortions: when your brain lies to you - here you have a written
description of some cognitive biases and some solutions, and 30 cognitive biases and
psychological misjudgments - here you could watch a more comprehensive list
of cognitive biases released at the beginning of the CORONA pandemic