Yes, brains are lazy. The part of the brain where we do all rational and cognitive hard labor, the Cerebral Cortex, actually costs a lot of energy to function. That's why our default state of mind is to let the smaller primitive brain and the subconscious do most of the work, the work that's done on auto-pilot.
Image by johnhain - source: Pixabay
Like everything else in nature, our brains take the path of least resistance. This is only natural and is called cognitive ease or cognitive fluency, and is nothing more than a measure of ease with which our brains process situations or information. The easier the brain processes the information, the more likely we are to feel positive about that information. There are many ways we can see this and there are many ways our brains are eased into accepting information.
For example, everything familiar to us brings peace and and makes us feel safe. Our brains have evolved to detect danger, and anything new is a potential threat to our carefully constructed world and world-view. If you ever wondered why we're generally not too keen on change, and why our resistance to change grows while growing older, this might help you understand. You know what's also easier to process? Information that confirms our current world-view, our current ideas and ideals; we all suffer from some amount of confirmation bias because of this. When confronted with a choice between conflicting information, we're geared towards accepting that which more easily fits with what we already think we know.
This sense of familiarity, the experiencing of that which makes us feel safe and comfortable, can also be manufactured. This is done by simply repeating the message over and over again; this has been known and used in marketing on a scientific level with multinationals spending billions on teams of psychologists and behavioral experts, so they can most effectively train our brains to associate their product with that safe sense of familiarity, by repeatedly exposing them to just the right words or just the right visuals. This works, whether you're conscious of it or not, it's just how our biological mental machinery works.
This is also exactly how millions of Americans have been duped into believing that the 2020 elections were stolen; months before the elections, before the campaigns even started, Trump already claimed that the opposition would cheat. The message, repeated over and over again, was that there would be two possible outcomes: Trump wins, or he's cheated. It was worse, even; when he won the 2016 elections he still made up stories about millions of illegal votes from illegal immigrants, and that he was cheated out of a more convincing victory. The Big Lie was well prepared through the repetition of this made-up theme.
If you want more proof of this, research has shown that the more often you hear a certain song, the more you will appreciate it. Even if you didn't think anything at all about it the first time you heard it, after hearing it a dozen times you start to recognize the tune, and your appreciation of it starts to not diminish. Future stars that are designated to be that by the market forces in the music industry, will be played on the main networks and music stations on the hour; it's their way of saying "we will make you like it, whether you want to or not".
Or think about food; we train ourself to like some tastes by literally familiarizing ourself with them, often under threats of allowances being denied by our parents... The point is that we need ease of mind. We need our world to make sense and that world is actually our mental model of that world. And our mental model of ourselves in that world; this is why we feel personally attacked, when in fact only our beliefs are attacked. Now you know why that old fart down the street won't listen to reason, and stubbornly persists in the world-view that served his sense of safety and comfort for so long.
But most important of all, this is why it takes conscious effort to learn something new, or even to be willing to learn something new. Our natural confirmation bias is nowadays multiplied by external factors like commerce, search-algorithms and lying politicians. It's been made rather easy to just give up and think nothing is true anymore, that truth exists only in our own minds instead of there being an objective truth "out there". We must therefore make the conscious effort to expose our minds to differing views, ideas and ideals. To have an open mind means giving up on ease of mind a lot of the time; the mental door is one that takes effort to keep even slightly opened.
So next time when you read an article headline and think "that author must be crazy", don't immediately click away. When you search the internet, don't search for "why apples are good for you" if you're already convinced that apples are good for you, but go for the open question "are apples good for you?" Don't search for "why were Nazis socialists" but instead go for "were Nazis socialists", and you'll quickly learn they were everything but socialists. Also, when you read my posts, or anyone's posts, keep firmly in mind my confirmation bias, and the mere fact that I usually write about stuff I already formed a rather firm opinion on; so look for other articles that challenge mine. We can't escape who we are, but we're damn well able to challenge our own beliefs and convictions. It just takes some effort.
The Illusion of Truth
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