Nature of Logic Perception
Essay by review • December 5, 2010 • Essay • 347 Words (2 Pages) • 1,313 Views
Our brains are naturally influenced from handling information in a particular and somewhat automatic way. One might say that this can be a good thing as it means perception and experience is fairly fast and effortless. There are advantages to survival from these biases as they try to provide instant interpretations of the world and thus free up important resources for other things and new information which might be threatening. However, such biases do have downsides. As certain things almost always appear a certain way to us (because of inherent brain biases underlying information processing) this can lead us to conclusions and views that are very persuasive but are in fact false and incorrect. We call this cognitive biases or habits of thought. For instance, often I would play the slots at the casinos in Chicago. On a three bet game board, I would bet on one game and it turns out that the other two game boards are the winning boards. Furthermore, it continues to be the winning boards another three times as I have not chosen to bet on those individual games. As the gambler, I may still decide to stick with betting on one game board according to our natural biases knowingly it seem perfectly reasonable to assume that a sequence of winnings will occur on the one game board I’m currently betting on and I will be a winner soon. This is in fact completely untrue with my own perception; I really thought that I was eventually going to win if I just stick with betting on one slot to save money if I was to choose three bets. What was really happening was that each spin on the slot machine is a new event where the game boards have equal and fixed probability of occurring. My critical thinking process changed when I realized that no matter how much money is put in the slot machine, I was taking a chance on winning and that one cannot assume that the time to win is approaching if I just stick to the same format.
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