Your brain treats false beliefs like physical realities, carving them into neural pathways through dopamine rewards, repetition, and emotional reinforcement. Understanding these mechanisms can help you recognize and overcome cognitive biases.
Your brain's reward circuitry, memory systems, and social cognition are optimized for certainty and belonging—not truth. Understanding the neuroscience behind confirmation bias, false memories, and tribal thinking can help you recognize when your mind misleads you and develop strategies to think more critically.
The third-person effect is a psychological bias where people believe media influences others more than themselves. This blind spot makes us vulnerable to manipulation, fuels censorship support, and undermines media literacy efforts.
Cognitive fluency bias makes familiar information feel true, even when it's false. This mental shortcut, which once helped humans survive, now makes us vulnerable to manipulation through repeated exposure in advertising, politics, and misinformation.
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