BY DANIEL COMP | JANUARY 25, 2023
This is the Scotomaville feature in the upcoming 365 spot book on mental wellness entitled My Mind's Wellness. Learn about scotomas and a cognitive bias cheat sheet developed by Buster Benson. You can live well in U.S.A. with an understanding of WWDWWD - why we do what we do. It's a simple scotoma - something we all have!
I'm Daniel Comp. I'm the author and curator of the Scotomaville Series.
Let's think about scotomas and cognitive biases for a moment. They have everything to do with mind wellness.
You and I share defects called scotomas. We have both visual and mental blind spots. All mammals have them. Unfortunately, we don't see things the way THEY are. We see things the way WE are. And, we're a hundred percent wrong fifty percent of the time. We don't know why we do what we do (WWDWWD). That's a scotoma. It's a blind spot.
Buster Benson did a fabulous job digesting 188 cognitive biases into four ideas. You can change your mind by thinking about why you do what you do with the parameters our brain was created with or has evolved to solve:
ONE - make sense of chaos
TWO - find a pattern
THREE - conserve resources (like calories that fuel thinking)
FOUR - hurry!
Those demands result in disastrous thinking. We jump to conclusions to save energy. We do so quickly because we've seen a similar pattern in the past (like a tiger).
We're immersed in chaos, so four simple things make us 100% wrong 50% of the time. Unfortunately - our biology and psychology insist otherwise, and that is a pattern called a habit.
Put the PDF on your device - and by all means, get your butt out of Scotomaville!
"Onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat" meaning: the burden of proof is on the claimant - not on the recipient!
BY DANIEL COMP syndicated: SEPTEMBER 01, 2022 last updated: JANUARY 25, 2023