The brain has no dead ends to deceive you

See how hard it is to see yourself!

A lot of people have a magical mirror in their homes, and in front of this mirror, people are always bright-eyed and beautiful, and half of their selfies are done here. But there are other mirrors in the world that are twisted and evil, and often make people wonder if the person in the mirror is themselves, such as the mirror that is inadvertently glimpsed when they are not ready, or the lens of someone else's mobile phone.

So, which one is the real self? When we look at ourselves and our eyes freeze in an instant, what we see is actually a slice of ourselves. From this point of view, if we think of our overall evaluation of ourselves as a dimension, then the slices that we evaluate are low-dimensional projections based on this dimension.

Obviously, no matter which low-dimensional projection, it cannot replace high-dimensional judgment. This is why we often find ourselves: both confident and inferior; both extroverted and introverted; both afraid of loneliness and enjoying quiet; fearless and timid and cowardly. We can't tell which of our real selves is, because we're thinking about things with sliced thinking.

Someone asked Thales what was the hardest thing to do, and Thales replied, "See for yourself. "Seeing ourselves is probably the hardest thing in this world, because we are human beings, and we are human beings who produce all kinds of emotions at any time: happiness, sadness, anger, shame... And once a person has an emotion, he will persuade the brain to hide his true intentions in order to maintain or get rid of a certain emotional state, such as feeling happiness and wanting to continue to feel happiness, trying pain and wanting to get rid of pain immediately. So the brain will create a series of false instructions for you to achieve the goal, such as self-deception and so on. Over time, we're really going to take this false thought directive as real. Therefore, as long as they are human beings, they must not be able to correctly understand themselves. Fortunately, we can adjust the degree of correct cognition through certain cognitive training.

Our brains are very stubborn a lot of times, it has nothing to do with right or wrong, it's just stubbornness. This will be more obvious in people who have a strong "sense of self". We often refer to this stubbornness as the "confirmation bias." Simply put, when you have formed a certain preconceived position in your mind or when you tend to get a certain result, you are more likely to unconsciously deviate from "fairness" on the way to searching for evidence. We often say that the first cause effect, the halo effect, etc., are all manifestations of confirming deviations at certain moments: I have preconceived notions that you are good, then you look good at everything; I see that you are dressed properly, clean and beautiful, then you should be clean and neat when you do things. These are all ways in which the brain deceives people.

Looking for positive evidence of an existing position in the mind seems to be an innate skill for us because we have a nature to reinforce our sense of self. At this point, whether you're a psychologist or a sociologist, no matter how much relevant systemic knowledge you have, it's hard to get rid of it completely.

One psychologist conducted an experiment to test whether "people, under the intimidation of authority, will continue to be kind to cruel orders, or will they become ruthless." The kind psychologist believes that human nature is good, so he sets up a scene in which he randomly selects a group of experimental subjects and asks them to punish a person who has done something wrong by using electric shocks. After the experiment, he found that people were indeed very kind, and most people were unmoved in the face of the wrong orders of authority. At this time, a friend who had the opposite opinion set up the same scene, and the results of the experiment were very different, and most of them were ruthless, constantly electrocuting the person who had done something wrong under the orders of authority.

Why do the same experiment have very different results? Maybe even they themselves don't realize that they've laid down a preconceived position about experimentation before the experiment. When the psychologist selects experimental subjects, although he has tried to be random, his subconscious will still help him pick some people who seem to be more kind, while his friends will "randomly" pick some people who seem to like more pranks. In the end, the result naturally went in their preset direction. There are many ways in which the brain deceives people, and if there is no scientific method to verify, such as double-blind tests, control experiments, etc., we will be completely deceived by it in many cases. What's even more amazing is that we probably never realize that we're being deceived, because we're "happy" to be deceived from the bottom of our hearts. And the reason why we don't really recognize ourselves is because we prefer the one we created to our real selves.