If I extrapolate from myself, there's a lot of deceit in the world without a beginning, middle, or end. The way it really works, a lot of the time, is that you suffer from the weight of what happened, from what you said and did, so you lie as therapy. Now the story you make up starts to take up space otherwise reserved for reality. For phenomena you substitute epiphenomena. Skew becomes ascendant. The secondary becomes primary. When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying.In this succinct and eloquent bit of prose, Guterson has sketched something vivid and accurate about How We Humans Work.
We are all fiction writers inside our heads. Some of the brain's circuitry actually supports this most human habit. We call the overarching tendency the bias of "blind sight"--the inability (due both to neurology and training) to overlook the way we erode the experience and memory of an event into terms we find more fitting with our own views of ourselves and how things "should" work.
We propose the notion of cognitive accuracy, in part, to counteract blind sight and the other biases it hides from us. We hope to offer insights and suggestions that help to shine a light on the "hidden layer" that embodies our learned behaviors. As we come to understand and accept the fallibility of brain-use, we can learn ways to counteract it--questioning our memories, weighing our evaluations against the best available evidence, delaying our decisions until we have consider alternatives, etc.
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