How the Brain Works (a la Ballard St)

Today's Ballard Street cartoon, by Jerry Van Amerongen, neatly sums up one view I have of how my brain works. I fondly remember how my mother used to reply to some questions with "I'm of two minds about that." As I have learned and matured, I find myself thinking, two minds, heck, I'm completely confused by the proliferation of minds I have about some things!

To help integrate Cognitive Accuracy into my daily operations and transactions, I try to recognize how "what I think" rarely, if ever, represents a clear idea, an unvarnished "truth", or even a single voice. I detect multiple layers of meaning in most things, and trying to evaluate those multiple meanings with my multiple experiences and opinions and emotional valences leads directly to "two minds", or, as the cartoonist says, some parts of me finding other parts of me crazy.

Cognitive accuracy won't change the multiplicity of meanings and levels and evaluations. But I believe that by focusing on which of those meanings more closely reflect my best, most dispassionate observations, and which offers the highest correlation with my preferred outcomes, I have the best chance of making decisions that will cause me the least amount of regret and confusion in the future. That sounds like a good thing, to me.