Humans inherently pass judgments, yet wisdom is essential to make intuitive judgments that differentiate good decisions from superior ones in the realm of sound value judgments. Recognizing that possessing sound judgment is distinct from being judgmental is crucial.
A notable difference exists between those who habitually find faults in others and those who do not. This tendency often signals a negative worldview towards the self and others. Commonly, individuals who perceive themselves negatively tend to judge others harshly, a phenomenon known as “measuring down.” This approach allows individuals to avoid holding themselves to a higher standard by focusing on the perceived deficiencies of others.
Measuring down essentially means descending into judgment, where one scrutinizes others to find solace in the thought, ‘At least I’m not like them.’ It acts as a mental defense mechanism to maintain an emotional equilibrium, often at the cost of recognizing the inherent goodness and potential in others. This widespread tendency leads some to excel in identifying flaws, neglecting the richness and complexities of human nature.
Understanding our own actions and attitudes, much like unraveling the mysteries of phenomena such as Bigfoot or UFOs, presents a daunting challenge. With its vast and complex landscape, the human mind offers infinite opportunities for exploration and understanding, yet it often struggles with comprehending personal behaviors and relationships.
Moreover, the reasons behind consistently poor decision-making can be as elusive as the passage of neutrinos through solid matter without interaction. We often assign meanings to various objects, ideas, and beliefs without possessing adequate knowledge to understand them fully. This leads us to justify rather than verify due to our brain’s inherent nature as a self-organizing patterning system.
Rather than acting as a scientist seeking truth, our brain functions more like a press secretary justifying pre-existing decisions—a process I refer to as neural gap-filling. This automatic mental process fills gaps between what we think we know and what we actually know when there is insufficient information to make a well-informed decision.
For instance, the human brain creates functional patterns from childhood, learning how to dress by copying memorized sequences. This mechanism conserves energy and maximizes efficiency, which is essential since the brain consumes significant energy even for unconscious activities.
Consider the challenge of deciphering scrambled sentences or numbers. The ability to quickly interpret these reflects the brain’s capacity to recognize familiar patterns, a skill honed over a lifetime.
Let’s experiment. Read the sentences below and see if you can decipher it.
“Tihs si wyh uyo cna esaily raed htsi snetnace. Is’t al5o wyh y0u can raed nmuebrs as wrods.”
After reading the scrambled sentence above, your brain may struggle initially, but it will soon figure out what to do with the words in the disoriented patterns above. Why? Because you have memorized word and sentence patterns throughout your life. It’s a form of sight wording. The words “the” and “psyche” are sight words. Sight words do not sound the same as they are written. “Sister” is not a sight word because each letter can be sounded aloud to form the word. For this reason, we are forced to memorize the words that don’t make phonic sense when we sound them out phonically using our alphabet.
Your home computer does something similar. When you visit a website, the images on that website are auto-cached to your hard drive — they are stored locally for quick accessibility. This way, your computer can access the images more readily and efficiently, thus saving energy and time. When your computer accesses a website, rather than finding the images and downloading them repeatedly, it directly accesses the cache — the images stored on your local hard drive.
Similarly, our cognitive processes handle personal ideas, concepts, and beliefs by storing pre-existing “ideas” in the brain’s conceptual cache, allowing for quick retrieval and application. This distinction between belief and knowledge is crucial; while we can imagine various scenarios or outcomes, actual experience shifts these from abstract to concrete.
Predictions and beliefs are often based on past experiences and expectations stored within our brain’s organic cache. For better or worse, we use the same thinking strategy as a computer regarding personal ideas, concepts, and beliefs. Despite evidence to the contrary, we tend to cling to our beliefs—a cognitive bias known as confirmation bias—making it challenging to alter our viewpoints once established. We fill in the gaps with already-stored “ideas” on our brain’s hard drive. This natural defense mechanism underscores the complexity of the human mind’s struggle to navigate and interpret the myriad aspects of existence.
What we believe about things is different from what we know about them. For example, you can imagine anything you want about me, whether true or false. You might imagine what Debbie will wear to the party, yet when she shows up in something else, you seamlessly switch to knowing how she’s dressed. Your idea moves from abstract to concrete. Predictions are our mind’s way of playing the odds based on our experiences and expectations.
I can predict what shirt a friend will wear when I visit him. I’ll be right more than half the time. In the same way, beliefs are “pet” ideas based on our internal life narratives stored within our brain’s organic cache system. You could say that beliefs are what we imagine “should be” or what we think something “ought to be” based on our experiences without objectively knowing or understanding it concretely.
Our mind’s natural defense mechanism is to hold the fort. We hold on to our beliefs, even if they are proven wrong with facts. This is known as confirmation bias, and it is difficult to change our minds once we have formed a belief. No matter how much evidence is presented to contradict our beliefs, it is difficult for us to let go of them. So, this is why our minds hold the fort.