Believe you can improve, and your brain will do the rest

🧠 Today in cognitive biases: The “false memory” effect describes how it’s possible to invent and “remember” a memory if asked leading questions. For example, in one study, researchers convinced participants that they had played a prank on a first-grade teacher with toy slime.
Issue #153: upcycling, locally grown bananas, and the value of incomplete plans
By Zulie @ Medium

Happy Friday! In honor of today’s mini-theme (too much info, not enough memory), let’s do a quick refresher on cognitive bias week so far:

• Conundrum #1: Humans aren’t great at dealing with info overload. Our brains filter until we’ve turned the random noise the universe is giving us into a meaningful signal.
• Conundrum #2: When we get those signals, we bend over backward to turn them into meaningful stories.
• Conundrum #3: Using those stories, we justify going for fast, quick, easy decisions over harder, thoughtful decisions.

Today, we’re talking about conundrum #4: You don’t have enough memory to remember everything important (which is why you probably can’t perfectly recall the previous conundrums), so your brain makes shortcuts. We generalize instead of remembering specifics; we rely on stereotypes; we edit our memories down to match our initial impressions or to fit the narrative we’re given.

For example, writes psychology student Dolphy Lee, in one study, two groups of participants watched a video of a car accident. Group One was asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other, while Group Two was asked how fast the cars were going when they hit each other. A week later, the groups were asked if there had been any broken glass. Overwhelmingly, the group who was asked about the cars smashing into each other recalled seeing glass, even though there was no glass.

We have unbelievably complex brains doing their best to whittle down the overwhelming amount of info out there into something we can use, and sometimes that means creating “false memories.” Counterintuitively, these shoddy memories are actually adaptive, even if they’re incorrect. Your brain tweaks memories to make all of them more accurate in general, although individual memories might be significantly off. Basically, we trade inaccurate minutiae for accurate overarching themes (which are more important to our survival long-term).

Still, it’s frustrating to realize you’ve remembered things wrong — and that, due to all the biases we’ve learned about so far, you’re perceiving a lot of things incorrectly in the first place. Is there any hope?

As we learned in Monday’s newsletter, awareness of biases actually makes those biases even stronger, whoops. But, in Buster’s words, “if we accept that we are permanently biased, but that there’s room for improvement, confirmation bias will continue to help us find evidence that supports this, which will ultimately lead us to better understanding ourselves.”

Believe that you can improve, and your brain will do the rest.

⚡ Lightning round: great, recent Medium stories in one sentence or less

• Software developer Amanda Southworth on why X and Threads can never fully replace Twitter: “People do not download apps for the features, they do it for the cultural relevance: to themselves, to others, to major events, or to patterns they may not themselves recognize.”
• Ever been suspicious of how on earth that farmer’s market stand in a U.S. city could sell “locally grown bananas?” Semi-retired writer Rocco Pendola offers a suggestion: just ask the vendor. “The best way to tell if a hospitality professional gives a damn, if a bartender cares about and understands cocktails, if a chef is passionate about what they do, if a server is actually in tune with the local area — and so on — is to ask.”
• Science communicator and podcaster Wealth Okete on how he built The Immunology in Africa podcast by not focusing on perfect plans: “Your plans do not have to be detailed or structured so long as they help you stay on track…an unstructured or incomplete plan offers far more help than no plan at all.”

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: Struggling to declutter? Try upcycling.

Like a lot of writers, I have a deep, visceral, and emotional attachment to the books on my bookshelves, even if I haven’t touched them in years. Recycling researcher Theresa Ann Story offers a thoughtful tip on how to declutter things you love: “If you’ve determined your books are beyond sharing, there’s still one more stop before hitting the recycle bin — turn old books into something useful.” She suggests hidden storage or a clock.

💭 Quiz: Cognitive Bias Redux

Here are three questions related to the cognitive biases we’ve learned about this week (for a refresher, browse previous issues of the Medium Newsletter here). If you know the answers, email us: tips@medium.com. First to answer all three correctly will win a free Medium membership.

1. You’ve decided to toss a coin 100 times. The first 75 tosses all come up tails. Every time you see tails, you’re a little more certain the next flip will come up heads. Which cognitive bias are you experiencing?
2. You have a magnificent idea for a new Medium post. You spend three months researching and drafting. You run it by a few trusted friends and colleagues, each of whom gives you notes, which you incorporate. You write 10 drafts, read the final one back to yourself, and you’re happy with it. You press “publish.” No one claps. You deem the project a failure. Name the bias you’re suffering from.
3. You work on a team designing a new type of dating app where your friends swipe for you instead of you swiping for yourself. You have a lofty mission: to make dating less lonely. Yet, for the last month, your team has been blocked by a single decision: what color the app icon should be. You’ve debated the meanings of 10 different colors and spun up a Color Committee that’s meeting weekly to discuss the way forward. What is the name for the trap your team is falling into?

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Edited and produced by Harris Sockel, Scott Lamb, & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com