Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

Is it worth spending thousands of dollars on such a piece of equipment and how should we evaluate their claims? Should we listen to anecdotal stories by other people who may be using the piece of equipment or should we require objective scientific evidence to evaluate those claims? We also use critical thinking in order to think about how we run our civilization. Our population is rapidly approaching 7 billion people and we need to make that sustainable in some way. I'm a physician. I see patients every day and I know the difficulty they go through often in making healthcare choices for themselves and for their family. We have to purchase healthcare products, decide what foods to eat, what lifestyles changes to make in order to stay healthy. All of these claims are based upon evidence and logic and we need critical thinking in order to be able to evaluate them properly. One of the premises of this course is that we are our brains. We are that three pounds of gray jelly that floats inside of our skull. The brain is comprised of about 100 billion neurons plus a lot of other cells that not only support those neurons but modify, modulate their function. The brain is in essence an organ that can think. It is an organ that is self-aware. Not only the most complicated organ that we know about, it may in fact be the most complicated thing in the universe that we know about. The brain can remember, it can feel, believe, calculate, extrapolate, infer, and deduce. It does everything that we think of as thinking. It is our universal tool and our greatest strength. Most people believe that if there's one thing that separates us or that is our greatest advantage over all the other creatures on this planet, it's our intelligence. But the brain is also strangely deceptive. It is also the root of many of our flaws and weaknesses. This course will also be exploring what we might call human nature. This may sound pessimistic but it's true that humans possess logic but we are not inherently logical creatures. We are not like the Vulcans of Star Trek mythology, right? We have emotions. So in addition to being logical, we are also highly emotional creatures. What that means is that we tend to follow our evolved emotions and rationalizations. Our thoughts follow what you might consider to be the pathway of least resistance. Not necessarily always the optimal pathway. Logic and critical thinking are therefore learned skills. While we have some inherent sense of logic, we are overwhelmingly emotional creatures. We have the capacity for logic. But logic and critical thinking are skills. We are not born as master critical thinkers. For example, we are also not born with the ability to play the violin like a concert violinist or we are not born with the skills and the experience necessary to perform well as a football player in the NFL. You should no more expect to be born a highly developed critical thinker than you should expect someone to be born a violinist or somebody who can play in the NFL. These are all skills and abilities that need to be developed over years and practiced in order to be good at critical thinking. Humans tend to make a lot of errors in thinking. Our inherent tendency, again this evolved pathways of least resistance, include a lot of flaws in thinking. Flaws in logic are one example. We call these logical fallacies. We tend to make logical connections that are not valid, that are not real. Our thinking is also plagued with many false assumptions. Our heads are filled with facts, things that we know to be true but in fact are false. Either they're just out and out wrong or they're just assumptions that may or may not be true but we really don't know. Our memories are also massively flawed. We tend to naively assume that our memories are an accurate passive recorder of what has happened when in fact our memories are plagued with numerous flaws that make them highly unreliable. And there are things that psychologists call heuristics which are down and dirty rules of thumb or patterns of thinking. They're mental shortcuts that we tend to take that may be right much of the time but they're wrong often enough that they lead us astray quite frequently.