I'm always fascinated by those examples that make you question your belief about psychology common theories of mind psychology versus neurologic ways of looking at things so the Challenger study was one in point. Many of the people's memories were inaccurate maybe only 10% more accurate in all the details and I think 25% of them had major discrepancies. The feeling of the new memory was so strongly correct that it it super vain and made it impossible to see that he might be making an error. That got me prompted in part to think about whether they're the the sense that he was certain was beyond his control which led me to think about it as a feeling state that was a sensation rather than a thought.
In this episode, we sit down with neurologist Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain, a book that fundamentally changed the way I think about what a belief actually is. That’s because the book posits that conclusions are not conscious choices and certainty is not even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing” as he puts it, are "sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason."
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