Monday, 31 March 2014
Will You Be the Same Person in 10 Years As You are Now?
Our thought processes are far from being as reliable and logical as we often think they are. In reality, our brains are constantly playing tricks on us, ranging from simple optical illusions to change blindness and other cognitive biases to the illusion that the self is a continuous entity that has the experiences that make up our lives.
Scientists are discovering more and more ways in which the brain fails to operate according to the simple common sense that we would expect. One notable example is the way that we perceive ourselves over time. In this regard, a study published in the January 2013 issue of the journal Science revealed a truly strange phenomenon that the authors call the “end of history illusion”—a reference to a concept originated by the German philosopher Hegel and advanced by American thinker Francis Fukuyama in a controversial 1992 book arguing that humanity had reached the end point in its sociocultural evolution. (more…)
Memory and the Brain | Comments Closed
