I left the recorder.
The brain makes countless cognitive errors as a result of its complexity. Most everyday forgetfulness is normal.
Is our brain failing?
Yes, and even more so considering how we live today: handling and managing a lot of information at high speed.
We are unable to remember in which corner of the house we left our glasses.
Because we have automated a very important part of the activities we do, and that implies that the minimum attention necessary to form a memory has not been deployed.
Sometimes we make up where the keys are and we go there again and again.
The brain has become an organ specialized in making predictions. The world we see is not a reality, it is an anticipation of reality, and the memories we construct are not a photo of what was but a reconstruction based on the probability of what happened. A large part of our memories are false.
What do I have to do to get the word off the tip of my tongue?
Stop looking for it and it will come. It is the TOT phenomenon, a failure in retrieving stored memory, very common.
Better to change the subject?
It often seems to us that this word begins with a letter, but that will not take us to the word, it is better to let the system act as it has been formed: automatically.
What happens to us behind the wheel that we become beasts?
We use a lot of cognition while handling something that is potentially lethal. Our primitive brain designed to survive can lead us to be hyperreactive and the slightest thing that happens to you, you go off.
Do hunches exist?
Yes, the human brain uses information, sensations and experiences preconsciously, which provide a type of information to the nervous system, which sets in motion a series of sensations that help us make decisions without knowing it.
Don’t they pass by reason?
No. If a guy in a red shirt hit me and I don’t even remember, but one day I’m walking down the street at night and someone in a red shirt appears, something will tell me to change sides. That’s the hunch.
Is the same thing happening with intuition?
Yes, they are those types of sensations that make us anticipate something for no reason. “I better not go in here,” intuition tells us. And it works because as a neurobiological process it exists, they are signals from the body that the brain uses to make us decide.
Between reason and emotion, who wins the battle?
It is very easy for emotion to take over reason, the number of neurons that go from emotion to reason is much greater.
Is it time to invest it?
These are billions of years in an environment that is nothing like today’s.
What about supernatural experiences?
They are fascinating, and the phenomenon exists. They are experiences that have been told forever and in any culture, but there is a more or less deterministic explanation.
What is that explanation?
We explain some phenomena as biases or cognitive errors when reconstructing memories, and in other cases we know that something has failed at the brain level that has triggered the experience of having seen a ghost, coming out of one’s own body, speaking an unknown language or live experiences of stasis.
Tell me.
In Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies, it is very common for affected people to experience this type of hallucinations and they can even appear years before the disease has been diagnosed.
There are mentalists who help the police find missing people.
They don’t find them. Confirmation biases make us tend to forget what has not provided a result and remember what has.
What is one of the most terrifying phenomena we can experience?
Sleep paralysis. It usually happens during the transition from wakefulness to sleep: you wake up and feel like you can’t move a single part of your body. That in itself is scary, and perceptual experiences are usually added to it that add very supernatural and terrifying nuances.
What type?
You may have the impression that there is an evil presence in the room, see it and, not infrequently, have the real sensation that there is a being on your chest that prevents you from breathing. It is a normal thing that happens to healthy people and affects half of the population. It happened to me. Scary.
