 So now, on this lecture, I'm going to get to the thinking processes that get us into trouble. They're also the same thinking processes that make us what we are, make us so successful. And I'll just focus on one of the many, many systems that psychologists have developed over the years for talking about two different systems of thinking. They don't quite map onto each other, but they're close enough so that there's always one system that is more primitive that we share with the other animals. It's early in our revolutionary history, and it's an autonomous system. They sometimes call it System One. It's an automatic system. It's a system that's triggered by things in the environment. It doesn't need any conscious thinking, stuff like that. And through revolution, probably, we didn't have the luxury to spend time thinking and doing scientific type thinking and deliberate thinking. So we share with the rest of the animal world this system whereby most of what we do is triggered by things in the environment. We don't have to think about it. It's just automatic. And in fact, some psychologists have actually studied another phenomenon, and it's controversial, but they say that most of what we do, that we think we are consciously doing, we are not. We are confabulating. We automatically have done something before we decided what to do. It's been triggered by things in the environment. And we make up a story, convince ourselves that we deliberately did that. It's called Confabulation. There's a lot of good evidence for that, but it's very disturbing to many people, so it gets into a whole free will controversy and so on. But so anyways, everyone agrees that we have something called this automatic system. There's two things about it. Parts of that system is hardwired, so that a lot of things are instincts, we might want to call them things like that, that automatically are like a reflex, like knee reflex and stuff like that. But there are things that we do that trigger that built in and wired in. But other things that aren't wired in aren't instinctive originally. We can automate by practice, like driving a car, for example, just a standard example. When we first learn to drive a car, we have to pay attention with our conscious mind and think about each step and we can't think about anything else. It's easily disrupted. But after some years, actually after a while, it becomes automated and it's now not part of our conscious system. We drive and do all kinds of other things. So that's what's called the system one. And then there's the second system, which apparently comes around quite late in our history. And it only makes sense to have such a system to override the system when we have time to think, when we don't have to react all the time to immediacy of what's around us. And that's called different names. But I like Keith Stanovich's particular way of putting this. Lim was fiscated on others, but he's done a lot of work and his colleagues. And he does take into account all the other ways of looking at it and then has his own way of putting all this together. So this thing, we can look at this particular, this is one example. This is from one of Keith Stanovich's, Keith Stanovich, by the way. A most interesting book of his books. He's written several books. But one of the earliest books, which is a paper bag, very well worth reading. It's called Who is Rational? Wonderful title. And it's an excellent book. Another book, there's actually, I'm going to recommend three books right now of his. What intelligence tests miss, basically. What they don't take into account. And excellent there, because it makes a distinction between being intelligent and being rational. Being smart. And two aren't the same thing. And a third book of his is in a different genre. It's called Critical Thinking. How to think critically about psychology. But actually it's a good general book about critical thinking in general. It's in its 10th edition now. And I highly recommend those. And later I'll give some other recommendations. In fact, on the course guide, we will have some further recommendations. The one thing I want to say again, emphasize again, the limitations of these books. There are a lot of good books in rational thinking. It's a big field now. And again, to my taste, they undervalue the importance of having good information begin with in the first place. They teach you how to think about the information you have. But they don't quite teach you well enough how to make sure the information you have is worth thinking about. And that's very important. And that's what the key bending was all about too. It was to get, to emphasize that unneeded observation, we're going to give you data, but that data is contaminated and it's going to contaminate your mind. So in order to have uncontaminated data and uncontaminated mind-ware, you want to know what is good data and how to make sure you get that before you waste your time thinking about it. Okay, so this is from, I think, one of his later books. We've got four or five books there, look at Amazon.com. This is one of his break-ups. This is Type 1 processing, sometimes it's called, or System 1, is the autonomous mind. And this is the mind I've been talking about that's automatic. That's what we, through evolution, we share with all other animals. It's the one that's triggered by things in the environment. It's automatic. Now, the Type 2 processing, which other people just have another system called System 2, and that's what Kahneman and his book on fast and slow thinking, this is the fast thinking because it's fast. You can handle a lot of things at once. It doesn't use many what we call cognitive resources. This is a very limited resource system, the Type 2 processing, and it can only handle one thing at a time, basically. You can only think one thing at a time when you're working at a system. So the problem is that, by the way, and the System 2 can override many times this thing. That protects us from doing a lot of stupid things sometimes. So there can be an override of System 2 Type 1 processing. We don't always do that, but sometimes it's worthwhile to do that. Now, we have something else here I've got to point out, is that there are people who make a big deal about something called mindfulness and mindlessness. And a psychologist has made a big deal about it, and she's written several books about it. And most of what she has to say is worthwhile. But in a sense, there are problems. Because being mindful means you're using this Type 2 processing. Remember, Type 2 processing is very, very labor-intensive. In other words, it's very cognitively costly. It takes a lot of resources, and you only can handle one thing at a time with it. And so you want to be careful how you apply this. You want to allocate it to important things. And so if you try to be mindful about everything, you're going to be just like the cockroach, I mean the centipede, who, when you get it to think about how it walks, it suddenly can't walk, and move each of the 100 legs, okay? So this is the problem with, you can't be mindful about everything. You've got to know how to allocate your resources, as I would say. So that's important to keep in mind. So you can't be, but because of that, these limitations, it's a real sphere limitation. This mind here, which works automatically and stuff like that, doesn't take much resources, and you can just do it without having to think. This later system, it does take a lot of resources, and it takes time to apply, but you can't apply it too much. And as I said, it's pretty clear that this system developed later in the life of humans when they didn't, they had some leisure time, which mostly they didn't have. They had to act immediately. They didn't have time to sit and think and do scientific experiments in the old days, but in the last few hundred years or so with the scientific revolution stuff, people had more time, and they can now devote time to long-term thinking and slow thinking, as it's called. But many people revered that kind of thinking, but it's the two together that's important. Sandwich breaks us down the type two and the two types of systems. I won't go into much detail about it. But the algorithm mind basically corresponds to, I'll simplify it, to intelligence, basically. What's called the fluid intelligence. It's the fluid intelligence. There's two kinds of intelligence we think. One kind of thing that tells the test of measuring are things, knowledge, that you should know, but you learned. If you've ever taken an intelligence test, you know, some of the things you're asking questions about facts, that's something you have to learn. But the other parts of the test are supposed to be testing things that have nothing to do with content, the facts that you know, but how you, you know, your ability to handle it, to think logically or do other things like that. And so that's called the fluid intelligence. It's the kind of which where it's not dealing with the facts you accumulated, but how you can do things. And so this is called, but it corresponds to what roughly intelligence tests measure here. But as he makes a distinction, which other people don't make, is that you got to have a different kind of mind, a third system called reflective mind. And reflective mind is the kind of, is the thing of, it has more to do with what I would call disposition rather than, the algorithm mind is talking about a capacity, your ability, your capacity to handle certain things, to deal with certain amount of information, to handle so much information in short term memory. These are what we call, these are things that are, have to do with capacity. But having the capacity to do something doesn't mean you're going to do it, use it that way. So you may have a lot of intelligence, that's the algorithm mind, you may be very good at it, you may have a, many people do, but that doesn't mean you're going to use it correctly. And how you dispose of it becomes more of a temperamental or dispositional thing. So what's, he, to some extent I think he's right, what Stanovich says, we got to separate rationality from intelligence. And that's what his book on what intelligence tends to don't measure. Toljens says don't measure how you're going to dispose of this. You're, you're, you're, and it's a matter of a disposition, your attitude towards wanting to get the things right, wanting to get this right. Now, with that kind of a system, I'm going to go on to here, I'm going to show you something. He does something fascinating to me, because this is what I meant, why I'm interested in reading this stuff and knowing this stuff, is he develops a, this is, this is the one I want to use here, okay. Can we, can we read that? It's, it looks complicated, but let me show you what he's doing here. He's trying to make attacks on me in all the different ways we can go wrong. Which is fascinating. He's trying to develop measures of this too, which no one's ever done before, you know. So this is a big project he has. And basically he breaks things down first into two different things, the cognitive miser and the mind-ware problems. The cognitive miser is a system of where it means that because the system is so hard to use, the system, this reflective mind, you have to think about it, you have to deliberately use it, you know. As I said, it's cost, it's cognitively demanding. So there's a tendency to not override, to let, to rely on your type one processing, your intuitions or whatever you feel like, rather than sit through and work it through. Let me give you one problem to demonstrate this. Here's a couple of problems, but this, this one here is, here we are, here we are. You've got to get the system right here, okay. Let's look at the first one. I think let's do all three problems, because they all relate to what kids see at Santa which is talking about. How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark? Now, do you have a, what's your first reaction? No, okay. But most people, many people, many people, many people don't get that. It's called the Moses problem. But if you say how many people of each kind did Jesus take on the ark, most people really, they realize it was Noah, right? But if you get Moses or some other people, because it's close enough, most people overlooked it, they overlooked that and they're focusing on the ark and how many were taken in, so they all say two. But you're different, you're not disposed that way. But this is something, this is a, here's a case where you have to override system one thinking. System one thinking just automatically is triggered by ark and something close to Noah, you know, Moses, you know, biblical stuff. And so the answer to comes out automatically into those situations. Your cognitive system, if you stop to think about it with system two, you realize that it wasn't Moses, you know. You have to stop and think about that. So it's a treat. Okay, here's another one. Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? And you're given three simple choices. Yes, no, or cannot be determined. Think about it for a while and... What's that? See. See, okay, how many people say see? Okay, this is the most common reaction. And it shows that you're kind of... It's a married Jack is married. And because people don't know Anne's situation, they still feel that's indeterminate, right? But okay, let's go through step by step now. Okay, Jack is looking at Anne. Jack is married, right? Okay, so Jack is looking at... We don't know whether Anne is married or not, right? But let's pretend. Let's first pretend that Anne is married, okay? Okay, if we pretend Anne is married, how does this come out? It shows Jack... Then yes. Okay, let's pretend Anne is not married. Let's say she's not married, okay? We have to work it out now. If it is married, and if she is married... No, no, that's the... If she's not married. I'm looking at an unmarried person. But Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Oh, no. Okay, well, as long as... This is called a destructive thinking type of problem. Very difficult, and it's a purely... A type 2 type of processing. A reflective mind type of thing. But the problem is that the simplest way of reacting to it... It's almost a type 1 reaction. You don't know what Anne is, so it's a... But the question is not whether Anne... It's not Anne. It's a married person, okay? But you can look at it both ways. Just assume Anne is married, okay? If Anne is married, Jack is looking at a married person. But Anne is a married person looking at an unmarried person, right? Okay, is that right? Okay, now let's say Anne is unmarried, okay? If Anne is unmarried, then Jack is looking at an unmarried person, right? So a married person is looking at an unmarried person. Right, in both cases. Whether she's married or not, either way, there's going to be an unmarried person... A married person looking at an unmarried person, right? And that's called disjunctive thinking, very hard, but you only can do it through a type II processing. But this is a very powerful one because most, almost everyone goes, and it was none here, only one person did not raise their hand. Everyone went for C here, even here. That's right. And it's because of the, so this is just a prime example of measuring a type II thing and it's a cognitive miser type of situation. It shows that we tend to be cognitive miser. It's easier to just assume, take for granted that we don't know anything about the answer to the thing is undetermined, okay? And then now this one is, this comes from Kahneman, who got the Nobel Prize. So you want to pay attention. You may get an Nobel Prize, too. Okay. But it's an old one, I used to use it for years in my class, too. A watch and a watch band cost $110 in total. The watch costs $100 more than the band. How much does the band cost? What's your first reaction? Most people, your first reaction is going to be what? Ten dollars. Okay. But then if you stop and do what most people don't do, but it's a type II process, you go back and look to see what your, it's a type I reaction to say 10 because, you know, $110 and $10 for the band, that's the difference of $10. So that's a type I reaction, it's immediately say 10. But the type II thing is to go back and look over that now. It's 60. It's not 60, I think about, it's going to be something like 95 and 5, I think, right? Yeah, because what happens is if you say 10, the answer can't be done, it can't be right, you go back and then look, check it out. And again, it's a type II thing to go back and check out a type I reaction. Can you walk through that answer? Yeah. There's a moment to figure it out. Okay, the way I did it, by the way, would do it, but going because I have the right mind where, I will use simultaneous equations. But that's not the way most people do it because they're not going to think of simultaneous equations, right? It doesn't cost five dollars. Yeah, but the way they think about it though is this, you want to say, everyone wants to say $10, right? But if they say $10, then you add it up, it's not going to add up to $110, right? So you've got to adjust it and then you can do it and then you can do it just without knowing simultaneous equations, you can just play around and do it. Most people can get down to $95, I think, and 5, 5. Well, 100 plus 10 is 110. 100 plus 10 is 110, yeah. But 100 more, but $100 is not 100. 100 more than 10 is 110. 100 more than 10 is 90. Oh. It used to be. No, 100 more than 10, 100 more than 10. Right. You got it now? Okay. Anyone got it? That is so good. Okay, so these are simple problems. They get an abnormal price for you, you know? Kind of got an abnormal price for things like that, right? For things. Okay, so this gives you a little bit of the flavor of type 1, type 2 thinking, and so on. Another part of it, which I think is important for other reasons, some people heard of Sherlock Holmes, I guess. And by the way, I find Sherlock Holmes very fascinating, I've always been fascinated by Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle was the epitome of a split personality in some ways, I guess. His detective, Sherlock Holmes, I've read the whole, everything, and there's only two times in the whole canon of Sherlock Holmes stories where there's a paranormal situation comes up and each time Holmes debunks it. The guy who writes Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, was the other way completely. He believed in everything. In fact, twice Sherlock Holmes is killed off in the stories. And some people theorize that this was the part of his, of him, Sherlock Holmes was the rational part of him that kept blocking his desire to believe completely and all kinds of crazy stuff, theories and so on. And so some people speculate, that's crazy psychology perhaps, but they speculate that his killing off Sherlock Holmes was to get rid of this one thing that's inhibiting believing 100% and all the stuff he wants, that's the logical part of him. So twice he did kill him off and he had to bring back because of popular outcries. But anyways, this is one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. I think this is the Hound of the Baskerville. I think it is. No, the Silhouettes Blade, I'm sorry. Is there any other point to which he wishes to draw my attention? To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime. This is Sherlock Holmes talking about that. And Watson says, the dog did nothing in the nighttime. Holmes says, that was a curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes. And the reason I like that is because it brings up a very important point I want to keep emphasizing throughout any kind of course like this, is that one of the most biggest weaknesses of all of us is that we really think, we always focus on what does happen and not on what didn't happen. And sometimes it's what didn't happen, it's the most important part to think about. And when we get to the framework, I'm going to keep emphasizing that when the prediction, because the prediction came true, it doesn't really show us much until we know what the alternatives would be. And we really think it's just not natural for us to think about the alternative things, outcomes that could have happened as well, under the same certain circumstances. That's the very, very important, the biggest feeling I think in many medical situations as well. But it was that, so that's a couple of things I wanted to alert you to on the psychology of thinking, maybe some of the latest things. Now let me give you some more examples. Some of my favorites over time, I've collected, there's lots of them. I'll just give you a few. I'm going to begin with the boomerangs I have here, okay? This is one of the parts, let's take this. We've got a white boomerang and a sort of non-white boomerang, okay? And let's say Mrs. Apple takes her two daughters to the exploratorium. And they're selling at the store, they're selling boomerangs, okay? And the daughter who has the white boomerang is very unhappy. She's crying and crying. And she's unhappy because why? Why is she unhappy? Hers is smaller and larger is bigger, is better in our world now, right? So she's crying because hers is smaller. So one, Mrs. Apple says, well, I'll fix that. She goes that and she stretches it out. And sure enough, now, I'm sorry, let's do it this way. Okay, here we are. Now hers is bigger, but the other girl is unhappy now, right? So Mrs. Apple stretches that one out. And when she does it, now the first daughter is happy again, but the second daughter is unhappy, right? I love this because it's an example of what I call, it illustrates, by the way, perception and cognition are very closely bound together. In fact, we can't really separate them out. Perception is a little bit more automatic than cognition, but the same principle is whole for both. And in this case, it's an example of what I would call assimilation contrast, a very important principle. What's happening here is that when I'm showing you this way, by the way, if I show them this way, they look the same size, don't they, to you? They do that because the most adjacent feature that, when you compare two objects, we always do this natural for us, we focus on the most adjacent thing, what's closest between them, the borders between them, the boundaries between them, which we exaggerate those boundaries to see how differently are. If I'm holding it this way, the two inner boundaries, are the shorter ones, are the thing of focus. When I put it this way, now this boundary and this boundary become the thing of focus that we're thinking about. So you assimilate this to its boundary for this purpose, and you assimilate this to its boundary, which is the longer one, and as a result, this one looks shorter and this one looks longer. If I switch them around, then it reverse that because now this becomes the most salient thing for what we're recognizing. That's why this notion goes all the way to things like, instead of calling it the United States, we talk about Washington. And we talk about, we sometimes use the capital of a country to represent the whole country. So as a part is representing the whole. In this case, the part here is standing for the whole because that's what's important for this comparison. Even though you know it, your brain is still telling you. That's right. Sometimes some of these illusions you can correct, some you cannot. That's what I find fascinating. By the way, the more I push them apart, I think it makes it harder. It makes less weakness. Because now, by spreading it out like this, these don't become that important. It becomes the whole thing becomes important. Is the long edge of one compared to the small edge of the other? Exactly. And you're using, your mind is automatically, this becomes now the celigate for the whole thing. This becomes the celigate. This is my explanation of it. Most illusions, by the way, psychologists have all kinds of arguments about it still. But this is my explanation. I think it's correct. This is my explanation, right? This is not a human feeling. Okay, let me go on a few more like that. These all make very important points about our minds, the way they work and don't work. This is one of some of my favorites here, hundreds of them, by the way, you can find anywhere. But over the years are my favorites here. Let me put this on here. I want you to read that to yourself. Okay, can everyone read that important sentence to yourself? Read it, okay. Now you've read it. I want you to do one thing. I want you to pay attention to the number of Fs in that thing. The Fs, A, B, C, D, E, F, the letter F. Count the number of Fs. I'm not going to give you too much time. The number of Fs that you find in that sentence. Okay, I'm going to take it away now. You need more time? Okay. Count the number of Fs. Okay. Okay, I'm going to take it away now. Okay. How many got the three Fs? Okay, you're unusual. About 80% of the people, almost every day I've been in, raise your hands and say you got three Fs. How many got some other count? Six. Six? How many got six? One? Because you have more time than most people, too. How many got some other number? I got six the first time. Four, okay. Most people, when you do it, most of the time I've done it. I've done it over 50 years. I've been working with this, and I love it. About 80% get three Fs. And I don't give them much time, of course. They're leaving out the odds. What's that? It's the odds. Now you know. Okay, let me show you what the Fs are at. I have to show some people. So I did this, and I did this one. So now you can see where the six Fs are. Now this is what I call multi-determination. More than one thing is involved here. One of the things, and it turns out there have been some... I had colleagues do some experiments, and it's true. This is the sound of the F. The three Fs that my people get have an F sound. When I ask it, the F sounds like an F. But the Fs in all three ofs doesn't have an F sound. And I've never believed that. I thought that was because that's not the most important factor. I thought people check it out and stuff like that. And it is a factor that does contribute to the effect. Another thing that contributes to the effect is more important, is that all what's called function words. All the stuff like that. They have the most frequent words in the name. They're connected. They're function words. They don't really carry any content. When people are reading, especially if you're a speed reader, if you're a good reader, you need to look specifically at the content words. You can fill in those in yourselves, and you're looking for the words that carry most content. The nouns and the verbs. And as a result, you're less likely to notice the Fs in the OVs just because they are function words. OV is not an important word. It's one of the most frequent words in the language, and you can skip by that. You can fill in yourself. There's a third reason. Can anyone guess what the third reason is? It was deliberately constructed. Why did I construct it that way? Look at it again. Where are the Fs that most people do get? The three Fs that they get? Where are they? Well, two of them are at the beginning of the text. And this is called the... There's two most important parts of any series you give people. Beginning and as the end parts. And when you do memory work, people remember this word or something like that. It's the words at the beginning. That's called the beginning effect. And the words at the end are what they pick up most. And that one's in the middle of it, at least like you. So by putting the two Fs at the beginning, it's more likely you're going to pick up those two Fs. Now we're focusing on not only what you miss, but the ones that you do get. Now what about the third one? It's hyphenated deliberately. I worked it out so it's hyphenated. That brings attention to it, right? So it's broken up. So in a way, I'm doing what a magician does. He's calling attention to what he wants you to pay attention to, which means you withdrawing attention to what I want you to not pay attention to. So that's involved. So this is an example of something that has actually three different things going for it. And as I said, if I don't give people too much time, about 80% get three Fs. And very few get the six Fs. So it's an example of where several things are involved at once to take advantage of it. Now let me do it. This is another one. I love this because it's an important principle. It's a nice, simple thing. You can see that we have this circle here, sort of gray circle, and it's against two different backgrounds. Now, I apologize to you, but this literally, I'm putting you in the state of conflict. Your mind is upset because I'm pitting two things against one another. I'm pitting what is called simultaneous contrast, a very important principle. And simultaneous contrast is, look, that, I'll do it over here, that if you have something like this against a black-dark background, it's going to look bright by contrast, that it really is. On the other hand, if you have something like this against a white background, it's going to look darker than it is by contrast. That's called simultaneous contrast. Yet, you don't tend to see it that way. You tend to see it all the same color. So I'm going to relieve your mind, I'm going to help you unstress yourself, but I'm going to give you an excuse to treat the two halves of the circle somewhat different by putting a boundary on it. Now, to do that, look what happens. Can you see now that the contrast is real? That the right side is darker than the left side? Because by giving your mind an excuse to treat them as two separate objects, but now you're in conflict because you know this is the same object and you want what we call constant, your priority is to make that object as uniform as homogeneous as possible. And so you're trying to make it all the same so that you're ignoring the fact that your perception system wants to see this contrast because what's overall here is that this is a single, wants to see this as a single object. If a single object wants to see everything as homogeneous, it's another example called assimilation and contrast. And that appears that I will demonstrate and talk about later. It's going to be a very important principle in understanding why smart people can be so stupid, okay? Now, let me try this one. Okay, how many have ever seen this before? Okay, if you've seen it before, you don't know. Okay, do the others have never seen it before? Can you recognize what it is? Okay, they haven't seen the dog? Okay. Once you see it, by the way, trust me, before you see it, you can make all kinds of things out of it, but it's something... But once you see it, what it is, once you recognize what it is, and I usually, sometimes I have people who have never seen it before, so I have to help them out. So there you can see that's where the dog is. Once you organize it that way, you can't go back. It's very almost impossible to undo it. This is related, this isn't a perceptual system, but it's also related to what we call belief perseverance in the psychological system. I mean, once you've created a belief, and you... it's almost impossible to undo it, to disbelieve it. The classic example of belief perseveration was done by... Lee Ross and his companions, very interesting people. But this was done back in the 70s, actually, very important thing. They did it with suicide notes. They had... they brought students in, these Stanford undergraduates, and they took a laboratory, and they said, look, we're trying to see how good people are recognizing who's going to commit suicide and who doesn't. So here we have a bunch of notes written by some people who actually committed suicide, and other people who were faking it, weren't interested. And I see that you can tell by reading, which sort them into two piles, and see how well you can do in sorting out which letters are fake suicide notes and which are real suicide notes. They had people do that. Well, they were nasty... no, social psychologists, and I'm glad I'm not a social psychologist, they're nasty people, and they created a bad reputation for others. You know, it's a mix of people, right? When people sorted their things out, half the people they told deliberately, you got 80% right, and the other half, they said you got only 20% right. It didn't make any sense, because all of them were fake anyway, they just made them up. But they wanted to know how people would react to that. And so they didn't ask the people afterwards, you know, why did you do this, and they had good stories about it. Well, I've always been a sensitive person, and I'm so good at it, the people that told me they got 80% right, they said, you did pretty well on that, how can you explain that? They come up with reasons for it. And the other people, the 20% failures, they said, how come you didn't do so well? They said, well, you know, I've never been good at people's staff, or stuff like that. And I've never been that kind of a person. Now, then, they have some ethics, and ethical issue is they have to de-brief them, as they call it. You have to tell them that you actually tricked them. So now they're told they were tricked. Okay? There was just chance. They all, what they were told was nothing. A few weeks later, they bring them back, and then I've done over time, they brought them back and said, okay, how well do you think you could detect suicide notes? How good do you think we'd be at it? People have been told that they had got a good score on it before, and then were told that this was meaningless. They now still believe that they are good at it, but the other people still believe that they're not good at it. And they sell theories about them, and working at it. You've organized your life and around that, the fact that you were good, and you brought up good reasons. The memory works this way, that now, the next time you confront with this thing, you're reminded of how good at you are doing suicide letters. The reasons that you brought up the time that you asked before you knew that it was a fake, those reasons are what come to mind, what we call crime, and they come to your mind, and so you think, hey, I am pretty good at it. Other reasons that that same person, that's the way he did the experiment, could have been the person that they told that he would bring up good, bad reasons for it. This is an example, a very powerful example of belief-person hearings, and I think it's very, very important why it's not just that people get fooled. We all get fooled. The point is that once we're fooled many times, we persist in it, and it's hard to get you out of it. There's another one like that, pictures like that that you've seen. Many may have seen it. If you haven't seen it before, it's a hard one to come across. But once you see it, you never can unsee it. You can't unsee it. Yeah. It's just a cow, it's a face of a cow. It's very hard enough people have never seen it before. Yeah. Okay. Here's another one I used to... Over the years, I was like this one here, I call it the invisible rectangle. Yeah, this one. We can do it with this one here. Maybe it can work this way. Okay. Maybe I should have a bigger one. What I want you to do is I want you to see if I can work. If I step back here, it will work for me this way. Yeah, I think it will work. I want you to hold your hands out so that your right hand is bordering the right hand edge of that rectangle, and the left hand is bordering the... By the way, I should do this. The left hand side of the thing. Can you do that? Have you done that? I can't do it. If you can do it, then after you've done that, hold that shut one eye, shut your left eye. What happens? Anything happen? Okay, then open your left eye and shut your right eye. What happens? If this works right, it should make it bigger or something. If this works right, what happens is that when you're looking with both eyes open, you see the rectangle, and you think you're seeing it with both eyes. But it's impossible for it to see it with both eyes. Only one eye you don't know is seeing it, and the other hand is blocking it. So you don't notice that... So it's not going to allow you to say, hey, one eye is seeing it and one eye is not, so it just suppresses. It fills in, actually. The eye that's not seeing is actually, your mind is filling in for it. Just like we have a blind spot and our eyes, we fill that in as well. And by the way, if you haven't thought about it, and I know most of you don't sit around thinking about these things, but some people do, if you think about it, all that you're seeing, this whole scene you're witnessing now, knee up here and so on, but very small little slit in the hole in your eye, the pupil, is letting in the scene. At any moment in time, 90% or more than 90% of this visual scene that you're seeing, this whole room, that you see as a whole, you're not seeing it. It's impossible, literally. But you fill in. We're always filling in. We're always adding to it. And we're not always aware of what we're putting there but what is actually literally based on the sensory input we're getting. We're always constructing it. And this is very important to keep in mind. You said 90% of what's in this room? The numbers are not sure. It's probably even more. But it's a huge amount that we're putting in. I'm going to give you other examples of that. But now a favorite of mine is a friend of mine. He's retired since, but one of the most clever psychologists ever. He came up with this. He's a very clever artist. He came up with this. How many of you have seen this? Shepard's Tables. This is very powerful. This is very interesting. The thing is that if you take this, consider this is just a flat plane here. This rectangle here is actually identical to this rectangle. If I cut this out and put it on here, it's identical. And everyone says it's impossible. So I got here. And I think I have an overlay I had here. What are you with? There it is. Thank you. So I did this overlay so you can follow it. Let's follow it. Put this over here. This matches this, right? No tricks. What's going on here? Your mind is not made up. We don't live in a two-flat land. We don't live in a flat land. We live in a three-dimensional world. And the mind is made to see things. So when we see this, we automatically see it as three-dimension. If these were three-dimensional objects, they would definitely not be the same size table tops. But this is a flat plane here. No matter how much you study that, you can't believe that they are literally the same. They are really the same. Yeah. So again, we're going to realize we construct a lot of around us. And we do this both with our perceptual and with our cognizance. Actually, they're very, as I said, tied together. In fact, very much together. There are a few others like that, but I just got one more demonstration I wanted to do for you. Which I think fits into this, I hope. Okay. I was going to do this today. What's that? The audience is talking about things that I did not know about. Okay. I have an envelope here in which I placed because I knew before I came down to Los Angeles from Eugene, Oregon where I live. I knew I was going to give you this lecture and talking about things like this. And so I put in here, I made a prediction of something's going to happen in the next few moments. Yeah. About two and a half minutes from now. So it's a prediction here, which I made before I came down. So there it is. It's all in sight there. You keep one eye on that, one eye on me and one eye on DJ. We're all set. The prediction is, has to do with these deco-playing cards, which you can see, the deco-playing cards. And the prediction is this, at least in part. The prediction is that someone is going to take, well, if I had this prediction, I'd say someone's going to take a playing card, right? And if I had someone take a playing card and they took the playing card I would because people are nice and I'm a visitor to your city and so you're nice to me, right? I'm a guest. So if I said, would you take a card, someone would oblige and take a card, right? And filled my prediction and it said someone will have taken a card. You would applaud and say, well, he's a necessary guy. He's really great, right? Let's see if I'm impressed that I did that. I used to do that way. So I added something to it. I added what the card is that they picked. Now, somehow, people are more impressed now. That's the same thing. Both predictions are right. So think about it. Why is one prediction more impressive than the other? I know it could figure it out, but anyways, that's what people do. So we're going to have someone choose one of these cards. Just touch. This one here? That one there? You can change your mind. So that one, right? So this is the one we want you to look at. Fix it in your mind. You all might want to fix it in your mind, too. Exact suit and value. So there's no doubt about it. You got it? Okay. So now, if my prediction comes out right, you're going to hop, holler and shout and say, he's it, right? Okay. So what I did was I put a giant replica, a larger replica of a playing card. The one I knew was going to be chosen. I had this prediction. And so I want you to be, let me know whether you are, well, this card is exactly suit and value of what you took. Is it? I think it was seven spades. So, see, seven spades. It's close, isn't it? No, no, okay, that's okay. That's good for this demonstration. I want you to put your feet flat on the floor. You think I can talk you into seeing it as a seven spades? Remember, I'm not a hypnotist, a mentalist, and stuff like that. I'm going to, well, now watch. Keep thinking now. Think of seven spades. Just breathe in and out and breathe in and out. Okay, breathe in and out. Breathe in and out. Let's see. Now, the reason for this demonstration, the reason for this demonstration, by the way, is did you actually see the seven of spades or do you think you saw the seven of spades? Well, and to see the clubs, I started doubting myself. Okay, so it brings up the issue of seeing that versus seeing then. The philosophers used to play, the linguistic philosophers, it was a fad for a while, that kind of philosophy. Ryle and people like that. Seeing that versus seeing as or something like that. But anyway, the reason I like to do the demonstration like this is that it raises the whole question of, for example, if the proverbial man from outer space, you know, there are these people, these visitors that we talk about, these ETs and stuff like that, what if they drop down through the ceiling while we're doing this demonstration, would they see the seven of clubs now? What would they see? Would they see the same thing you saw? You're looking at. Let's say you have a visual system of some sort. Would they see the same thing you're seeing? Assumption is to say yes. But what if they had a civilization where they don't have, okay, they don't have any kind of system about a language they don't know about playing cards and stuff like that. Would they still see the seven of clubs? No. What would they see? They would see and change that we would know. So they would not be seeing the same thing you're looking at. They wouldn't see the same thing you see. Well, in some sense, they are seeing the same thing you see in some sense or not, right? Right. Okay, so this raises some very interesting questions in them. Little ones are actually in space. Little ones are actually in space. Little ones are actually in space. Little ones are actually in space. Okay, they might not they might know it's that. They might not know about space. Okay. They may shoot him. That's why I say this is a very special audience. That's a figure the first time in hundreds of years I've been doing this. But someone knows that there was space in the corner. I use them on a platform with the distance of people too. But anyway, this is the end of this thing. To all those important because now we're going to go into the framework and that's the next lecture. Awesome.