cranium gazing CIA

I was planning to start a series of posts this morning on the topic of "how little we know our own minds," but a spate of scrabble requests and other urgent matters kept me off task.

Then, by great fortune, I ran into this incredible CIA document that does my work for me! Just a few choice quotes from "The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" to get you doubting your every thought:

"A basic finding of cognitive psychology is that people have no conscious experience of most of what happens in the human mind. Many functions associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted prior to and independently of any conscious direction. What appears spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking."

"Herbert Simon first advanced the concept of "bounded" or limited rationality. Because of limits in human mental capacity, he argued, the mind cannot cope directly with the complexity of the world. Rather, we construct a simplified mental model of reality and then work with this model. We behave rationally within the confines of our mental model, but this model is not always well adapted to the requirements of the real world."

"People construct their own version of "reality" on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received."

"This process may be visualized as perceiving the world through a lens or screen that channels and focuses and thereby may distort the images that are seen. To achieve the clearest possible image of China, for example, analysts need more than information on China. They also need to understand their own lenses through which this information passes. These lenses are known by many terms--mental models, mind-sets, biases, or analytical assumptions."

Couldn't have said it better myself, CIA! If we want to begin to understand anything out there in the world (our job, our mother, what the heck we should do about climate change), the first thing we need to get a handle on are the tricks of our brains.