Fight The FUD.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt = FUD.

This is an important concept that I’ve been considering for a month or so now, and I want to share my thought with my friends.

First, it’s important to understand that when your senses take on new information/stimulus from the outside world that your brain has a certain ordered way of processing this information, and it needs to be very quick about it because reaction to stimulus can be a life or death scenario.

As such, your brain is exceedingly amazing at taking in this new information and asking “Should I be afraid of this?” or “Is this important to my survival?”. This is a very emotion-based processing done in your Amygdala.

In a historical / evolutionary context it makes a lot of sense that we have evolved to do this. Your caveman ancestors heard a noise and their brains needed to, very quickly, process that information in order to determine if that was a bird or a saber tooth tiger. So we evolved our information processing systems to make sure all information was processed like this first for good reason.

But what happens when we are no longer under threat from saber tooth tigers, and our brains still process information the same way? Simply put, this is how we are manipulated by external entities to make decisions about our lives without processing information logically and rationally.

I have come to believe we are all being manipulated by fear mongers, and we don’t even realize it most of the time.

The information we ingest and the information we share with our peers is often so laden with FUD that we don’t even stop to consider that information for its logical and rational merits. We are triggered by fear to immediately accept something as the truth because it appeals so neatly to our fear processors that we don’t even bother thinking about it any further.

I will ask all my friends reading this to do what I’ve been trying to do for myself over the last month or so and scrutinize all critical information before making a decision on it. That, before you press that share button on Facebook, you consider if you are playing a willing part in some other entity’s campaign of fear.

Let’s start using our logic and rational areas of our brain a bit more, and not be duped into lasting decisions that are based around fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Fight the FUD.