Cognitive Bias: The Brain’s Basement
Declutter your mental space
Several years ago, I was assigned to work on an enormous, complicated project. To do my part, I had to spend most workdays in a windowless and cold basement with roaches clustered in the bathroom sinks. I hated being chilled and below ground.
But I couldn’t do a whole lot about it. The work was there, thus that was where I needed to be. Because I had been, I thought, robbed of my power to not be in that basement, I told myself the story of my victimhood over and over again. Cognitive bias, the brain’s unconscious storage bunker, had me in its thrall.
The word bias comes from old French. Originally, it meant ‘oblique line.’ People in both the fashion and food industry know that ‘on the bias’ means to cut fabric or food at an angle. Similarly, when cognitive bias invades our brains without our conscious knowledge, we operate from an angled or skewed perception. Instead of straightforward, rational thought, our brains take shortcuts.
Not all mental shortcuts prove detrimental–we need them as much as many buildings need basements. They provide our brains a little extra thinking room and a place to shelter when things get overwhelming. But we do ourselves and others a disservice by allowing biases to act unchecked and unacknowledged by our conscious selves.
