Why you can’t trust yourself

Our brains are fundamentally unreliable.

You are Biazed and Selfish without realizing it. Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University defines it as: Moralization Gap: both perpetrators and the victims distort the facts of a situation to fit their respective narratives: It means that whenever a conflict is present, we overestimate our own good intentions and underestimate the intentions of others.

You don't have a clue in what makes you happy, or miserable: In his book, Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows us that we suck at remembering how something made us feel in the past and guessing how something will make us feel in the future.

Changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

You are easily manipulated into making bad decisions.

You generally only use logic and reason to support your pre-existing beliefs. Knowledge and the feeling of knowing that knowledge are two completely separate things. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias run rampant when we don’t acknowledge the difference between what we actually know and what we just feel like we know.

Your emotions change your perceptions far more than you realize. You often use memories of the emotions you had at one point in time as a basis for decisions that you make at another point in time, possibly months or years later. You do this all the time and you do it unconsciously.

Our memory sucks: our memories of past events are easily altered by other past experiences and/or with new, incorrect information. Function of memory: 1) Learn from past experiences. 2) Create an identity by giving us a story of the past. In this way, it doesn’t really matter how accurate our memories are. All that matters is that we have a story of our past in our heads that creates that part of the sense of who we are, our sense of self.

You aren't who you think you are. The idea of a “core self” — an unchanging, permanent “you” — is all an illusion.

Your physical experience of the World is not even that real. Our unconscious mind processes information at 11 million of bits per second vs our conscious mind that barely process it at 60 bits per second.