Celeste Kidd on Let's Learn About
BCNM faculty member Celeste Kidd recently appeared on a Let's Learn About broadcast with Adam Conover. From overthrowing stereotypical beliefs to revealing the truth about knowledge retention, Celeste offers valuable insight on just how exactly humans form knowledge and beliefs.
From the episode:
You can say that people exhibit bounded rationality. That means that they make good decisions, but their ability to do that is limited by the fact that they have imperfect perception, imperfect knowledge, limited working memory, people forget stuff. I think it is fair to say that often approximately rational - there's a lot of noise in there.
It's even noiser that we thought it was! Memories that are near and dear to your heart when you think back on them are very vivid - it's almost like you're watching a movie. When you actually emperically design studies to investigate these rich, vivid memories, the results show that these memories very much do not exist. They are approximations; you have bits of key information stored and then everything else is reconstructed on the spot based on general knowledge and beliefs on the world. So these are distortions that happen that you don't even notice.
These cool theories about everything you've seen is stored somewhere in your brain you just can't access it - more and more it seems like that's not quite right.
Check out the full video here!