English | January 06, 2023 | ASIN: B0BRQXCX2N | [email protected] kbps | 10h 51m | 610 MBLecturer: Alexander B. Swan

As you read this sentence, your brain has just processed about 20 million bits of information. In fact, every second of every day, your brain processes about 11 million bits. And yet, that astonishing number just isn’t enough to get you through your day. Consequently, your brain takes some shortcuts—and it’s those shortcuts, called heuristics, that make it all work. Some shortcuts are completely be and helpful—such as your ability to recognize your child even if half his face is in shadow or your ability to imagine tomorrow even though you will never actually see it.

The shortcuts of cognitive biases, however—when the brain fills in gaps of solid, reliable information with a lot of guesswork for efficiency’s sake—can lead to errors of memory and judgment and cause faulty decision-making with unintended, even dire, consequences. For example, take confirmation bias. This tendency to consider only information that confirms our existing beliefs can cause us to make incorrect assumptions about the cause of a coworker’s behavior, misinterpret expental data, or even make disastrous eeering decisions resulting in loss of life.

In Understanding Cognitive Biases, you will learn how to recognize these biases for what they are, counteract them when necessary, and even use them to your advantage in some instances. In 24 fascinating lectures, Dr. Alexander B. Swan uses examples from psychology expents, history, politics, movies, TV, comics, social media, and more to illustrate dozens of cognitive biases that affect us all. You’re not alone in your somes irrational judgments and interpretations of events or people. But you can learn how to make better decisions—no matter what shortcuts your brain wants to take!