Mind Bugs

The activities, pictures and examples provides for the last class was amazingly surprising to me. I did not realize the problem of mind bugs is everywhere in our daily lives. People often believe what they see and this behavior sometimes gets us trapped by our mind bugs. From the book, irrational predictability, I notice that our mind bugs are often come from our past experiences. As a matter of fact, our past experiences send signal to our minds, and our mind convert the signal and store permanently somewhere in our brain. So, next time, when we encounter the same or similar experience, our brain will automatically command us to do the same thing over and over again in our future. The perceptions from past experiences are deeply ingrained in our minds once we make the first decision, behavior, or action. These mind bugs are really powerful and hard to get rid off unless we take a serious internal reflection and some analytical experiments to clarify and restart our believe system.

There is an example I like to mention regarding to my erroneous misconceptions. During my college life, I always drink my roommates’ milk without asking because in my mind I was thinking every thing in the refrigerator should be shared among roommates. This misconception was developed since my childhood when I was living at home. So, one day my roommate came to me and told me stop taking advantages from him. I was shocked and did not realize how bad things became. Then, I tried to examine all the details and did internal self reflection about my past experiences. I realized that I have to stop doing this misbehaviors and start respecting other people’s properties. We have to view things from other angles to solve this puzzle.