We are confident that we notice everything in front of us. But in reality, we often only see what we are focusing on.Simply put, whenever we are paying attention to something, whether it is painting, reading, driving, or observing a person of interest, we tend to not notice certain events around us, no matter how notable they may be.

Illusion of Attention: The Gorilla in the Room

CONFIRMATION BIAS

Whatever we fail to notice remains unheeded. We may overlook important details, leading to potential biases in our decision-making.The Danger of Illusion: Focusing on only certain aspects can lead to us missing out on key information that may have a negative impact in the future.Be Mindful:<ul><li>Pay attention to your biases and try not to prioritize certain information over others.</li><li>Take a step back and reassess your decisions to ensure all important factors are considered.</li></ul>

Avoiding Attention Bias

Confirmation Bias refers to our tendency to interpret new information in a way that supports our existing theories and beliefs, rather than objectively considering all the facts.
<ul>
 <li>We often filter out or ignore any information that contradicts our current views, leading to a strong and often disproportionate support for our preconceived ideas.</li>
 <li>Indications to the contrary are quickly dismissed as exceptions or special cases.</li>
 <li>Our bias is often influenced by our emotions and past experiences.</li>
</ul>

Confirmation Bias

Our minds tend to focus on examples that are easily remembered. Example: When we see news of car accidents, we become anxious when driving on the highway ourselves. "May be I'll end up in an accident too". However, the likehood of dying from lifestyle diseases like Diabetes or Hypertension is much higher. Since that is not often highlighted in the news, they are often overlooked. <ul><li>Our minds prioritize information that is most easily accessible or most recently encountered.</li></ul>

Availability Bias

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored! ⚡To overcome confirmation bias, write down your beliefs and consciously seek disconfirming evidence.<ul><li>Set aside preconceived notions</li><li>Be open-minded to opposing viewpoints</li><li>Challenge your own beliefs</li></ul>Next time, before jumping to a conclusion, make sure you have thoroughly examined all evidence.

How To Deal With Confirmation Bias?

Know how our subconscious mind controls our action with illusions

A world-class thinker counts the 100 ways in which humans behave irrationally, showing us what we can do to recognize and minimize these “thinking errors” to make better decisions and have a better life Despite the best of intentions, humans are notoriously bad—that is, irrational—when it comes to making decisions and assessing risks and tradeoffs. Psychologists and neuroscientists refer to these distinctly human foibles, biases, and thinking traps as “cognitive errors.” Cognitive errors are systematic deviances from rationality, from optimized, logical, rational thinking and behavior. We make these errors all the time, in all sorts of situations, for problems big and small: whether to choose the apple or the cupcake; whether to keep retirement funds in the stock market when the Dow tanks, or whether to take the advice of a friend over a stranger. The “behavioral turn” in neuroscience and economics in the past twenty years has increased our understanding of how we think and how we make decisions. It shows how systematic errors mar our thinking and under which conditions our thought processes work best and worst. Evolutionary psychology delivers convincing theories about why our thinking is, in fact, marred. The neurosciences can pinpoint with increasing precision what exactly happens when we think clearly and when we don’t.Drawing on this wide body of research, The Art of Thinking Clearly is an entertaining presentation of these known systematic thinking errors--offering guidance and insight into everything why you shouldn’t accept a free drink to why you SHOULD walk out of a movie you don’t like it to why it’s so hard to predict the future to why shouldn’t watch the news. The book is organized into 100 short chapters, each covering a single cognitive error, bias, or heuristic. Examples of these concepts include: Reciprocity, Confirmation Bias, The It-Gets-Better-Before-It-Gets-Worse Trap, and the Man-With-A-Hammer Tendency. In engaging prose and with real-world examples and anecdotes, The Art of Thinking Clearly helps solve the puzzle of human reasoning.

Understand yourself and those around you.

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Rolf Dobelli is a Swiss author and businessman. He began his writing career as a novelist in 2002, but he is best known internationally for his bestselling non-fiction The Art of Thinking Clearly (2011, English 2013), for which The Times has called him "the self-help guru the Germans love".

Illusion of Attention: The Gorilla in the Room

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