Opinion

Great story.  I blog about food issues, and deal with this sort of "information filtering" all the time.    This story was the basis of my 4th of July post.

Now if we could get rid of the other bigot.. Robert Byrd. Who still serves !

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

very  good.  thanks

http://www.freespeech.org/fscm2/genx.php?name=home

So why are the Swift Boat ads the lies and John Kerry’s memories the "truth" ?

Yes, this is a fascinating insight into a brain mechanism that can result in faulty memory.

I’m intrigued as to why memory functions in this way:

It would seem that as the human mind evolved it needed to be able to process and recall a lot of information. Some of this information would have been ultimately disposable, but very important and highly context sensitive (‘I should stay clear of this part of the forest because I heard a bear growling here five minutes ago.’) Having a holding area like the hippocampus would allow us to store a lot of temporary data, much of which would be used briefly in a focused way, then let go.

Then there would be another class of information that we would need to recall over and again (‘Red berries make you sick,’) without the fuss of recalling the context — this becomes the ‘rule set’ by which we live.

This second class of information can help us live safely and effectively. We build up our rule set and stick to it. And, if we’ve processed the original information correctly, the rule set will tend to do well by us. But, as Wang and Aamodt point out, when we’re misinformed or when we don’t process the original information correctly, or when lies get repeated often enough without a conscious internal effort to contradict or doubt, we end up believing falsehoods.

Their advice: to be conscious about what we believe and contemplate the reverse.