So most psychologists, most neuroscientists believe this statement,
and this is from a letter in Scientific American, and
David Hambrick was a psychology student at Georgia Tech.
The strong consensus of this group is that the scientific literature does not support
claims that the use of software-based brain games alters neural functioning
in ways that improve general cognitive performance in everyday life, or
prevent cognitive slowing and brain disease.
Now the reasons that people develop these sorts of subjective knowledge states
about behaviour, first we tend to engage in non critical thinking and
that leads to erroneous conclusions, such as, you ignore evidence and
argues against things that you really believe in.
Or you fail to accurately judge the credibility of the source thats providing
you the information, or you misunderstand the information.
Or you don't use statistics to really see whether not that difference that you see
out there in the world is really a significant one or just due to chance.
Or you see relationships that don't exist, you talk about correlationsm when in fact,
the correlations aren't significant.
Or you use relative comparisons, and
this is a phenomenon that's studied by Kahneman, who's a psychologist at
Princeton, who actually won the Nobel prize a few years ago for
his work on decision making and how people make decisions.
Let me give you an example of one of these ways in which
a subjective response can be wrong.
He presented a series of numbers for a very brief period of time and said,
quickly estimate what you think the product of these numbers is,
if you multiply the numbers together, what will you get?
Then he presented them in two ways, you can start with the 8 or
you can start with the 1.
So you see that 8 times 7 times 6 times, so forth, for a very brief period of time,
a few seconds.
Take it off and he'll say, okay,
give me the estimate of what you think the product of that multiplication is.
If you're presented with the 8 starting first, the average guess is 2,250,
if you start with the 1 first, the average is 512.
Big differences in just how you stack the comparison that you're going to make,
in fact, the real answer is 40320, so
everybody underestimates what the product is.