Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Why did Donald Trump Stress the Importance of Building a Wall on the Mexican Border?

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This post has nothing to do with Donald Trump; rather, it's a device used to frame a discussion of Alex Rosenberg's How History Gets Things Wrong, The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, discussed here last week. We want the simple story of how Trump reached his decision, but the simple story is almost certainly wrong. "Scientists have been able to determine that the neurons that make decisions fire up before the ones that are involved in consciousness," writes Mitch Weisburgh. "Basically, the brain makes decisions based on the activation of neurons that are located in a completely different part of the brain than the ones involved with conscious thought." Awareness of this process should inform our thinking about the fallability of our own decision-making process.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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