How to Play With Your Biases
You have recently purchased a new black Tesla Model X. Now you begin to see the black Tesla Model X all over with greater frequency than had been previously experienced. The black Tesla Model X is not actually appearing with greater frequency. Your mind is playing tricks on you.
Cognitive biases explain the idea that we have all experienced known as the frequency illusion, the recency illusion, or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. These biases explain the “my black Tesla Model X” phenomenon, but there are many more biases we fall victim to when we operate on auto-pilot.
Confirmation bias can serve as an unintentional megaphone for this frequency or recency idea. Once you’ve seen the black Tesla Model X a few times and thought about how much you’ve seen it then you start to look even harder to prove your new theory that everyone has just purchased the car you did.
These biases show the power of selective attention. Our brains are hardwired to fill the gaps of what we have not sensed with conclusions and imagined detail. Our brain also seeks out these patterns to reaffirm our beliefs and to prove to ourselves we are right.
This is how a writer can create an entire scene from one remembered detail.
This is also why eyewitness testimony is so horribly inaccurate.
The thing about knowing stuff like this is that it keeps you from submitting to the tricks your mind can play on your subconscious. Your perception of the world is often skewed by what you pay attention to. If you pay attention to your own biases all the time and can’t filter out the random harmful bits then you aren’t going to have done very well with your time.
If you know the tricks your mind plays then you can direct play to the truth instead of self-deception. Every game values the truth as a reference point if nothing else. Weighing the effect of these biases on your ability to perceive the truth is a form of play which practices detecting the truth despite perception.
As we are bombarded by more and more information we must learn to take control of our attention. The failure to take control may mean you turn your attention to social media, commercialism, or any of the other messages that people pay millions of dollars to send to you in the hopes that their attention-grab results in your spending money with them. You actually give life to that cycle if the advertisement or other attention-grab results in your purchase.
Taking control of attention is essential to play.
When we play we are willing to suspend our hardwired beliefs in order to interact with the game. To do this requires attention. It requires attention on a fixed state of the game but also on each of the possibilities that might arise. When we play, therefore, we are not fixated on the one result we have determined through our biases. In the midst of a game we are more interested in the possible outcomes we can envision and then bring into reality through our play. Play with others in this way reinforces the idea that our vision of reality is not the only possible way to see the world.
