id: 2101,7A
title: The brain wants to match patterns and move on.
date: 2021-07-21

The brain wants to match patterns and move on.

Because it is hard-wired to quickly draw conclusions about the future to achieve its goals, it puts those predictions into practice immediately to further reward/punish based on the result via dopamine.rB6 Unfortunately, in a social setting, this leads to dysfunctional narratives that don’t serve positive outcomes. This drives confirmation bias where pattern matches (and feedback loops that drive self-fulfilling prophecies) reinforce the prediction, but the mind automatically dismisses alternative narratives without evaluation. With the problem “understood”, truth-seeking motivation dwindles.rB1