Mind Bias and its Avoidance

Today, I am to go to an outstation from the village and public bus service from the village is at about 7 am. After some of my writing jobs after midnight on availability of electricity, I went to bed to take a nap before getting ready for the journey with the idea of getting up at 6 am for the day. I could not sleep well because of worry of sleeping long and missing the bus. I checked up my wrist watch, it appeared to 6 am. Got up, shaved myself dressed up, checked for time from the wall clock, it was 6:25 am. Then, I sat on my work-desk for once again looking into mail boxes before departing. After the mailboxes, checked up the time from my computer, it was 6:45. After shutting down the computer, I locked my door and proceeded towards the bus-stand.

On the way, I observed the darkness. It came to my mind that when I had gone to catch the same bus last week, it was a good daylight. Today, it is 8^th February and the day-times are gradually increasing. With this logic, it should not be the darkness but more light at this time. On the way to bus stand, there is a solar lamp post, I checked up my wrist watch for the time, it came out to be 5:50. I thought, how foolish I had been committing the same mistake of misunderstanding the time by one hour from three clocks, on three occasions within a duration of about an hour. Anyway, I returned to my work-desk to begin writing this piece based on my current experience.

This mistake was caused by the mental bias due to my wish to get up from the bed at 6 am combined with my worry of missing the bus. When it was 5 am, I mistook it for 6 am, when I checked up for time from my wrist watch for the first time this morning. On later occasions, I did not care for the hour but concentrated on minutes only.

For any series of information collection by the brain for storing in the memory with interlinks, the first unit information works as the datum of the set. If for any reason, this piece of information is misconceived, all the later information in the set have chances of being misconceived for their being linked to the first information. In such a situation, the mind is called biased, and the only reason for this bias is the first information. This logic also dictates that any of the later information is incapable of biasing the mind for their link dependence with the datum information. Therefore, to keep a bias off your mind, take extra precaution in collecting a new information before it is recorded in the memory.

Mind bias and mono-tracking are just two sides of a coin with the second one being the outcome of the first one. Since, mono-tracking is deeper than bias by one level, it is more difficult to remove. While is biased mind may be provided with a new information without its relationship with the datum information, a mono-tracked mind refuses to accept such a new input as an independent information but interrelates many unrelated information with a given datum information.

Once the person realizes, of course it is difficult, that his/her mind is mono-tracked, he/she must quit the subject for the time-being and engage his/her mind to something new, or just let is relax or freely wander with no preset goal. This would free the mind from the track. Then only, the problem be looked into independent of the past mono-tracking experience.

As I was writing this page, my Engineer son came to me and saw my topic. Then, he posed me a problem of dividing an area into congruent parts. First, he took my mind into doing this job in a tactical ways by putting 4/5 difficult problems. Then, he posed a very simple problem of dividing a square into 5 congruent parts. I kept on trying to do the job in highly tactical ways but could not find an appropriate tact. Ultimately, it came out to be a very simple problem need no tact. My mind was looking for some tact just because it was put on a mono-track by previous problems of similar nature.

Many human failures are for mono-tracking of minds while the solutions are very simple if the problems are looked into independently. All religions and other so-called Divine preaching are flourishing for mono-tracking of minds of people.

The most basic ignorance yet biasing of human mind and brain is that it presumes to know things as they really are, while the basic fact is that all perceived information reaching the brain through sensory organs are false, though directly related to the reality. For example, two identical things placed at different distances from the eye appear to be of different sizes. The logic faculty of the brain related the two sizes with their respective distances and makes guesswork of their relative sizes using all other information about the objects. For the same reason, a rectangular book may appear to be trapezoidal or of parallelogram shape depending its placement with respect to the eye.

If a person succeeds in freeing his/her brain from the bias of presumption of knowing things as they really are, chances of eliminating bias or mono-tracking may be minimized.