While watching an old indian horror movie, there came a point when the the priest had exorcised the evil out of the girl and was sitting at the kitchen table while the mother of the girl served him tea. The father of the girl brought a psychologist was who tried his best but could not succeed (for obvious reasons), then her mother called the priest. Her father resisted it but let it happen for her mother's satisfaction. The girl became better now and the parents were happy. The psychologist saw the girl and she looked and behaved normal. He was content that whatever abnormal psychological condition she was going through had subsided. While leaving the house he saw the priest sitting at the table and gave the priest a look of disbelief and condescension. The mother of the girl, who was serving him tea saw it and looked back at the priest who said something wonderful. He said, "Human knowledge is like a lamp in pitch dark. There is light in a certain radius but beyond that there is infinite darkness and we don't know what lies in it."

I really liked that analogy and realized that there is one more aspect to this. If you light a lamp in a pitch dark room there is a immediate circle of darkness around the lamp (where its own shadow lies), then the light is intense and fades slowly into darkness as we move out. The first dark circle is the lamp's own self, which is not illuminated, which is unknown. The next circle of intense light is the immediate surrondings of the lamp which are most familiar and known. As we move out, the knowledge and confidence in that knowledge decreases till things enter the unknown. This is what I believe is the state of human knowledge. Paradoxically, the self despite being the closest is the least understood. The immediate surrondings with which we deal with every day is something we are most certain about. As we try to look at things distant from us, they become fuzzy, dim and uncertain. That is why we call them frontiers of knowledge because about them we can only guess and conjecture but cannot say anything with certainty.

As I see it our capacity to do something also follows a similar pattern. Let me give you an example. Lets say I drive a car. When I run it around the city at normal speeds I am pretty confident about my driving skills. But, if I am in a car chase (imagine any high-speed chase from a movie). What would happen? My driving skills have been stretched to their limit. I am now unsure if I can make the next turn. My driving could become so erratic that I could lose control and run off the road completely. These two situations represent the most familiar and the frontiers but what about the first dark circle? Have you noticed that whenever we are learning to do something we are most actively involved but as we grow familiar we think less and less until it becomes second nature. That familiarity is what creates the dark circle around it. The lack of introspection and thought makes us ignorant of how else it could have been done, what could be done to make it better. Until someone else comes up and says "Why don't you try it this way?" and we suddenly realize its obviousness and ask ourselves "Why didn't I see that before?". We didn't see that before because we weren't really looking.

What I learn from this is that we should not be too sure that we know ourselves because doing a lot of familiar stuff does not mean that the inner circle has become illuminated. Instead, it may have grown darker. Also, this confidence of knowledge and skill when taken to the frontier would not produce the same results and we may be making a lot of mistakes. Unless we keep our eyes open towards these two possibilities our confidence could well be delusion.

I read this turning dancer article and according to it, it predicts which side of the brain is dominant. Your particular characteristics are attributed to which part of the brain is stronger. This strength is not literal but just point to your predisposition or tendency. This wont be the first thing that you must have read that tells you about your personality. From stars to blood groups to lines in my hand to the sum of digits in my name, everything is supposed to be revealing in this regard. This sounds more scientific. It is not completely wrong though. It is true that specific abilities are centered at specific areas in the brain, for example language is in the left brain and spatial abilities. The diagram below shows the distribution of the abilities.

These things became known when doctors started treating patients with brain damage, especially those with the corpus collosum, a bundle of nerve wires that connect the left and the right half, cut were studied. Patients with severe epilepsy were treated by cutting the communication between the two halves of the brain. The experiment were successful but it revealed strange behavior in those patients. They could see a word but couldn't read it, they could sing but not speak and they couldn't remember their dreams as one half is responsible for having the dream and another for recording it to memory.

Coming back to personality and brain inclination, this got me interested but further research revealed that this was by far not a definitive answer to the question. People use both brain halves for most processing and even in people who have one half of the brain destroyed due to some problem the other half learns to adapt to this loss and compensates for its abilities. The other half can be trained in such people to learn the other half's ability, pointing to the fact the its not just the side of the brain that matters. This sells pretty well as an idea because the sides show that the creative and analytical or the artist and the scientist have different inclinations, how obviously left/right brain isn't it? Not so obvious actually. People typically have the whole spectrum of the creative to analytical abilities. The creative people often use the analytical abilities in their thinking and the analytical also rely on their intuition as much as logic. Both during their thinking processes use both sides of brains. During individual tasks, that are focused through well designed experiments in a lab environment, we do tend to use one area more than other but in general any give task that we do, requires multiple areas of the brain to work in concert.

Still for the sake of fun we indulge in the left brain - right brain thing to explain our personalities. Having left and right hand inclination also has nothing to do with the brains inclination as creativity and analytical abilities are equally distributed among both of them. So which brain are you?

This sounds like a disease but its not. This isn't a real term either. Its just a name I have for the habitual use or insistent attachment of post rationalization. Post rationalization is the simple act of justifying your actions, after, you have done them. This is not something unusual at all. We do it all the time, sometimes knowingly and intentionally because we have some other priority at hand which is being satisfied, but mostly unconsciously. Its an energy saving mechanism of the mind, a tool that helps to avoid confusion and maintain composure.

In an beautifully simple experiment scientist used a magic trick called the black card trick to fool the subjects into accepting, after having rejected it, the wrong card yet at the same time exposing a very fundamental fact about our ability to make decisions and the very conviction with which we stand by them. The experiment involves showing two similar yet distinct pictures of the same person to the subject and asking which one they like better. They are asked twice to make sure they see the difference and choose with confidence. Just then, the experimenter puts the cards down on the table and behind each picture card is another card with the opposite picture, the experimenter slips the back card to the subject. The top of the actual card is black and the table is black too, so the experimenter simply slides back that card without the subject knowing. The subject picks up the card, looks at the picture and is as confident as before, even if there is slight inexplicable confusion it doesn't last long before the subject convinces himself that it is the card what he chose.

Making decisions is as common an activity as from drinking water to taking a breath. Depending on what you call a decision, you could be making from tens to hundreds of decisions per day. Some big and life changing to some small and insignificant, but decisions nonetheless. A common problem with making decisions in uncertainty, which in common parlance is called life, is that you cannot be sure that the decision you made is correct or not. So you spend sometime thinking about it, weigh in the pros and cons, look at the best and worst case, discuss it with an expert and finally make a decision. Not everyone goes to this length but that's pretty much as far as you go. Once the decision is made you either are right in the near future or dead embarrassed wrong. In the long term what a decision brings is once again a matter of uncertainty because you can only know as much time as you have spent. If its "long" term and becomes clear "someday" then until that time comes, probably few generation down the road by some people's standard, you wouldn't know.

In the post decision period if someone asks you about your reasons you either state the most obvious things you knew before making that decision or what you realized after it, with confidence, in your support. Unless the decision turns so bad that when it goes public its intensity multiplied by the number of people who come to know it , make it utterly impossible to consider right and you must accept your bad judgement and then backtrack or change direction. While its not that bad, the natural tendency is to believe that you made the right choice. It is reassuring and gives you a feeling of control over your life. You may accept the opposite card and you may convince yourself that it is what you "chose". So much for being in control and choosing how to live your own life. A generation's dream evaporated.

So what the hell do you do in the face of such absurd limitations of the very brain which you need to make decisions and lots and lots of them for a probably very long life to come? Just be aware of the fact. Those tricky scientists suggest that you try to be as conscious as possible of fact that you are making decisions in uncertainty and you may fooled by your own self in to believing something that is not. After that be ready to look at evidence that says you missed something and try not to insist too much on one answer when everything was not as clear as day and night. Decisions have to be made but when made in the uncertainty cannot be depended upon. You could be moving in zig-zag but you would be moving anyway. So keep moving and don't make decisions too much of a burden once you have learnt better afterwards.

Among the different variety of exploitation that exists in this world, half of them employ it while almost all of the emotional ones depend on it. Well, what is it? Its guilt. Its actually both a good thing and a bad thing. It is this inner voice that makes you repent over the things you did wrong and compels and urges you to make them right. But what if this inner voice is heard by someone else and they also know what to say to compel or urge you to do something?

You come across these beggars on the street and well, as far as Pakistan is concerned, there is the Thursday thing too where they roam your neighborhood in search for alms and donations. They call in the name of the Lord or the favorite Prophet of the Lord, whom you happen to follow. They call in the name of all the sufferings and loss that you have had or all the good things that you want and say the Lord will help, if you help them. They call in the name of your children, your parents, your brothers and sisters.They call that you may have success. They call that you may prosper. We give them something and it makes us happy, really happy.

There is another wonderful group of people. They follow someone. Not only that they follow someone but they follow unquestioningly and without condition. They find the knowledge and power and value the person wields fascinating and how well that person goes about his affairs inspiring. That inspiring person is a guiding light and represents the things that they would like to be or do. That inspiring person knows what the don't know and does what they don't do and following him makes them happy, very happy.

To me, there is a common thread that runs through these pearls and many more such in life to bring about this wonderful and shiny trap that you put around you neck. To me, the thread is guilt. I don't know if you find my theory interesting or not but I believe it has a point. The feeling of guilt that can remove us from the wrong path, once harnessed by someone can lead us in any direction and we will be happy, really happy.

The beggar stands there and says all the things that you feel inside and gives you the means to do something about it, no matter how pointless. You want that good thing to happen but you may know that you haven't done enough to earn it.You want that bad thing to go away but you may know you may have done wrong to deserve it. Guilty of your own shortcomings you feel compelled to give him something in the hope that it will change things.

The preacher may be sitting on his pulpit and telling you things that you should do and you feel compelled to follow it. Guilty of your own sins and lack of knowledge you rest the burden of truth on his shoulders and hope that he will take you across. You must follow because you don't know. You must follow because you are no good.

Life it seems throws you in uncertainty and makes you vulnerable with your mistakes. The key is to learn to listen to you inner voice and not to the people out there to make things right. You may still make some mistakes but you learn and you do it right. Let it be action and not compulsion. Let people be helpers and not operators.

Unless you’re taking a test or playing Jeopardy, metacognition is more important to success than cognition. In real life, when you’re faced with a question the first decision is whether you know the answer or not. With strong metacognitive ability this is easy. If you know the answer, but can’t come up with it, you can always do a bit of research. If you know for sure that you don’t know, then you can start educating yourself.

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