This is your brain undergoing cognitive dissonance

[ButterflyWoman]

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/201 ... onance.ars (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/12/this-is-your-brain-undergoing-cognitive-dissonance.ars)

Really interesting article. Took me a while to decide where to put the link, actually. I finally decided it was best suited to the reality creation forum, because of the the implications with regard to thoughts and beliefs (which directly affect the manifestation of your experience of reality).

In a nutshell, when you decide against something, it actually changes your beliefs about the thing. Really interesting information there, potentially very useful to understand when working with beliefs and thoughts and preferences and such...

[CFTraveler]

I liked this

..the study pretty clearly shows that behavior isn't driven simply by what we believe; our actions can feed back and alter our beliefs. Which, really, shouldn't have surprised anyone, given the degree of post-hoc rationalization that most people engage in. However, as the authors note, this fact seemed to have escaped those who developed the economic systems that assume that people are rational ..
:D