Sunday, October 29, 2023

This Is Your Brain On…Your Brain



Some of us are old enough to remember this public service announcement with an anti-drug message: 


Symbolically using an egg in a frying pan to represent a brain being fried by use of too many illegal drugs.

This is not about an anti drug message, nor even an anti gematria message.  A “too much gematria will ruin your brain” message is doomed to failure like the so called war on drugs.  This is about the large supply of people who continually think “nobody is stupid enough to believe that!”  It’s also not about people with mental illness so much as how even people with relatively minor brain misfiring can allow themselves to be duped in the short term.

This image has made the rounds on social media:



When I first saw this, I didn’t read the accompanying test before I made a quick reaction, which was a WTF am I looking at?  This image was specifically created to simulate what a person might see when they are suffering from a stroke.  The actual objects get jumbled up into things that are not completely bizarre, but everything looks vaguely familiar.  It’s not meant to be “decoded” and taking a stab at if this thing looks like a jacket, that thing looks like an animal head, there’s a small bed, a gift basket.  Indeed, those are some of the things my unstroked brain tried to decode out of it.

The correct answer though, is the same as the correct answer to gematria decodes.  It doesn’t make any sense.  And for whatever reasons, from severe damage to relatively minor cognitive bias issues, there are people that will not just spend too much time trying to decode what can’t be decoded, they will start arguing and defending their own position.

The bigger picture, the correct answer that can’t be decoded, is that something like sports picks in gematria makes no sense.  For a decade we’ve seen the hypocrisy and lies.  Fairly simple things like picking both teams, constant failed predictions, following sources for news that have been caught again and again outright lying, and doubling down to justify being wrong.  Anything but ignoring the jumbled meaningless input and moving on with life.

This is the depressing world of those examining the world of misinformation and disinformation.  Trying to sort through those that who can be guided to the correct answer from those that are just being assholes to make a quick buck.  For now, by all appearances there’s far more money in putting out disinformation than there is in combatting it.

The people that fall for bad information are not necessarily too stupid, but they are falling for tactics designed to make them feel smarter than they really are.  They are constantly pressed to make emotional judgments to find an answer within something like the above image, that has no answers within it.  There are no bits and pieces  to claim yourself as a winner for being right on.  This is your brain on your brain, within a rabbit hole of deception and hatred.

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