A Short Essay: You Can't Consciously Fine-Tune Your Neurons
"We are blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We're not designed to know how little we know."— Daniel Kahneman
We like to think of ourselves as rational agents, capable of choosing what we believe and what we reject. But in reality, beliefs aren't toggled like switches; they're entangled within a dense web of cognitive biases, emotional patterns, and unconscious heuristics. You can't consciously fine-tune your neurons in real time— at least not without deep introspection. You can't surgically isolate one irrational belief—say, a certain political ideology with no logical grounding—and expect it to remain quarantined, harmless and detached from the rest of your cognition.
Belief systems are not modular; they exist as an interconnected network. Belief in one thing will inevitably bleed into belief in another—even if the two seem unrelated on the surface. This is because most of your cognitive processes are unconscious. You're not just choosing isolated ideas; you're reinforcing patterns of thought. Accepting one claim without evidence—especially if it's emotionally comforting—subtly weakens the overall structure of critical reasoning. Over time, this erosion of scepticism can spread across domains like science, morality, or politics, where rigorous thinking isn't just preferable, but essential.
Training your mind to embrace convenient falsehoods isn't a localised decision; it reshapes the entire cognitive framework you use to interpret reality. What's worse is that these changes often happen beneath the surface of awareness. You don't notice your threshold for scepticism lowering, or your confirmation bias strengthening, because belief formation is largely unconscious. That's why the idea of filtering out the harmful parts of irrational belief—keeping the emotional comfort while discarding the dogma—is seductive but naive. It assumes a level of metacognitive control that the average person simply doesn't possess.
The only real antidote is sustained, uncomfortable introspection—actively confronting inconsistencies in your worldview, revisiting the foundations of your beliefs, and resisting the urge to settle for easy answers. But that's not how most people live; and even for those who try, it's a slow, recursive process, not a flick of a switch. Or perhaps, there is a level of irrationality that humans need to practically function. So the trade-off we often imagine—"Can irrational belief be beneficial if filtered properly?"—perhaps that may not actually exist. Not because the intention is flawed, but because human cognition doesn't work that way. Beliefs leak, and over time, they shape who we are in ways we can't always trace or control.