The human mind is really quite complex if you get into it, there are so many different phenomena going on yet the outcome, when rendered to (the consciousness of) the owner of the mind, it appears quite indistinguishable from reality itself. This might help explain why almost all people seem to have such high levels of confidence in their own beliefs being 100% accurate, but can so easily see cognitive errors in others (which they themselves cannot see).

All of this isn't incredibly well understood by scientists and philosophers, but there are all sorts of theories and studies that are chipping away at the mystery. Digging into the material while reflecting upon the nature and contents of one's own mind, a lot of interesting questions arise, like "just how is it that I seem to know the answer to so many things, and can often even articulate how I know things to be true, but then often discover I'm actually incorrect"? Or "I believe X, and I consciously attribute it to Y, but how would I know for certain that Y is the only thing upon which my belief rests"? It also makes reading social media a lot more interesting because you get to observe manifestations of the illusions up close.

Based on my layman knowledge of the underlying neurology & psychology, combined with the epistemic crisis (systemic racism/corruption, conspiracy theories, fake news, etc) that can be observed on a daily basis on any social media platform (and interfering with democracy), I have come to strongly "believe" that society should be having some serious conversations about whether this material should be included in some way with standard school curriculum, perhaps as a sibling to the anti-racism/stereotyping initiatives that seem to be showing some decent results.

Just a few of the many interesting theories about what's going on in our brains:

Heuristics in judgment and decision-making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristics_in_judgment_and_dec...

How the Brain Biases Beliefs: https://neurosciencenews.com/biases-beliefs-9701/

Belief formation – A driving force for brain evolution: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027826261...

State-dependent Memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The Noumenal World and the Phenomenal World:
http://mrhoyestokwebsite.com/WOKs/Reason/Useful%20Informatio...

Four theories of amodal perception: https://escholarship.org/content/qt3td65034/qt3td65034_noSpl...

The Importance of Amodal Completion in Everyday Perception: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6083800/

What Is Amodal Completion?

"Amodal completion is the representation of those parts of the perceived object that we get no sensory stimulation from. In the case of vision, it is the representation of occluded parts of objects we see: When we see a cat behind a picket fence, our perceptual system represents those parts of the cat that are occluded by the picket fence."

"If perception is sensitive to top-down influences because of the top-down sensitivity of amodal completion, then it is not an unbiased way of learning about the world, as our preexisting thoughts, beliefs and expectations could influence how and what we perceive (see Siegel, 2011 on a version of this worry). So we get a form of vicious circularity: Our beliefs, thoughts and expectations are supposed to be based on and justified by our perceptual states, but these perceptual states themselves are influenced by our beliefs, thoughts and expectations (because of the top-down influences on perception via amodal completion)."