Title: What Actually Is a Belief? And Why Is It So Hard to Change? | Psychology Today
Headings: What Actually Is a Belief? And Why Is It So Hard to Change?
Ralph Lewis M.D.
What Actually Is a Belief? And Why Is It So Hard to Change?
Beliefs evolved as energy-saving shortcuts. Restructuring them is costly.

Content: These shortcuts to interpreting and predicting our world often involve connecting dots and filling in gaps, making extrapolations and assumptions based on incomplete information and based on similarity to previously recognized patterns. In jumping to conclusions, our brains have a preference for familiar conclusions over unfamiliar ones. Thus, our brains are prone to error, sometimes seeing patterns where there are none. This may or may not be subsequently identified and corrected by error-detection mechanisms. It’s a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. In its need for economy and efficiency of energy consumption, the default tendency of the brain is to fit new information into its existing framework for understanding the world, rather than repeatedly reconstructing that framework from scratch. Seeing is believing
It seems likely that the processes in the brain involved in abstract belief formation evolved from simpler processes involved in interpreting sensory perception. article continues after advertisement
Since we experience the external world entirely through our senses, we find it hard to accept that these perceptions are sometimes subjectively distorted and that they are not necessarily reliable experiences of objective reality. People tend to trust their physical senses and to believe their perceptions even when they are hallucinating and no matter how bizarre their perceptual distortions. People will layer explanations on top of their perception of reality to explain away contradictions.