[in progress] The availability Heuristic means that your brain can quickly respond with actions or thinking reflecting what is most available in the Brain. This is a key area for advertising experts …
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When we hear or read something we actually are biased to alter the meaning of what we have read to match what we already think. This results in a bias that we do not usually perceive.
[in progress] A list of the major brain heuristics, maybe a short history of key developments in understanding how the brain functions during the 1970s.
A short description of a topic/article with a read more link.
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[in progress] A short description of a topic/article with a read more link.
NOTE: make a copy of this “topic intro” object when more are needed.
Introduction
In the mid-twentieth century people began to discover how the human brain works. It has many characteristics and details. The details give us a clue as to why the brain learns like it does and why the brain can slow down learning more — understanding what is “true” better, seeking the truth better. We can also use the information figure out how to compensate for things that may fool us.
Brain Composition
The brain contains neurons (nerve cells) and dendrites (receptive branches). Neurons can transmit electrical and chemical signals throughout the body. Dendrites are tree like branches of a neuron that receive and process signals from other neurons. The dendrites with the receiving neuron process incoming signals which can cause the neuron to trigger and send out a signal to many other neurons. The dendrites can be gradually adjusted and altered by learning things from human experiences such as learning arithmetic in first grade classes. The brain is acting something like a computer but where the long term learning requires the dendrites to be adjusted which can involve repetition of the information from outside of the body. This repetition could be from a teacher repeating the arithmetic descriptions or by repetition of advertising on TV or on a web page.
Researchers have been studying the details for many decades. Recent research (as of 2017-2025) has increased the knowledge of the details of how the dendrites and related processes work. The knowledge in general has been applied to machine learning (artificial intelligence) which has improved significantly in the recent past.
Explore Articles
The overall effect of the way the brain works has been studied over the years since 1960 and the basic ways the brain operates (responds), called heuristics, has been studied and reported in publications and books.
The articles shown below describe key characteristics including:
- the availability heuristic – how we learn from repetition, how advertising works
- confirmation bias – how our brains tend to warp incoming information to match what the brain already thinks it knows.
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