{"id":8691,"date":"2013-04-01T09:36:24","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T09:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acneeinstein.com\/?p=983"},"modified":"2019-11-22T10:08:29","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T10:08:29","slug":"critical-thinking-for-clear-skin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acneeinstein.com\/critical-thinking-for-clear-skin\/","title":{"rendered":"How Your Brain Perpetuates Acne By Deceiving You"},"content":{"rendered":"
Let me start this post by making a bold claim. Critical thinking is by far the most important skill you can learn, as far as getting over acne is concerned. I believe that critical thinking is more important than understanding diet and nutrition. And lack of critical thinking adds years to your misery.<\/p>\n
I lived with acne 8 years longer than I needed. It’s all because I was stupid, ignorant and lacked critical thinking skill. By writing this post I hope to spare you from that agony – we both know that it’s not fun to live with acne. In this post I use rather strong and loaded words, like ignorance and stupidity. I want you to know that my use of these words has no bearing on intelligence or any other personal characteristics.<\/p>\n
The ignorance I’m talking about is actually the ‘default mode’ of the human brain. Evolution hardwired the human brain to jump to conclusions and recognize patterns where none exists, called patternicity<\/a>. What we didn’t evolve were critical thinking skills. Brain-power is expensive, and critical thinking just wasn’t important for the survival of our ancestors (I’m assuming). Hence evolution resulted in believing, rather than critical thinking, being the default response to new information.<\/p>\n The problem is that today we are bombarded with an endless torrent of information, much of which is pure hokum. And this is where the default mode of the brain gets you into trouble.<\/p>\n In the about me page<\/a> I told the story of how I spent 8 years trying all sorts of alternative and natural treatments. While I learned, sort of, a lot during this time, most of the 8 years was wasted on trying highly implausible treatments that, in retrospect, had no chance of working. All because the critical thinking faculties in my brain were in massive #FAIL mode.<\/p>\n The point of this post is not to attack your personal beliefs or anything like that. I hope that you can learn from my mistakes and cut the time it takes you to get over acne<\/strong>. I hope that this post prompts you to question what you believe about health. Because being able to set aside things that don’t work greatly reduce the time it takes for you to get clear.<\/p>\n I also hope to point out that skepticism is not a dirty word – as it’s often portrayed in the alternative and natural health circles. Being skeptical means looking at evidence with an open mind, as much as humanely possible, and being willing to change your beliefs when they are shown wrong.<\/p>\n I got the inspiration for this post while reading a comment<\/a> on a recent post, Debating Homeopathy Part II<\/a>, at the Neurological blog. The commenter recounted how his earlier ignorance led him to believe in homeopathy. This got me to thinking how ignorance and lack of critical thinking about acne just prolongs suffering and ends up wasting tons of time and money. In this post I want to offer some remedies and to cover a few common ways we ‘get it wrong’.<\/p>\n This is the mother of all fallacies. Because when you ‘see something with your own eyes’ it’s hard to dismiss it. This stems from the fact as humans we fancy ourselves as unbiased and impartial observers. We like to think that we see reality as it is, without any distortions or biases. Furthermore, many people like to think their brains as infallible supercomputers.<\/p>\nIt worked for me<\/b><\/h2>\n