Key Terms
Inference
The mental process of drawing conclusions from evidence. Most inference is unconscious, effortless, and immediate.
Brain
The physical organ (gray and white matter, electrochemical activity). Mind: the range of conscious awareness, thought, p
Representation
An information-bearing unit of thought. When you perceive, imagine, remember, or desire something — you represent it.
Homeostasis
Body returns to equilibrium after disruption. Inference: drawing a conclusion from evidence or premises.
Example
People vastly overestimate death by violent crime versus death by heart disease — because crime stories dominate media c
Allostasis
Body anticipates future needs before they arise; based on past experience patterns. Anchoring bias: initial value skews
Heuristic
Mental shortcut; efficient but not always accurate.
Substitution heuristic
When facing a hard question, the brain silently replaces it with an easier one and answers that instead. This produces c
Flow state (Csikszentmihalyi)
Effortful activity that becomes pleasurable because skill matches challenge. Only available to those with real expertise
Cognitive bias
What happens when a heuristic produces a systematically incorrect result. Cognitive biases are like perceptual illusions
Evolutionary basis
Social groups improve survival odds. Pro-social behaviors include both in-group bonding and out-group suspicion.
Sunk costs
Time, money, energy already spent — unrecoverable. The fallacy: letting past investment distort present-day evaluation.
Metacognition
Thinking about thinking. First-order thinking (cognition): how you normally engage with the world.
Metacognitive activities include
Checking, planning, selecting, inferring, self-interrogating, interpreting experience, judging what you do/don't know. (
Steelmanning
Strengthening an opposing argument to its best possible version before engaging it. Sunk cost fallacy: overvaluing somet