Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
I think this is why it&#x27;s hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you&#x27;re right.<p>At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion.  Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you&#x27;ve gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory.  What you store there is the conclusion.  If it comes up again, you&#x27;ve got your decision, but not all of the information about how you arrived there.<p>So when your decision is challenged, you are not well equipped to defend it, because you no longer retain <i>why</i> you arrived at that decision, just the conclusion itself.<p>It&#x27;s <i>immensely</i> easier to trust that you arrived at the right conclusion and the person who is in disagreement is missing something, than it is to reload all of the facts and figures back into your brain and re-determine your conclusion all over again. Instead, you can dig in, and resort to shortcuts and logical tricks (that you can pull out without needing to study) to defend what you&#x27;ve previously concluded (possibly correctly, but without the relevant information).<p>If this finding ends up being generally an approximation of how our brains work, it could explain a lot about what&#x27;s happening to global conversations, particularly around the Internet and on social media specifically.  It also suggests a possible solution; make the data quickly available.  Make it as seamless as possible to re-load those facts and figures into your working memory, and make it as unpleasant as possible to rely on shortcuts and logical tricks when arguing a point.