Schemas and the Political Brain

Before you keep reading, try this experiment. Take a blank piece of paper and, in as much detail as possible, draw a $5 bill or £5 note, purely from memory.

If you do, you’ll be astonished to realize how rudimentary and wrong your drawing turns out to be. These are objects that we’ve seen thousands of times in our lifetimes. We instantly recognize them. We have a clear sense of what they’re supposed to look like. But when it comes to recreating them in granular detail, most of us are utterly useless. Our memory can recognize, but not always reproduce.

Our cognitive processing and our memories don’t work the way we think they do. We tend to imagine there’s some sort of file drawer within our heads, in which all sorts of information goes in, gets stored in pristine form, and then we pull it out when we need it. But that’s not true...

Brian Klaas for The Garden of Forking Paths.

Brian Klaas

Dr. Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a columnist for The Washington Post. Klaas is also a frequent television commentator and political consultant. He is also the author of the forthcoming book CORRUPTIBLE: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us and host of the Power Corrupts podcast. Dr. Klaas is an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, US foreign policy, American politics more generally, political violence, and elections. He has previously authored three books: ‘The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy’ (Hurst & Co, November 2017); ‘The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy’ (Oxford University Press, December 2016); and ‘How to Rig an Election’ (Yale University Press, co-authored with Professor Nic Cheeseman; May 2018).

https://brianpklaas.com/
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