The most obvious example is the a-ha. You study a science problem from every angle, yet have no idea whether or not you really understand it; then suddenly, without any effort on your part, you suddenly “get the picture.”

To understand why our brains might have developed such a mechanism, consider how we recognize a face. You’re walking down a busy street; you subliminally see but do not consciously notice hundreds of passersby. Nevertheless, your visual system is silently looking for good matches for faces from your past. When it “recognizes” a face as being quite similar to Joe Blow, your college roommate, it notifies you that you are looking at Joe Blow. This recognition occurs at an unconscious level; the feeling of knowing that it is Joe is an unconscious visual system calculation of the likelihood that the face actually is Joe’s. Without this mechanism, all perceptions from the trivial to the urgent would be given equal weight. With this feeling of knowing as part of perception, the unconscious brain can steer us toward looking at or thinking about things that it considers important.

However, we are subject to all sorts of perceptual errors. To grasp how difficult it can be to shake an unjustified sense of correctness, look at Muller-Lyer optical illusion.

Though the two horizontal lines are exactly the same length, we “feel” that the top line is longer than the bottom one. Our intellect tells us they are equal; our unconscious perceptual processes tell us that they are unequal. Worse, even knowing they are the same length cannot dispel the clearly irrational feeling that one is longer than the other.

Take-away point #1:

Just as we cannot consciously will ourselves to see the two horizontal lines as equal, we cannot will away false feelings of knowing.

Take-away point #2:

There are two types of knowledge—that which can be scientifically (empirically) tested, and that which cannot. Whenever you have a sense of “being right,” ask yourself if this feeling can be objectively tested. For example, you can measure the length of the two horizontal lines and “know” whether they are equal or unequal. You can ask the passerby if he is Joe Blow from college.

But, for those thoughts and ideas that cannot be objectively tested, you must operate with considerable caution and due respect for the possibility that your “sense of knowing,” no matter how overwhelming, can be dead wrong.

The antidote to unjustifiable “certainty” is a healthy dose of humility. It might even be that your biology is preventing you from seeing that a contrasting view has a grain of truth.

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