I am stupid

 Major premise: People are stupid.

Minor premise: Isaac Asimov is (was) a person

Conclusion: Isaac Asimov is stupid

(Sorry, no post yesterday because I was doing some heavy cerebral processing.)

He'd have been the first to admit it. All of us are susceptible to cognitive errors and biases. I'd like to think that Asimov was less susceptible than most, but he must have had his own foibles. It's a constant struggle to be mindful and think straight. 

For my own part, I once had a romanticized view of the Chinese revolution, I was an anthropogenic climate change skeptic, and I entertained the likelihood that medical intervention, on balance, did more harm than good. (Viz Illich, Medical Nemesis.) 

One of my pervasive misconceptions was believing that mental states are far more influential for physical health than they really are. I thought that placebos had a direct effect on biological functioning, and that physical maladies such as gastric ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease, acne and various forms of chronic inflammation, among others, were caused by or at least associated with emotional states. Actually ulcers turn out to be an infectious disease caused by a bacterium, placebos affect self-reports of symptoms but not measurable biological parameters, and most of the other sorts of syndromes I mentioned are autoimmune or allergic disorders.

Chronic stress is associated with high blood pressure, and people with serious mental diagnoses tend to have a lot of comorbidity and shortened life expectancies, although the exact mechanisms are uncertain. So it's not that there's nothing to it, just that many people have an exaggerated and even fundamentally incorrect view of the relationship between the brain and the rest of the body. A positive attitude won't cure or prevent cancer. The etiology of asthma is not well understood but it is definitely not caused by psychodynamic processes. Maternal smoking in utero is a risk factor,  in many cases it seems to be basically an allergic disease, and it may be related to infections or toxic exposures.

Nevertheless, the brain is a physical organ and it is connected to the rest of the body. Chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic pain syndromes of all kinds, are probably basically neurological in origin. The circuits that send pain signals to the brain have gotten stuck open, to put it crudely. This doesn't mean the person is crazy or that the fundamental cause is repressed anger or childhood memories or anything like that. Physical or psychological trauma likely may be involved in causing these syndromes but it isn't happening because of any ongoing psychodynamic cause, it's a misfunction of the nervous system. But the point is, I now have an open mind about these questions and I acknowledge what we, and therefore I, don't know.

It's probably a good exercise to think about prior beliefs of your own that have changed. What might you be convinced of today that could turn out to be wrong? What beliefs could you reexamine? And what are the obstacles that might be stopping you?