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...
