By Wormwood, Ph. D.

(Intercepted by Jesse Jost)

The human brain is a disgustingly powerful little tool. But there are certain design flaws (others would call them “efficiencies”) that we demons can capitalize on to maximize human misery. I want to share some strategies I’ve honed over the centuries that take full advantage of the brain’s natural weaknesses.

These strategies work because humans place way too much trust in their powers of perception. When a human looks at the world, he believes that what he sees is the way things really are. When he remembers, he trusts that his vivid memories are accurate, and when he imagines the future, he assumes he is seeing clearly. Obviously we know that there is far too much going on in the world for any human mind to fully grasp it all, so the brain is selective in what it records and what it ignores. When the brain records what is going on around it, it chooses what sensory details to remember and what to leave out. If a person did not have this ability to tune things out, he would go crazy.

Most humans are aware of the fact that they miss certain details and they are okay with that, yet they are also confident that they have an accurate view of what is going on. But when they pull up their memories, there is a process going on they seem to be blissfully unaware of. You see, they think their memory is like a video recorder and that the memory files are stored just like they are recorded. But if everything was actually recorded that way, these files would be way too big for the brain to handle. In reality, the brain only selects a few key details and stores them in a compressed file. When the brain recalls a memory, it pulls up those details. However, in order to recreate the memory, the few details are not enough, and this is where it gets fun for us.   Continue reading…