Editorial : i wonder, October 2020

Ravi, Chitra (2020) Editorial : i wonder, October 2020. i wonder... (5). ISSN 2582-1636

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Abstract

Welcome to this special issue on the Pandemic. Our aim in this issue is to engage with the many ways in which the pandemic challenges our cognitive bias for certainty. A tendency, as the journalist Marcio Moreira Alves describes it, to "suffer from an absence of doubt". Not just in our ability to access the physical, social, and psychological necessities for survival. But, also, in our tendency to seek the certainty of knowledge, of knowing, and of the many symbols, like words, that we use to capture and share this knowing. This is reflected in our quest and love for answers. The more definitive an answer, the more certain its wording, the more powerful its hold on us. The neurologist Robert Burton suggests that this “...profound ‘feeling of knowing’ may act as a reward system that provides the positive feedback necessary for us to learn and to continue wanting to learn...”

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Articles in APF Magazines

Authors:

Ravi, Chitra

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