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