Over the years, when most patients have first met psychiatrist Michael I. Bennett, they have tended to believe they would soon to get to know a trusted confidant who would sit quietly, listen intently, and eventually deliver something he says is scientifically impossible: a way to make all their bad feelings go away.

“I’d say, ‘Well, what’s your goal with this problem?’ explains Bennett. “And they would say, ‘Of course, it’s to feel better. It’s to improve it. It’s to solve it,’ and I’d be essentially saying, ‘Fuck that! That’s not going to happen.'”

Is all this new technology improving our thinking or dampening it? Are all these new communication tools turning us into navel-gazing human/brand hybrids, or are we developing a new set of senses that allow us to benefit from never severing contact with the people most important to us?

A few days after Hurricane Katrina erased the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I traveled down there in a truck with my uncle and aunt-in-law to help them salvage what they could from their home.

They lived close to the beach, just off the highway that runs parallel to the ocean through Gulfport, Biloxi, Pass Christian, Bay St. Louis, and Waveland. Katrina ravaged them all, tossing boats into neighborhoods, trees into houses, and houses into the streets. At the minimum, if you lived there, your home took in a few feet of the Gulf of Mexico leaving behind a crusty imprint on the lower half of your walls and deposits of goop on your toilets and in your bathtub. Looking at the imprint, you could rewind the events in your head based on the height of the water line. Beneath that line, everything was ruined, all piled up in the kitchen or the living room or in a hallway closet through some strange quirk of physics.

Before we had names for them or a science to study their impact, the people who could claim the most expertise on biases, fallacies, heuristics and all the other recently popularized quirks of human reasoning were scam artists, con artists, and magicians.

On this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we discuss the folk practitioners of cognitive science with magician and scam expert Brian Brushwood. In the conversation, we explore a wide-range of ideas from how card tricks can be a gateway to better critical thinking to why most psychics end up tricking themselves into believing in their own bullshit. We also discuss why people fall for scams of all sizes, how to avoid them, and why most magicians can spot a fraudster a mile away.

Is psychology too WEIRD?

That’s what this episode’s guest, psychologist Steven J. Heine, suggested when he and his colleagues published a paper revealing that psychology wasn’t the study of the human mind, but the study of one kind of human mind, the sort of mind generated by the kinds of brains that happen to be conveniently located near the places where research is usually conducted.

When you hear about “subjects” in a psychology paper, those subjects are almost always North American college undergraduates or students from Australia or the UK, members of a cohort many scientists now label as the WEIRDest people in the world, short for Western, Education, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic – the kind of people who make up less than 15 percent of the world’s population.

Is the person you believe to be the protagonist of your life’s story real, or do you daily witness the unfolding tale of a completely fictional character? In other words, is your very self something concrete, or is it as illusory as a daydream?