Can the mind be trusted?

Chapter 9

Can the mind really be trusted?  The mind processes things and depending on different variables can the interpretations be wrong sometimes?  I say yes.  There are lots of times that we dream something so vivid and wake up the next morning thinking that what we dreamt was really true.  There are times when I hear people whispering around the corner and my mind interprets this as people talking about me when in reality they were just discussing a private matter that they didn’t want others to overhear.  When I grew up, I was forced to eat eggs because my step father thought I was just trying to get out of eating my breakfast.  I didn’t like eggs and because of these repeated experiences my mind has tricked me into thinking that I can never eat an egg or I’ll get sick like I did when I was a little girl.  Of course, this is probably not true but my mind says that it is.  In Ernest Hemingway’s, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, he introduces us to an elderly man that is dealing with thoughts of despair and who has recently tried to kill himself (Hemingway, 2010) and I think that a lot of people dealing with these types of thoughts are facing the tricks that the mind plays on them.  They think that there’s nothing left to live for or that everyone hates them or that people are out to get them.  These things could very well be true or is it just the mind allowing us to think things that aren’t really true?

Hemingway, E. (2010). A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. In M. S. Krasny, Sound Ideas (pp. 775-779). New York: McGraw-Hill.