This is Disambiguation, a new newsletter by David McRaney about how brains make sense of the world which he almost titled: “I Think Therefore I’m Wrong.”
Also, I’m David, so let’s leave the third person thing behind from here on out.
For some of you this will be the second time you receive this post. I wrote it, posted it, and then clicked on all the things to make it a newsletter when I should have done those things in the reverse order.
That being said, this is the first post, which means this is one of those posts people make to tell you they are about to start making posts.
So, with that in mind, this is your chance to subscribe or unsubscribe right before I start sharing all sorts of new content. Some of it will be extra material from my new book How Minds Change, but most of it will be completely new, original, unique essays about how we are all the unreliable narrators in the story of our lives, telling ourselves tales about ourselves despite being unaware of how unaware we are.
Oh, and disambiguation is what brains do when confronted with novelty and uncertainty. We use what we (think) we know and understand to disambiguate the ambiguous. I love that term, especially because it comes from reading comprehension – the act of deriving meaning through context when a word, phrase, or entire essay could be interpreted in many different ways.
More soon.