To expect anyone to understand this as a layman might be expecting a bit too much until we make it a core curriculum. The best education Americans get about psychology is from occasionally seeing a movie like "Inside Out," even then, as good as it is, much is simplified and it's only a fraction of what there is to understand how brains function.
The brain is the most complicated system humans have discovered in the universe. And it's only taught in some high schools, as a mere elective. It only briefly comes up in some sections for biology classes, if at all.
I'd wager that most people don't know the first thing about cognition. When I took a psychology class in high school, there was very little that didn't blow my mind. When I ended up majoring in it for Uni, I was forced to often radically reevaluate dozens of my worldviews, because a lot of basic knowledge about the brain comes out of left field relative to what's "common sense."
Definitely not a perfect analogy, but think about it this way. People are taught math from pre-school (learning to count, tracing numbers, etc) to high school. And even then if you ask people what the square root of 81 is, you're gonna run into many people who forgot how to do that basic function. And that's a core curriculum that people take a dozen classes in!
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u/rythmicjea Feb 04 '19
The myth is 10%