Last night, the United States made a HUGE stride. This is universally acknowledged. However, whether this is a stride towards self-destruction or vast improvement is subject for debate. And debated it is. Regardless, it is long sought-after health care overhaul for which Obama has been euthanizing his public opinion.

I am excited for this stride, personally, and even more excited for all of the necessary amendments to the bill that will eventually follow (ideally at a swift pace) to fix some of its issues. With this, I expect to have a more bipartisan vote.

Will doctors’ malpractice insurance be fixed so that unnecessary chunks of income are no longer bitten from their salaries? Will we finally subsidize their college education as we already do for so many teachers committing themselves to making a difference in especially troubled areas? Will we reinforce the currently ambiguous (to some) language of law to establish that although women have the right of choice in abortion, they do not have the use of tax dollars in doing so? I hope so.

But I digress.

After touching on that, I want to go into something else which I observed quite a bit today.

Watching the health care debate taking place in the U.S. House of Representatives pretty much all day, I noticed something that was not at all a surprise to me, nor will it likely be to anybody reading this.

What one Democratic speaker said, most every proceeding Democratic speaker repeated, if not in different words. What one Republican speaker said, most every proceeding Republican speaker repeated, if not in different words.

There just wasn’t that much more to say. Moreover, most of what was said by one party was judgment based upon perception. The exact perception judged vastly different. This is why ‘debate’ as it was deemed, is not the right word to describe the process which happened today. Rather, when you have two sides taking the exact same data, interpreting that data in vastly different ways, and then taking turns repeating that same information to no avail, I call that a waste of time.

And an interesting lesson in psychology.

Let’s illustrate the difference between ‘perception’ and ‘judgment’ using this example. The most commonly referenced aspect of Obamacare today was definitely the big news from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO has asserted that the bill as it stands will actually cut the deficit over time. This is hardly fact. What the CBO has done here is apply judgment to perception. Perception is far less subjective (although not completely objective) than judgment. The CBO's assertion is a judgment call based upon analysing of perception.

So what happened with this? Naturally a majority of Democrats praised this judgment and adopted it as their own, using it to support the notion that the bill is budget-friendly. And of course Republicans have contested this judgment, asserting that the CBO (a supposedly non-partisan entity) grossly misinterpreted the facts.

None of this should be surprising. And we owe it all to cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is that feeling we get when two ideas preside in the mind which blatantly oppose one another. It’s a very negative feeling. It’s uncomfortable, it’s discouraging. Fortunately, our mind’s have a way of dealing with this unwanted emotion. Unfortunately, it’s not always logical about it.

Consider those holding religious convictions. Many times in history, scientific findings have made assertions which conflict with some religious text. For instance, the age of the Earth. When radioactive dating suggested the world was over 4 and a half billion years old, this conflicted with long-held notions within the church that the Earth was much younger. So what happened?

One of two things. Some decided that previous interpretations of their holy texts could have been wrong, and that, once reinterpreted, they could coexist with modern scientific findings. Others decided, with cognitive dissonance and emotional ‘necessity’ as their only reasoning, that this scientific method and its findings were simply false. The former is an example of the logical faculties of the human mind, its ability to adapt and make sense of confusing situations. The latter is an example of the potential logical dangers of cognitive dissonance.

This is obviously a more controversial explanation of the concept. So here’s something a bit less controversial for all of us to enjoy:

This is a great example. Our brains are meant to perceive with great depth. We scan our environment for colors, shapes, etc. In this case, the signal our mind is receiving for color is contradictory to the signal our mind is receiving for words. I like this example, because we can’t even help it! It’s so basic, that the hard-wiring of each individual’s brain is going to determine what they end up saying, especially if that individual tries to start naming off the words faster and faster.

Here we can see that when cognitive dissonance occurs, our brain must resolve the issue by choosing but one stimulus to dominate. In basic scenarios, as our Color vs. Word chart above, the end result is simply a fun, fairly insightful activity on whether the participant is left or right brained. On more complex issues, it decides which facts to ignore, which facts to emphasize, and which facts to inflate.

We are absolutely all guilty of this. I will indulge you with a little bit about myself. I am hard-headed. I do my fair share of twisting and manipulating things to fit what I want to believe. This is all an emotional faculty prevailing over logic, though.

And whenever I can recognize that, I encourage the dissonance to result in a well thought-out, logical comparison of both ideas in question and a decision based upon these conclusions.

Unless I know the logical conclusion will contradict what my emotional faculty is desperately trying to convey to me. In which case I ignore as much logic as necessary.

And that’s cognitive dissonance.