Our growing understanding of the human brain and the human mind has given us insight into the pitfalls of making judgements about what we perceive and what we know. The brain has a capacity for rapidly sorting objects, events and experiences into categories that are useful to us as clinicians, such as when we observe that this child looks 'sick', or that patient's difficulty in word finding suggests a stroke. Because these mental processes are largely unconscious,1 we are often unaware of exactly which memories, perceptions and assumptions affect our actions and our judgement; without awareness, we cannot validate or disconfirm them. Importantly for those of us involved in medical education, assumptions about our own behaviour are also often unconscious and, therefore, we can be blind to many aspects of our own competence, effectiveness and professionalism. Reflection is promoted as one way of gaining access to perceptions and judgements that often escape our awareness, and thus may place us in a better position to change them.
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