The Divided Mind: Cognitive Freedom in the Age of Permanent Persuasion
In a restoration workshop, under a low angle of light, a woman is bent over the face of an ancient painting. All around her, silence. Before her lie not only colors and materials, but layers of time: oxidized varnishes, dust, old retouches, and nearly invisible alterations that have accumulated over the years.
With a swab, she proceeds slowly, a few millimeters at a time. She knows that her task is not simply to remove. She must recognize and distinguish what belongs to the work from what has settled upon it. A gesture that is too hesitant would leave the image hidden; one that is too aggressive would risk erasing not only the patina but also the original color.
It is, first and foremost, an exercise in discernment.
Perhaps we should learn to observe our minds in the same way, especially as they navigate the contemporary information landscape.
Every day we are bombarded with a volume of messages that no previous generation has had to process at a speed comparable to ours. News, comments, images, videos, statistics, testimonies, opinions, reconstructions, and content generated or modified by artificial intelligence often appear within the same visual space, separated only by a few seconds of scrolling.
Rigorous scientific research can appear alongside a supposition, a personal testimony, a deliberate manipulation, or a falsehood crafted with such care that it appears perfectly plausible.
The problem, then, is not merely the existence of false information. Contemporary disinformation operates at a deeper level, because it interferes with the processes through which we ascribe meaning to what we encounter. It captures our attention, plays on our emotions, exploits repetition and familiarity, and taps into our sense of belonging, our fears, our resentments, and our expectations.
It doesn’t simply seek to make us believe something; it can attempt to influence the very way in which that belief takes shape.
For this reason, external defenses—fact-checking, source verification, media literacy, platform accountability—remain indispensable, but they cannot be enough. There is a more intimate realm where action is needed: that mental space—often very brief—that separates what we see from the decision to accept it as true.
Research in recent years has challenged a rather widespread cliché: the idea that people are almost incapable of distinguishing reliable news from fake news. In 2025, Jan Pfänder and Sacha Altay published a systematic review with a pre-registered meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour that compiled 303 effect estimates drawn from 67 experimental studies, involving a total of 194,438 participants from 40 countries.
Overall, people were clearly able to distinguish true news from false news. Curiously, they were more likely to doubt a true news story than to accept a false one—a finding that the authors interpret as a propensity toward skepticism rather than credulity.
This is an important point, because it alters the very meaning of “critical thinking.” Strengthening the mind does not mean teaching it to be suspicious of everything. A society in which all information is perceived as potentially misleading is not necessarily freer or more resistant to manipulation.
Critical thinking is not the same as indiscriminate distrust; rather, it consists of the ability to gauge trust based on the available evidence.
A consistent picture emerges from the meta-analysis published in 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Mubashir Sultan and colleagues. The authors pooled individual data from 11,561 U.S. participants across 31 experiments, resulting in a total of 256,337 judgments regarding the truthfulness of news headlines. Accuracy was higher than expected by chance for both true and false news stories.
Greater analytical reasoning ability was associated with better discrimination, while self-reported familiarity with a news story increased the tendency to consider it true.
And it is precisely familiarity that is one of the most delicate aspects of our cognitive architecture.
When we encounter a statement again, processing it becomes more fluid. That sense of ease can be unconsciously mistaken for a sign of reliability. This is the so-called illusory truth effect.
Jessica Udry and Sarah Barber, in a review published in 2024 in Current Opinion in Psychology, demonstrated how simple repetition can increase the credibility attributed even to false information, conspiracy theories, or implausible claims.
In the same year, Felix Speckmann and Christian Unkelbach, in four pre-registered experiments published in Cognition, highlighted an even more subtle phenomenon. Participants not only tended to perceive repeated information as more familiar, but were also more likely to feel as though they had already known it before the experiment.
In other words, something encountered only recently can subjectively take on the feel of older, more established knowledge.
Here, disinformation encounters a fundamental characteristic of human memory: remembering does not mean faithfully reproducing a record. Memory is reconstructive. The content may be retained while the memory of its source fades; we may recall a phrase without knowing precisely where we read it, who said it, or whether it came from a verified article, an anonymous comment, or content we had initially recognized as false.
The meta-analysis by Alexa Schincariol, Henry Otgaar, Ciara Greene, and colleagues, published in 2024 in Memory, Mind & Media, offers a particularly interesting finding. By analyzing the available experimental studies on exposure to fake news, the authors found that approximately 40% of participants reported at least one false memory. This finding should be interpreted with caution, as the studies presented multiple instances of fake news and showed considerable heterogeneity: considering the total number of false events shown, the proportion actually “remembered” as true was around 22%. It remains significant, however, that better analytical reasoning skills were associated with a lower likelihood of reporting false memories.
This does not mean, of course, that every piece of fake news rewrites our memory. It means something more realistic and, in some respects, more disturbing: subsequent information can become embedded in our reconstruction of what we remember, and our memory of the source can deteriorate more rapidly than our memory of the content.
Disinformation does not operate solely in space; it can also operate across time.
Another primary pathway is emotion. Fear, anger, indignation, and a sense of threat have a particular ability to capture our attention. When a news story touches on a moral conviction, a fear regarding one’s identity, or group membership, it becomes more difficult to evaluate it objectively.
We are no longer merely examining a piece of information: we may feel as though we are protecting something that concerns ourselves.
However, it would be wrong to revive the old dichotomy between reason and emotion. The two dimensions do not run on separate tracks. Emotion directs attention, contributes to memory, and assigns significance to events. The problem arises when its intensity becomes so strong that it is no longer recognized as a variable capable of influencing judgment.
For this reason, one of the most valuable questions to ask when faced with a news story that immediately provokes a reaction might be very simple: Why do I want it to be true so badly?
Or, conversely: Why do I need it to be false?
These are metacognitive questions. For a moment, they shift our focus from the object being observed to the person observing it.
The psychophysical state in which we process information also deserves attention, provided we avoid any deterministic shortcuts. We lack a scientific basis for claiming that stress or inflammation automatically makes a person more gullible. Such a conclusion would be simplistic. We do know, however, that many functions involved in cognitive control depend on the integrity and efficiency of prefrontal networks.
In a review published in Biological Psychiatry, Mary Kate Joyce, Stacy Uchendu, and Amy Arnsten analyzed the mechanisms through which stress and inflammatory processes can interfere with the functioning of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region critical for working memory, abstract thought, attention regulation, and cognitive control.
It is at this point that the neuroimmunological perspective can enrich the discussion, provided it does not become a universal explanation. The body, brain, and environment are systems in constant dialogue. States of prolonged stress involve neuroendocrine and immune circuits that interact with brain networks involved in attention, memory, and behavioral regulation. There is, therefore, no “biology of fake news”; rather, there are biological and psychological conditions that can make the cognitive work required to evaluate complex information more or less efficient.
Critical thinking, in this sense, is also an embodied process.
Comparing sources, simultaneously holding multiple hypotheses, inhibiting an impulsive reaction, tolerating uncertainty, retrieving prior information, and admitting the possibility of revising a belief all require resources. It is not an abstract act that occurs independently of the body’s state.
Sleep also plays an indirect role in this balance. A systematic review with meta-analysis published in 2024 in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews synthesized 39 studies, 125 effect estimates, and 1,234 participants, showing that sleep restriction has a negative—albeit, on average, small—effect on memory formation.
This does not mean that getting little sleep leads one to believe misinformation. Rather, it means that memory, attention, and processing ability also depend on the conditions under which we ask the mind to work.
A fatigued mind does not necessarily lose intelligence. It may lose something more subtle: the time and resources needed to use that intelligence effectively.
And time is perhaps one of the most contested commodities in today’s attention economy. Digital communication often urges us to react before we’ve even processed the information. Scrolling, commenting, sharing: the action easily precedes evaluation.
Misinformation thrives on haste. Verification, almost never.
Studies on accuracy prompts are interesting precisely because they seek to reopen this gap.
In 2022, Gordon Pennycook and David Rand compiled twenty experiments—involving a total of 26,863 participants—in a meta-analysis published in Nature Communications. A simple prompt to consider the accuracy of content before deciding whether to share it improved the quality of the information people reported wanting to share, particularly by reducing the tendency to share fake news.
It is not a definitive solution, but it suggests something significant: we may share inaccurate content not necessarily because we are unable to recognize it, but because, at that moment, our attention has been captured by something else—surprise, a sense of belonging, outrage, a desire to participate in the conversation, or a need for approval.
Refocusing attention on the question “Is this accurate?” may be enough, at least in some circumstances, to change behavior.
In recent years, prebunking—or psychological inoculation—has also garnered significant interest: the idea of teaching people in advance how to recognize certain recurring manipulation techniques, such as the excessive use of emotion, false dichotomies, the use of fake experts, or the indiscriminate discrediting of sources.
In this field as well, however, scientific caution is essential. In 2024, Pennycook, Berinsky, Lewandowsky, Rand, and colleagues published five studies in Nature Human Behaviour, involving a total of 7,286 participants. Inoculation against emotional manipulation helped participants recognize that specific technique, but on its own it did not improve their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. The results were more favorable when the intervention was combined with an explicit emphasis on accuracy.
The distinction is crucial: recognizing an attempt at persuasion does not yet amount to determining whether the claim on which it is based is true or false.
Corrections also play an important role. The review by Ethan Porter and Thomas Wood published in 2024 in Current Opinion in Psychology concludes that, overall, factual corrections improve the accuracy of beliefs. The dreaded backfire effect—the hypothesis that correcting a falsehood often ends up reinforcing it—appears to be much rarer than has sometimes been reported.
Correcting, however, does not mean erasing. Paige Kemp, Aaron Goldman, and Christopher Wahlheim have emphasized that the effectiveness of a correction also depends on memory: the original information and the correction may be recalled with varying degrees of strength, and the benefit tends to diminish over time, especially when the memory of the source fades.
This leads to a fundamental principle: it is not enough to know something; it is equally important to remember why we believe we know it.
The source of information is not merely an embellishment. It is an integral part of knowledge.
At the same time, educating people about disinformation should not turn into a pedagogy of mistrust. A study conducted by Emma Hoes and colleagues and published in 2024 in Nature Human Behaviour involved a total of 6,127 people in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong. Various strategies—fact-checking, media literacy advice, and communication about disinformation—reduced the credibility attributed to false information, but in some contexts they also increased skepticism toward true statements. Furthermore, in the United States, these effects were no longer observable at the one-week follow-up.
This is a valuable warning. If, in an effort to protect ourselves from falsehoods, we end up destroying the very possibility of placing trust in well-documented information, we would simply have replaced one vulnerability with another.
The goal should be different: to educate people to place trust in proportion to the quality of the evidence.
A truly fortified mind does not automatically respond with “that’s false.” It asks: Who claims this? Where does the data come from? Can I trace it back to the original source? Is there independent confirmation? Am I reading a fact, an interpretation, or an opinion? Is this a single study or a replicated finding? Is the relationship described merely correlational, or is there evidence to suggest causality?
E, above all: What might make me change my mind?
This question is crucial. If the answer is “nothing,” we are no longer examining a belief; we are protecting it.
This is where clinical psychology and the study of disinformation can intersect. Cognitive rigidity offers temporary protection from uncertainty because it allows us to organize the world into stable categories. But it comes at a cost: it gradually forces reality to conform to what we have already decided.
Psychological flexibility requires a more complex shift: accepting that an opinion can be changed without that change being experienced as a personal defeat.
Saying “I was wrong” takes more strength than one might imagine. It means understanding that a belief is not synonymous with our self-worth and that abandoning it, when the evidence requires it, does not mean losing a part of ourselves.
Perhaps the deepest resistance to manipulation begins right here: not in the endless accumulation of information, not in generalized suspicion, and not even in the presumption that we are too intelligent to be deceived, but in the awareness of the limits of our own functioning.
Knowing that repetition can influence us. That familiarity is not synonymous with truth. That we can remember content but forget its source. That an intense emotion can alter the way we evaluate what we read. That information consistent with what we already believe may seem more persuasive precisely because it requires less mental effort.
Recognizing this is not a sign of weakness. It is metacognition.
Fortifying the mind against misinformation means training it to pause: not an anxious pause, but that brief interval in which an impulse can turn into a question. Is it true? How do I know? Where does it come from? Why do I want to believe it? What evidence would I be willing to accept that contradicts what I think?
A mature democracy needs people capable of engaging with these questions. Science, journalism, medicine, and—more broadly—any space where different human beings still attempt to construct a reality shared sufficiently to allow for dialogue all need them.
Because disinformation does not prevail only when it succeeds in making us believe a falsehood. It achieves a result—perhaps even more dangerous—when it convinces us that there is no longer any verifiable truth, no common ground on which to compare evidence, and no source to which it is reasonable to attribute greater reliability than another.
Meanwhile, in the lab, the conservator has paused. The glancing light now falls on a part of the painting that previously appeared almost completely dark. A face has emerged from beneath the altered layers. It is not new. It had always been there. The woman brings the swab closer, then withdraws her hand. She knows there is a point beyond which cleaning no longer means recovering the image, but risks erasing it.
Perhaps we, too, need to learn that balance. Not to believe everything, but also not to destroy everything out of fear of being deceived. To remove what has been altered without damaging what stands up to scrutiny.
And to preserve, amid the clamor of the world’s infinite versions, the patience needed to recognize the original color.
