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The first thing that happened in your mind when you read that sentence is (1) a bad feeling. That then triggered (2) a rational, conscious thought that interpreted that bad feeling: "this feels bad because it's not true, here are the reasons why it is not true.

There is ALWAYS an "emotional/intuitive" response that precedes the rational, conscious thought. There's a ton of research on this (see system 1 vs system 2 thinking etc).

There is no way to stop the emotional "thought" from happening before the "rational thought". What you can do is build a loop that self reflects to understand why that emotion was triggered (sometimes, instead of "this feels bad because it's wrong", it's "this feels bad because it points to an inconvenient truth" or "I am hungry and everything I am reading feels bad")

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That's very hard to know without being in an FMRI machine while reading, which I wasn't, sadly.

Just functionally, it seems reasonable that something happened before that bad feeling to trigger it, e.g. "trying to fit this with already known things, and finding it doesn't".

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Isn't your argument a support of his claim?

If emotions did not weigh on recall, surely there would be no "emotion-driven cognitive biases"

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If the claim was "reducing the emotional weight of the action makes your thinking worse" – No.
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