A new study about “Cyberchondriacs” tries to understand the reasons why, when we’re sick, we google our symptoms, and then think we’ve got some deadly disease. Basically the results suggest that we, as Googlers, demonstrate the kind of unconscious pattern creation in which the human brain excels—and which frequently leads us astray when it comes to the basic logic of probability. The way gamblers say they have a “hot hand,” cyberchondriacs believe they have “hot symptoms”: if they hit the first two in a list, they believe they must have the third one as well.
(via It’s Not a Tumor! The Psychology Behind Cyberchondria - The Daily Beast)
