Some Mental Learning Disabilities 

Among the Learning Disabilities are Status Quo Bias which is an irrational preference for the current state of affairs.  The brain is wired this way.  Per Wikipedia, a study found that erroneous status quo rejection has a greater neural impact than acceptance.  We make decisions constrained by bounded rationality, that is the lack of time and knowledge to always make optimal decisions which leads to satisficing (choosing an ok solution, not the optimal) and routines.  We need Consumer Reports.  We are also victims of the competency trap which is when we continue to do what were good at even after the environment changes.   Which is why Alec Baldwin's Blogpost on Huffington Post supporting Mayor Michael Bloombergs proposed banning of large size sugary drinks in which he points out how food is marketed as a drug is valid.  See Kelly Brownell, OYC The food marketing landscape.  Humans are genetically designed for food scarcity in an environment where food companies valuation is determined by their growth.  These mechanisms have been shaped by evolution. We can tell when we are hungry but satiation can be overridden.  When you ask a Frenchman how they know when to stop eating they say they are full.  When you ask an American it is when the plate is empty or the TV show has ended.  People tend to eat the same amount as the people around them.  To some extent we are lemmings. So food availability used to be a good thing but now it needs to be limited.  NYC is also scaling back its school breakfast program.

With the exception of the reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless....Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned...from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings.
-- Ashley Montagu, 1973 

 Another learning disability people are susceptible to framing.  Advertising food that is 80% fat free sells more than advertising food that has 20% fat. People avoid things that are framed as losses as do monkeys research shows.  Another problem is that our minds are not evolved to do base rate computations at Peter Grey in his OYC psych course points out.  This is a Kahneman slow brain computation.   How much is 28 times 72.  The brain draws a blank.  If the incidence of a disease is 1 in 1000 and a test has a 5% false positive rate and a 0 false negative rate and if a person test positive for the disease what is the likely hood they have it.   People guess between 50% and 90%  The answer is 2%.   (Out of 1000 people one will have the disease.  If you test the other 999, 50 will test positive)  Medical tests are good for testing  people with symptoms that increase their likelihood of having the disease but randomly testing people is not helpful. NY Times Lets (NOT) Get Physicals.  Availability bias makes us falsely overestimate the chances of being killed by sharks is greater then the chance of getting killed by food poisoning from potato salad.  Confirmation bias is another deficiency.  The internet has been the greatest promoter of confirmation bias since you can confirm anything.  

Getting around these deficiencies require some thinking. 

The "THINK" motto was developed by Thomas J. Watson, Sr., three years before he joined the forerunner of today's IBM in 1914. By the early 1930s, THINK began to take precedence over other slogans in IBM, and it appeared on signs such as this in IBM plants and offices, and in company publications, calendars and photographs all over the world.