Our brains are extraordinary: fast, intuitive and endlessly creative, but they also come with quirks, shortcuts and predictable bugs. These “cognitive biases” shape everything from the food we order to the technologies we build, often without us noticing. In this talk, we’ll explore some of the most surprising and entertaining biases that influence our everyday decisions and what they reveal about how humans actually think. We’ll begin with a quick attention test, the kind where people swear they were paying attention, right up until the reveal. From there, we’ll dive into anchoring, where the first number we see quietly rewrites our expectations; loss aversion, which makes losses loom larger in our minds than equivalent gains; and the IKEA effect, which explains why we love things more when we’ve built them ourselves. Along the way, we’ll unpack confirmation bias, the spotlight effect, the planning fallacy and the peak-end rule, each one a window into the hidden logic behind our “irrational” behaviour. This isn’t a list of flaws. It’s a tour of the elegant, messy, deeply human heuristics that help us navigate a complex world. By understanding these patterns, we can design better tools, make smarter decisions and be kinder to ourselves and others when things don’t go to plan. Expect demos, relatable examples and practical takeaways you can use the moment you leave the tent.