Peoples' minds do not function like your computer. The reference you cite was part of a study that was properly sourced in the book, so yes, it is true.

If you look more broadly and read introductory psychology books, you will discover the many quirks that our (and I mean all of ours -- yours and mine included) brains have. Whether that means that all the world's population needs God's help to survive because of the way our brains function is a question that we won't be able to answer in our lifetime.

"The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body.

I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic.

The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have."

From Milton Glaser's "Ten Things I have learned" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592580