We’ve had the fallibility of human nature proven to us time and again. We know our senses can be misled and our judgements biased. Strangely, prone as we are to inaccuracy, our automatic reaction to an opposing view is often a deep-seated conviction that it is wrong. The logical thought process being: If it’s right, why wouldn’t I, a rational human being, already subscribe to it?
Yes, why would perfectly rational beings commit crimes against humanity? Could millions of people across different generations that participated in slavery, genocide, and world wars all be uninformed idiots?
Social norms and cultural conditioning shape our beliefs and behaviours without active consciousness. It has not even been a century since India’s caste system was officially abolished, nor half of that since South Africa’s apartheid came to an end. Let’s pare it down.
What we call an optical illusion is in truth, no fault of the eye. If anything, it’s a brain delusion. Our windows to the world are merely postmen delivering neutral mail. It is the big, fat organ in our heads that decides how to read them, as with other sensory reception in our body.
Even though it consistently ignores your nose and makes monsters of normal folk i.e. Flashed Face Distortion Effect, nothing is wrong with your brain. Eva van den Broek and Tim den Heijer refer to it as a prediction machine in The Housefly Effect. Evolved to show us the most useful, but not necessarily the most accurate version of reality, to reduce ambiguity.
Studies also show how we tend to overestimate our intellect and intuition. In fact, it usually plays out on a scale where the less you know about a topic outside your professional field, the higher propensity you overestimate your acumen in the area.
Recent reports suggest how well-educated, digitally savvy individuals are increasingly susceptible to scams. One attribution being the misguided confidence in their cognitive abilities against fraud, making them less careful. If you think it could never happen to you, perhaps you’d like to reread the first sentence of the previous paragraph.
Then there are also the grave errors of our memory. Here’s a fun exercise: Recall the last time you took public transport. Try to remember the traits of your fellow passengers. Unless specific details caught your attention then, most of what you’re recollecting have been entirely recreated by your brain.
Despite not being able to retain precise data exhaustively, your brain did not picture an empty bus or train, nor faceless phantom figures. It resorts to fabrication to offer a coherent state, as Albert Moukheiber expounds in Your Brain Is Playing Tricks On You.
Time is another pesky thing we don’t have the best grasp on. Not just its subjective passing depending on how bored we are, but our perception of historical events. Take these bunch of fun facts that are somehow odd to mentally reconcile: Napoleon was still alive when all of Jane Austen’s books were published. Such was Abraham Lincoln with Samurais. The Victorian era and the Wild West.
So the next time anyone challenges our worldview, rather than instantly getting riled up to disprove them, think of how much we could learn if we consider the minute possibility we might be wrong and simply listen?
