The Self-Deceiver (Homo delusus)
The power of belief and its impact on the human future. How beliefs are formed and why. The central beliefs—money, politics, religion, the human narrative—and how they hinder us from saving ourselves. Risks of unsound beliefs. Value of science + belief. S
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The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe —Voltaire.
Over the years, a dozen aircraft have ploughed into the rugged flanks of Apex Mountain, British Columbia. While several causative factors were involved, a common thread is that pilots of low-flying aircraft found themselves trapped amid a landscape that is in fact higher and climbs more steeply than it appears to. “We use that particular terrain in one of our mountain courses to show our students the optical illusion. There is an appearance that the terrain climb is shallow but it's quite steep,” local flying instructor Mark Holmes told the Globe and Mail (Theodore 2010; Youssef 2010). Canadian Transport Safety Board investigator Bill Yearwood added: “You can easily be lured into thinking that the terrain is not as high as it actually is,” he said. “You reach a point where you can’t turn around” (Theodore 2010). The pilots probably died as a result of a false belief, engendered by an optical illusion, that their path ahead was safe. It’s a not uncommon story through human history. Such a ‘belief ’ is possibly what killed the young pre-human, who fell to the leopard 1.5 million years ago (Chap. 1) and many, many more since. On the grand scale, unsound beliefs could also prove fatal to civilisation. If you ask them how they see, most people will say it’s with their eyes. But of course, like many popular notions, this isn’t true. Science has long known that our eyes consist of specialised nerve cells that collect and process
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J. Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41270-2_9
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light, and that the actual image we see is in fact assembled in the brain from countless packets of information. Thus it is the brain which ‘sees’, not the eye. And, of course, the brain is fallible, subject to misinformation and heavily influenced by its past experiences when it constructs those images. The mirage is a familiar optical illusion—an apparent sheet of water on an otherwise hot, dry road or desert landscape. The brain even ‘knows’ the water probably isn’t there, and can verify this by approaching it—but it still insists on interpreting the light waves collected by the eyes as if it were real, probably because it is more accustomed to seeing water than shimmering air, or because the viewer is thirsty or else hallucinating. There are many charming tests that illustrate the ability of the brain to generate false images, or create illusory pictures—like the endless Escher staircase, the Kanisza triangle or the nineteenth century spinning disc depicting a bird in a cage.1 These give rise to the familiar statement that “things aren’t always as they appear”. Our other senses are equally open to misinterpretation by the brain, though less spectacularly. Illusions are fun—but they can also be deadly. In the 1990s, for example, British researchers warned of an optic
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