If you’re a Nyanzipithecus alesi climbing in the branches looking for some juicy hanging fruit, and out of the corner of your eye you think you spot a shadow that might be a leopard and you leap to the next tree and it turns out there is no leapord, well, you haven’t lost that much, assuming you’re good at leaping and didn’t have much risk of a fall.
But if you ignore the shadow because it doesn’t look that much like a leopard but actually turns out to be one, well, you’ve just been Darwin-awarded out of the gene pool.
So we’re all programmed to see significance in shadows that are just shadows and dim shapes that are just dim shapes.
It’s what we are.
The whole purpose of education is to rise above your brute genetic programming. Some people never do.
Great explanation. I never knew that was a theory about why we tend to see significance in what are really just random arrangements.
I'd also heard that the climbing in trees thing is why we sometimes awake with a start when just falling asleep. It's the "falling" thing, like dozing in a tree and you begin to slip.
No joke. When I’m hiking, I see distant rocks that look like animals and other shapes all the time. It’s also common to see patterns in rock walls. Sure enough, when I actually get there, it looks like something totally else (usually nothing remarkable at all). The human eye and brain are very easy to fool. The face on Mars only looks like that when the sun is hitting at a certain angle. I’ve seen pictures of the same region with the sun hitting at a different angle and it looks like just a bare patch of sand with some rocks strewn around. It’s sometimes fun to look at stuff like that out in nature and see what appears as long as you keep your perspective about it.
The power of suggestion by other people is powerful too.
I used to love listening to Art Bell and his stories and guests. Listen to a show about “Shadow People” until 2am, then head off to bed. Of course would always see some shadow disappear out of the corner of my eye!