Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to You're right. I don't.

"its capabilities and its limitations"
McFly — (archived)

I read a fascinating article years ago in which a psychologist speculated that our interaction with reality is much less reliable than we might like to think. Sorry, I have no recollection whatsoever of the article's title or the author's name, but a major part of her thesis was that we typically hallucinate with surprising frequency. We see things that simply aren't there, or are oblivious to things that are.

Examples of the latter were in some ways more striking than the former. People can apparently fail to perceive the presence of some fairly substantial things...buildings, for instance. And the faulty perception can span long periods of time.

She suggested that though these hallucinations are widely experienced and occur on an almost daily basis, most are perceived as unremarkable and are accepted as reality. But there are some, much less rare, that can't be so easily integrated. At that point, the person has a choice to make about how to deal with it.

The human brain may be the most complex computing device known, but it seems to me that perhaps we're not running the best software. Our peripherals leave definite room for improvement too.

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