Believing Is Seeing
How we humans see what we want to see, according to our fantastical beliefs
Even today, a few devout followers of the Catholic branch of Christian mythology in the Republic of Eire gather around a statue of the virgin Mary and are convinced they see it moving. These few people are the faded remnants of what used to be a much more widespread phenomenon. Prior to the successes of scientific empiricism and the reshaping of our world, many people every year used to see and have conversations with angels; today, we hear about UFOs, alien abductions, and rectal probing instead.
As-yet unelucidated changes in the way the human brain is hardwired seem to have occurred around 100,000 years ago which had a profound effect on us as a species. It may even have been a single gene coding for fewer than a handful of proteins (due to post-translational modifications, one gene can and often will generate more than one protein). Whatever the cause, the results are clear: we became the first species known to live in a mental world in which fantasy outweighed reality.
This is, above all else, what makes our species unique. Other species have a theory of mind and can imagine — and therefore manipulate — what others of its kind are thinking. We’ve seen clear evidence of theory of mind not only in chimps but also in corvids…
