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More Joy Of Social Media
Madness spreads much faster than viral infection
We humans are a credulous lot at the best of times. Our long history on the African savannah and in the primordial forests of Eurasia contained no selection pressures that would have resulted in us developing a significant capacity for reason, nor any capacity for consistency-checking. Added to this was a great deal of selection pressure to conserve scarce and unpredictable calories, which means that we’re actually hardwired to do as little thinking as possible. This is because an active brain can consume up to 30% of the body’s blood glucose, and that’s energy that was much more frequently needed by our muscles to enable us to escape from predators or forage for food.
And that’s why we so reliably fall for absurdities like religious mythologies, astrology, Tarot reading, Power of Attraction, and an uncountable number of other infantile ideas. Our brains aren’t adapted to see past simple ideas, no matter how absurd they may be. This problem is compounded by fear, which causes shutdown of the prefrontal cortex and thus deprives us of what slender reasoning resources we may have once possessed.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that during times of mass hysteria such as the one we’re presently living through, social media should be a cesspit of idiocy. Thanks to the BBC, I’ve belatedly discovered what a…
