what are Shermer's primary claims?
- We have a tendency to see faces
- Humans are pattern seeking
- Auditory allusions - people hear what they want to hear
which real-life situations/examples did you
find most powerful in terms of illustrating these claims?
- The face on mars.
In 1976 there was a large movement for NASA to photograph an
area of the moon as people thought it was a piece of architecture made by
extra-terrestrial life forms, when actually it was just a mound with protruding
parts making it appear as a face
- The Virgin Mary in Clearwater Florida.
The silhouette of the Virgin Mary appeared to be on the side of
the building. Many people of the religious community came to see this holy
sight . Thousands of candles were laid out in front of the building and lit in
tribute of the Virgin Mary. After an investigation of the building, Shermer,
Dawkins and Randi concluded that wherever there was a palm tree and sprinkler,
the image would appear
- Film white noise with Michael Keaton about the dead talking back. Supposedly there is a hidden demonic message in the song 'stairway to heaven'. Shermer plays a snippet of the song. The songs reads:
Keaton then plays the snippet backwards without displaying the
words of the reversed version, the only clear word that can be hear is 'Satan'.
He then plays it again, displaying the 'supposed' massage:
Now that the audience can see the words that they are supposed
to hear, the words can be heard clearly.
which areas of knowledge were the real-life
situations/examples primarily drawn from?
- Our search for meaning in terms of not being the only intelligent life form in the galaxy and that intelligent life would 'resemble us'
- Religious knowledge: In the Christian faith the Virgin Mary is and always has been a symbol of hope.
- The belief that evil exists and the belief that everything has a deeper meaning.
do you agree or disagree with Shermer's
primary claims and why?
Yes I
definitely agree with Shermer's claims
According
to research, one reason could just be that we see so many faces in our
day-to-day lives, we’re expecting to see them everywhere.
“Starting from childhood, they are the most common
stimuli that we encounter in everyday life,” There could also be deeper,
evolutionary reasons for why we are especially prone to see faces. Human
survival depends so heavily on others –
whether we need their help,
Other
research suggests that the brain, being hard-wired to understand people and
their motivations, tries to look for human-like intention in everything around
us. In a bid to make sense of our fears, we begin to personify them, filling
the world with gods and demons.
Interesting
study that contributes to this:
A study
was done on the appearance of cars, these two images were shown
Two
groups of people were asked; Europeans and Ethiopians. The Ethiopian group had
never seen any Disney movies about cars yet both groups' results were the same.
The top car looks like a happy face and that cars with big windscreen, round
headlights and a small grill tend to be considered young and feminine while the
second car appeared to be angry and that cars with flatter headlights and a
bigger, squarer under-body are older and more masculine.
From the moment of
birth, the brain is trained to search for and recognise patterns. We are always
looking for patterns and then connect a meaning to it. For example: putting a
bird in a box with two buttons, after pecking each one it receives a treat. It
does that again and gets another. The bird now associates that sequence with
getting food so it will continue this pattern.
Humans are the same, in fact, it is highly unlikely that baby will
reply/react without a goofy grin from a human. The brain has no restrictions on
this pattern seeking, it sees patterns where there is almost no information to
present one, and it sees patterns when there are not any, palm reading, for
instance. In his book “ How we Believe” Michael Shermer argues that human
brains are belief engines- kind of pattern recognition machines that connect
the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that they see, observe and come
across in nature.
The brain can be
fooled by the ears just as it can be fooled by the eyes. The main difference
is, we're quicker to realise that our eyes are fooling us. Humans hear what
they want to hear or what they think they are hearing. An experiment was done
to prove this: a man was filmed saying the word 'bar, bar, bar'. He then says
'far, far, far' In fact the audio didn’t change between the two takes. In the
second he was silently saying 'far, far, far' but the word 'bar' was being
played. Because he make the 'f' sound
with his lips we heard 'far'. The clip then plays the two next to each other.
Depending on the one you look at is the thing your hear. It shows that we hear
what we think we are hearing and seeing.
<https://www.quora.com/What-does-this-quote-mean-Humans-are-pattern-seeking-animals-and-we-are-adept-at-finding-patterns-whether-they-exist-or-not%E2%80%9D>
<http://matus1976.com/science/pattern_seeking/page1.htm>
