07.07.07
Trust your feelings…or not?
Check out this excellent post about what intuition really is all about in Druid Journal:
Maladaptive Wetware
Science has a long and distinguished history of showing that human intuition is completely unreliable.
- The Earth is the center of the universe. No, it’s just a relatively small, insignificant planet orbiting a medium-sized star buried in a perfectly normal galaxy.
- The Earth is flat. No, it’s a sphere.
- The sun goes around the earth. No, the Earth goes around the sun.
- People are fundamentally different from animals, just like animals are fundamentally different from plants. No, humans are animals; in fact, we share 98% of our genetic material with chimpanzees — we’re more closely related than horses and zebras.
- Fire is a spirit that needs food and shelter, like any other living thing. No, it’s just a chemical reaction that is powered by fuel and oxygen.
- If you take 20 people at random and put them in a room, it’s very unlikely that two of them will have the same birthday. No, the probability is almost 50%.
- You can’t know something without knowing you know it… Actually, your subconscious is aware of all sorts of things it isn’t telling you!
The latest myth to be overthrown is the idea that women talk more than men. Here’s yet another factoid that everyone “knows” is true — that feels true to most people — and yet, a simple, ingenious experiment has shown that it’s simply false. On average, women and men talk approximately the same amount.
What this shows is that human intuition is seriously flawed. Our rational minds are just fine, it appears — nothing wrong with our reasoning faculty. But our hunches, our guesses — they are way off. One wonders how we managed to survive this long as a species.
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