I have been listening to an audio version of Adam Douglas’s famous book “The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy”. Somewhere in the book the main character, Arthur Dent, and his friend, Ford Prefect, are at a cricket game. Ford Prefect starts acting weird and finally he points in one direction, while looking the other way, he asks Arthur Dent what he sees. Eventually Arthur gets it and does see the spaceship parked nearby when he looks away from it. A spaceship at a cricket game is so much out of order and so disturbing to peoples perception, that they cannot comprehend that there is a spaceship parked near the cricket field. This is my reiteration of Ford Prefect’s explanation.
In other words people do not interpret what is way out of their “normal” perception. The brain overlooks it, so to speak, it does not get interpreted correctly the visual data presented. It fills in the blank with the normal, the expected data. Out there researchers have looked in to this and found similar results. Neurologist and cognitive or neuro -psychologists have done this research. Do your own research.
The brain overlooks the correct interpretation, fills in the blanks and the person does not need to face the difficulties of having to deal with a spaceship at a cricket game, it is somebody else’s problem. This is an oversimplified explanation. BUT it does help to understand what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”. Usually this is describing the state of holding to opposite views and holding both to be true. And then just going along with the story of being at a cricket game, disregarding the spaceship parked next to the coffee stand.
What is even worse is that by making it to somebody else’s problem, it implies I do not need to do anything. That is why we neglect to see it. Ford Prefect or Adam Douglas explains that the implications of the spaceship is Somebody Elses’s Problem. By making it Somebody Else’s Problem I do not have to deal with it. I delegate my responsibility to deal with the problem to Somebody Else.
Basically this is what has happened over the last two years, and in preparation for much longer times. Most people have given up their right to be responsible for their own deeds, their own do and do not do. “I am not a scientist, I do not know anything about energy, gravity, etc.” So people or at least the main part of the population any given place have done what they were told by the authorities. “They know better, they are educated, have degrees”.
In my humble opinion we have learned from the moment we come out of the womb to disregard signals of danger. Imagine the little baby not wanting to be held by the aunt, but the baby is handed to her and hold by her, even though every fibber in the baby screams danger. The baby are told to be nice to a person that it senses only as one big dangerous energy field.
Or how about this one: “Do as I told you, NOW, and not as I do”. Another one is creativity, which is only allowed as long it is with in the boundaries of the adult ones, in the classroom.
There is no room for playing around with fantasies of giraffes and unicorns having babies and what they would look like. The more dangerous ones are in physics, in the sciences, gravity or density, germ or terrain. The speed of light is the limit or is it?
We have given up critical thinking, we lean to those who know more. And as in all good fairytales and horror stories this is the melting pot for disasters to come in abundance.
