The Science of Fate: Why Your Future is More Predictable Than You Think by Hannah Critchlow

Author:Hannah Critchlow [Critchlow, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473659308
Google: 5iLhDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2019-03-06T06:00:00+00:00

Getting round the glitches: collective consciousness

If opening up the doors of perception doesn’t appeal, there is a less risky, totally legal and easier way that we can mitigate the glitches in perception that can lead to disordered beliefs: get out and expose ourselves to a new experience or a new opinion – test our own construction of reality by comparing it with somebody else’s. Professor Chris Frith from University College, London, has performed some groundbreaking studies in this area, bolstering the idea (of which we are probably intuitively aware) that when we discuss our subjective views with somebody else, we increase our chance of arriving at a more accurate representation of the world. The old adage that two heads are better than one appears to be true on a neurological level. Our ability to reflect on our perceptions and pass on our knowledge to others to affect their framework of reality, and vice versa, has the potential to help us arrive at a more nuanced understanding.

For this to work, though, we need to expose our worldview and opinions to challenges rather than simply have them confirmed, and as we’ve seen, on one level our brains are resistant to this. New information that requires us to re-evaluate our existing assumptions about how the world works is unwelcome, since it comes with an energy and attention cost. Our brains are very good at filtering out such challenges. This helps to explain why it can be so hard to change our own mind or somebody else’s. We will be coming back to the neural basis for belief change in the next chapter.

But another competing mechanism comes into play to counterbalance the brain’s innate conservatism in this regard: the drive to move, explore and seek out novelty. We seem to be hard-wired to enjoy (subject to the usual caveat of ‘to a greater or lesser degree’) meeting other people to share ideas and our perspective of the world. It helps us form a collective consciousness, which is really a way of referring to the mass of ideas that circulates in the world, feeding into and sustaining culture and investigation of all kinds. One of the great benefits of pooling of intellectual and creative resources is that it can help us to get round the bugs in our individual perception and belief-building systems.

As we discovered when we were looking at love and relationships, social interaction, communication and the reward pathway are all intertwined. Interaction with others can feel pleasurable on a biochemical level. This process drives us to build belief systems as a collective. The potential benefit, for individuals and cultures alike, is a more robust belief system that has adapted itself to the challenges of competing ideas, one that allows for more flexibility and creativity in the making of meaning.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that collectives are just as capable of sustaining disordered beliefs as individuals. If we only ever exchange ideas with people who see the world as we do and don’t challenge

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