Why our minds believe crazy things.
And why you’re not crazy for believing them. Evolution says it’s best.
Imagine being alive a million years ago. You’re a primitive man walking the African plains in search of food or shelter. Suddenly, you hear a noise - it’s grass rustling. In a split second, you’re thinking — is it the wind… or is it a lion, tiger, or some other predator? The answer your brain makes could mean the difference between life and death.
If you were to assume it’s just the wind, and you were wrong — guess what — you’re dead. If you assumed it’s a predator and you were wrong — then there’s no harm. Our brains were wired to make associations like this, in an attempt to make sense of the world and to survive. We’re constantly looking for patterns to connect the dots, like our ancestor connected — grass rustling — to a predator or the wind, for example. Evolution decided it’s best if our brains always believe that events, like the rustling grass, are connected to the predator because it’s better to believe something false and remain alive, than to believe something false that’s really true. In other words, if you believed it was the wind, but it was a predator, then you failed to connect the dots and you’re dead — and man as a species would soon go extinct if we all made this mistake.
This helps explain why our brains are predisposed to believe some crazy things sometimes. We believe negative thoughts that have no basis in reality, but feel them as being very real. It’s the underlying cause of depression and anxiety symptoms — people are listening to their primitive brains fantasizing about everything that could possibly be a danger, in an attempt to protect us from worst case scenarios — which never really come to fruition.
We all tend to connect dots and make associations that are irrational and have no connection whatsoever. Sometimes we do this in an innocuous way, for example, you win a golf game wearing a hat you had never worn before. You connect your new hat to you winning golf. Now the hat becomes “your lucky hat.” It’s what psychologists call ‘magical thinking.’ And we do it all the time. In a more limiting manner, say someone eats a greasy hamburger for lunch. A short while later they’re riding in an elevator and experiences some acid reflux which causes them to lose their breath. He or she has a brief moment of anxiety and soon after develops a fear of elevators. That person connected two unrelated dots — breathing problems with elevators and then starts avoiding elevators and voila a phobia is born. This is how the primitive mind works. It’s looking to connect dots to make meaningful patterns, even if the pattern it creates doesn’t really exist.
That we are all wired to make these erroneous connections, should come as a relief to many people who beat themselves up or think they’re crazy for making these erroneous connections. The good news — is that when your brain does this, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you or your brain — your brain (the primitive one) is doing what evolution wired it to do — believe everything, then we’ll never miss the correct pattern when it actually appears.
