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Yup.
that sums it up very nicely
and I’ve heard monkeys are good kissers ;-)
That monkey trick is just soo mean. VERY interesting results though.
Not sure about the monkey trick…chimpanzees put out a very distinctive (and unpleasant to humans) odor. If these women came within a foot of these chimps, the odor certainly should have tipped them off that these were not the hunks they had seen – unless Shermer’s hypothesis is stronger than monkey smell. (I only know this because I had the misfortune of having to work with a chimp in a commercial I once produced, years ago).
Plus, there’s the whole liability thing with the possibility that the chimp and/or orangutang might have ripped one of the girls’ faces off (though admittedly both apes look pretty young), and the fact that it might not be a good idea to be sharing saliva with an animal so closely related to us due to the possibility of unknown trans-specific pathogens lurking in there capable of going either direction and causing serious problems.
But I am always struck by the way in which human beings are so highly-entertained by being shown optical illusions and the ways in which the brain’s visual system jumps to conclusions which aren’t there, but then resist having the slightest worry that perhaps a larger part of the rest of the conclusions our brains jump to might be just as full of errors and self-deception. I guess the one is seen as a kind of parlor trick, but the other would require so much introspection and open such life-changing ramifications as to be be unbearably uncomfortable to examine, so we don’t even “go there”.
But imagine what the world would be like if we could as easily convince ourselves to entertain the possibility that there are ideological illusions to which our brains have led us, as basic as these ones Shermer has shown here, but which have far more serious implications for our existence than these simple visual tricks do.
If anyone wants to read an entertaining and fascinating book, try to find a copy of Robert Ornstein’s ‘The Evolution of Consciousness’. He deals with many of these very issues, and shows that the mind is actually made up of what he calls a “squadron of simpletons” each of which doesn’t know the others exist, but run our minds on a daily basis. The artistic depictions of this “squadron”– as potato-head-like, dunce-cap wearing little “specialists”, each doing its own job up “there” while imparting to us the illusion of “seamlessness” in our conscious experience is really worth checking the book out for in and of themselves. I’ve raised my kids using those drawings, and they’re pretty difficult to “fool”, even if I do say so myself.