The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life
Psychology research shows most people wrongly assume their thoughts can become reality — even people who say they don’t believe in telekinesis or ESP. “If you think about something and then it happens, you feel a little bit responsible for it,” Hutson said. It’s an irrational feeling. Why do we feel it?
“It’s a byproduct of how we understand causality,” he said. “If there are two events, A and B, if A happens before B, if there are no other obvious causes of B, and if A and B are conceptually related, then we assume A caused B.”
The faulty logic gets reinforced every time you think a positive thought, such as visualizing a successful basketball free throw, and then the thought boosts your confidence, which affects your behavior, and — voila! — the ball swooshes through the net. (…)
Few Americans openly practice voodoo — e.g., inserting pins into figurines of their enemies in order to inflict bad luck or pain — but studies show we’re all secret practitioners. “When you do some symbolic action or perform some symbolic ritual, you tend to think it will bring about what it symbolizes,” Hutson said.
In a recent experiment, psychologists monitored people’s perspiration levels as they cut up a photograph of a cherished childhood possession. Unsurprisingly, destroying a representation of their childhood made the participants sweat.
photo { Danielle Levitt }
