If God designed the human brain, he (or she) did a lousy job. Dogged by glitches and biases, requiring routine shutdown for maintenance for 8 hours a day, and highly susceptible to serious malfunction, a product recall would seem to be in order. But in one respect at least, God played a blinder: our brains are almost perfectly designed to believe in him/her.
Almost everybody who has ever lived has believed in some kind of deity. Even in today’s enlightened and materialistic times, atheism remains a minority pursuit requiring hard intellectual graft. Even committed atheists easily fall prey to supernatural ideas.
The human mind is the perfect breeding ground for bizarre beliefs, so we shouldn’t be surprised that fake news has such a powerful influence.
Conspiracy theory? Fake news? It’s not just the naive who are prone to delusional beliefs, and the only answer is to question, question, question and question.
Everyone loves a good story. So much so that our brains make them up all the time, and most of the time we don’t even notice. This is confabulation – and it can make fools of us all.
Confabulation is common in dementia, when people fabricate stories to fill in gaps in memory. In Capgras delusion, where a person insists that a loved one has been abducted and replaced by a doppelgänger, confabulation explains away the sensation of disconnection they feel in the company of someone they know they should love.
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