by Kim Pederson…….

So remember back in 2000 when we were all freaked out about the flesh-eating bananas? If you picked the wrong bunch of imported fruit, necrotizing fasciitis (NF) would leap onto your skin and turn it into livid purple boils before it all slid off into a steaming pile of derma, etc., at your feet. The nice folks who sent out the mass email about this were also good enough to inform us of the FDA’s shocking NF cover-up. People were understandably upset. They wanted to get their potassium fix without having to worry about what kind of sunscreen works best with exposed muscle tissue and bone. They called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so many of them dialing in in fact that the CDC had to set up a banana hotline with this recorded message: “If you are calling about the reports of flesh-eating M. paradisiaca sapientum, we have this message for you. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!”

I missed the banana scare somehow. I was made aware of this shocking gap in my memory (among countless others) by a BBC Future article titled “Why Are People So Incredibly Gullible?” Author David Robson begins this piece with a dire chastification: “Our brains don’t let piddling little facts get in the way of a good story, allowing lies to infect the the mind with surprising ease.”

Robson then asks the question, “Why do so many false beliefs persist in the face of hard evidence?” The first reason, psychology tells us, is that we are “cognitive misers,” in other words mental lazards (lazy laggards). We’d rather go with our gut (intuition) than actually think about (analyze) something. What this boils down to is that if we see someone familiar to us (and thus trustworthy?) say something often enough, it gathers patinacred (a patina of credibility).

Robson goes on to describe the effects of factors like “cognitive fluency,” the “bounce-back effect,” and “scientific fraud.” I can sum up his message this way: We are all Dupes of Earl (or Donald or Ted or Hillary or ISIS or you name the person, practice, or belief set). He cautions us to “at the very least” stay conscious of these flaws in our thinking and try to compensate for or correct them. And there’s the rub. Not just staying conscious but attaining it, I mean. With few exceptions, our chronic brain-deadedness continues. Upright or otherwise, we lie insensate like Frankenstein’s monster on his slab waiting for a bolt of lightning to bring us to our senses. The skies are still clear at the moment. But I hear a thunder storm is coming. The forecast has it arriving on or about November 8.

* Gulliver discovers Laputa, the flying island (1855 illustration by J.J. Grandville). (US-PD)

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.