“Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us?”
—MICHAEL SHERMER
Our mind looks for connections. We are always looking for connections. It is what we do. It is how we are wired. When we see one thing and something else appears, we do our best to connect the two.
To illustrate: We look for connections between and among faces. We tend to feel immediate connections with certain faces. With others, we don’t. It happens even though we are typically not aware of it. Why is that? There are several reasons, one of which is that we might know or have known someone else who resembles the face in terms of structure, form, and coloration. If we remember them as a nice, safe or comfortable person, it is likely we will believe that same thing about the second person. Looking for these connections is part of our basic survival mechanism—separating the safe from the unsafe. It is a trait we share with other animals who, often as a matter of life and death, have to determine friend from foe—fight or flight—very quickly.
Extending this principle to magic, it suggests that if a magician takes a broken object, covers it, waves his hand, and then reveals an unbroken object that looks like the first, we will conclude that a restoration of that first object has taken place. It never enters our mind that perhaps the magician somehow got rid of the broken version of the object and made a new unbroken version appear. A vanish of item “A-1” followed by an appearance of item “A-2” is not what our mind concludes or perceives. Why? Because we look for (need, actually) connections. Our mind prefers consistency and continuation. We want our world to make sense in the simplest possible ways. One object restored is simpler than two objects anyway you cut it! So, we strive to make pieces fit.
When we see something broken and then see an apparently identical something not broken in the same place, our mind concludes that the single object has been restored.
Now, modify the very same magic trick just a bit and have one object vanish from a table and then appear somewhere else, and our mind will still connect those two events (objects) as one. We see it as an illusion of transportation—teleportation. The object was over here on the table and now that same object is over there. In this example, our mind focuses on the placement of the single object. We don’t consider that may have involved the vanishing of one item and an appearance of another relatively identical item. The simplest connection tends to win.
So, a magician can combine “a vanish” and “an appearance” and make (allow) the audience perceive that an item has been restored from its broken condition, or has be teleported across space. Employing the same general approach, the audience can also witness it as time travel by having the object, which has been moved from its original place, vanish and then appear back where it was originally—before the trick began. It is as if the moment of time has been started all over again. Even though it is still the same display, when it is presented as time travel, it will be perceived and experienced as time travel. The human mind is eager to accept any data that supports its need to believe that the simplest connection is fact, and magicians are masters at providing that supportive data.
My point is that the very same set of phenomena can (will) be interpreted, perceived, and experienced in multiple ways depending on the context (the supportive data) in which it exists or is presented. An individual’s interpretation of the phenomena will be based on how one connects things in his own mind. When Paul Eno noted that outdoor phenomena is more often connected to UFOs and indoor phenomena is more connected to other paranormal experiences, that is a perfect example of the way our mind connects and interprets phenomena in different contexts.
But, as demonstrated, those connections, and thus an individual’s interpretation of them, may not be an accurate assessment of what actually took place. The mind is “built” to seek comfortable explanations first, and truth second. The magician skillfully utilizes those human traits in creating illusions. In the real world it often happens just by chance, driven in that case not by the magician’s skill in setting our expectations, but by the contexts or expectations we bring to situations ourselves. In either case, what may be most comfortably perceived as a single event may actually be several. Our minds often don’t perceive the number of events involved correctly because they are focused on making meaningful, comfortable, uninterrupted connections instead.
I contend that in our perceptions of the paranormal world, our minds often make connections in ways that are based on these same principles. As a result, I believe our perceptions of things that may most easily be construed as paranormal are often inaccurate—simple rather than true. It is a matter of connections and is based in those things that bring a person to make one set of connections rather than some other. As a result, individuals necessarily perceive the same events differently whether they are faces, vases, or ghostly phenomena. And that is the very same reason that we would naturally interpret seeing a “spirit” of someone who is dead as seeing them as someone in the “world beyond” rather than perhaps the fact that they are very alive and being seen in a rare glimpse into another universe.
My goal here is to suggest that all those traits and beliefs and characteristics that combine to make us who we are work together to color our conclusions, our connections, and our interpretations. We may perceive the paranormal quite incorrectly because of what we know, believe, and most importantly, perhaps, don’t know. We each make assumptions, which are dependent upon all those things that make us who we are: a unique individual.