Then there’s the science of availability. The problem I should be solving is, “How does the Ponzo Illusion work in the Oregon Vortex?” But the problem I prefer to solve is, “How did that person suddenly become taller?” In the context of the Oregon Vortex it’s hard to figure out how this applies. Converging background lines distort our perception. The height change phenomenon is due to an effect called the Ponzo Illusion. When it comes to the vortex, it takes some mental effort to figure out what’s really going on. It’s that we don’t bother to solve the real problem. It’s not that we don’t recognize that there’s a problem. To complicate matters, according to Kahneman, we are cognitively lazy. So which kind do most humans prefer? You guessed it.Īccording to the Italian researcher Ponzo, the human mind judges an object’s size by its background. The problem, according to Kahneman, is that slow thinking is hard work and fast thinking is easy. In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman asserts that human beings employ two modes of thinking: the fast, intuitive, emotional kind, which makes us spend money on lottery tickets and vote for poorly qualified leaders, and the slow, methodical, intellectual kind that makes us figure out our taxes and debunk conspiracy theories. Heedless, Lazy, Distorted Thinking, the Most Popular Kind For my part, I would like nothing more than to see the laws of physics turned upside down, so we could start all over again and maybe figure out how to develop that transporter beam I’ve seen on Star Trek. So what is the proper protocol when approaching a vortex? No one knows for sure, and that’s what I like about it, the idea that there’s a mystery here that science has yet to crack. Pack mules owned by gold seeking panhandlers displayed a similar distaste, and even today the area is said to be devoid of wildlife, dumb animals apparently having better sense when it comes to vortices than knuckle-headed tourists.īelieve it or not, this ball was actually rolling uphill. My favorite part of the Litster version is that Native-Americans considered this area “forbidden ground” their horses refused to enter it. Okay, maybe so, but I for one sort of like the idea of a vortex. In other words, we are only fooling ourselves. The scientific explanation for all of this, as offered by Oregonians for Science and Reason, is a combination of boiler plate optical illusions and the power of suggestion. Where Animals Have More Sense than Humans They don’t like being bamboozled and demand to see the man behind the curtain. Litster explained this as a disturbance of the earth’s magnetic fields caused by the vortex, an explanation that suited me fine, but other folks are a little put off by what they see as a load of hokum. Excuse me, but, uh… this broom is standing up by itself.
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