Does anyone really know the answer? Ever? That's the point of this excerpt from a short essay by novelist Harlan Ellison: . . . [My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about…
We don't attend to everything we see. As Andy Clark has written in Natural Born Cyborgs, our brains don't bother to create rich inner models of the world. We can't create such models because there is simply too much information out there for us to process it all. Further, the world is generally available to revisit periodically, so why bother? In other words, we use the world as its own best model--we "cheat" (because we must cheat). But this cheating can be exposed through dramatic experiments. I've previously posted on some of those experiments here (by Quirkology). Here are some additional experiments demonstrating our need to "cheat." In this experiment, done by Dan Simons and Dan Levin, only 50% of the subjects noticed that the person to whom they were talking had changed. Here are additional demonstrations by Simons, along with a bit of explanation. Here's a more elaborate write-up on the "door" experiment. And see here. When I use the word "cheat," I'm being facetious. Our strategy of using the world as an adequate model is one of the many cognitive heuristics we must use in order to survive.
In the February 2008 edition of Natural History Magazine (article not available online), you can learn where tigers still live in the wild. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 100,000 tigers living in the wild. Today, there are only 5000 in the wild. 
Tigers now inhabit only 7% of their original territory, which has shrunk by 41% in the past 10 years. Those relatively few tigers that remain in the wild hunt wild cattle, deer and pigs in isolated pockets of forested land in India, Sumatra, Eastern Russia in southern China. Tigers are hunted illegally for pelts and for tiger parts that are used in medicines (such as tiger penis soups).
But did you know how many tigers live in United States? 7,000 to 15,000 tigers live
in private roadside zoos, circuses, sanctuaries, farms and backyards in the US. Owners are often deluded into thinking that they contain the creatures, treating them like house cats, perhaps attracted by the challenge. Yet even house cats, which
have been domesticated for thousands of years will reach out and swat their human companions. What happens when a six month old sixty-pound beast with claws and slicing incisors takes a swipe?
Are these privately owned tigers allowed to run in large open areas and kept in good health? Not likely. Many tigers are kept in cages much too small for them and they are “fed insufficient or inappropriate food, such as canned dog food.”
The Natural History article indicates that tigers …
If you've ever had this thought that intelligent people never believe things they can't prove, consider that some of the world's sharpest and most skeptical minds have confessed in writing that they too believe things that they can't prove. You can read all about it in the 2005 Annual Question…
Here's a well-conceived website. Straight-forward and fun. You will be given 20 short video clips of people smiling. Are they genuine smiles or fake smiles? After you make your picks (this will take about 5 minutes), this BBC site will reveal the correct answers and give you some genuine pointers for determining whether…
