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up, but it failed to do so. In 1832, they finally abandoned the ship and walked north across the frozen sea to the site of another, earlier shipwreck. When the ice began to recede around that vessel, they took to its longboats, rowed off, and were eventually rescued—as chance would have it, by the same ship that Ross had captained in 1818. All told, Ross and his crew were stranded for an unprecedented four years. Yet as star-crossed as the expedition was, it redeemed Ross as a man of ability and courage in the eyes of his nation. Parry, meanwhile, garnered (and deserved) a reputation as an outstanding Arctic explorer, but he never achieved the imagined wealth and glory of discovering the Northwest Passage. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else, although the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen finally navigated a complete passage in 1906. But that waterway and the others that were eventually discovered in the far north proved too distant and dangerous to rely on as trade routes—and at any rate, by then, the invention of the railroad had yielded an altogether different solution to the problem of transporting goods across North America. (John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833 (A. W. Webster, 1835).

stepping outside and looking up. One of the contributors to Jastrow’s Story of Human Error, Harlan T. Stetson, makes this point as well in “Error and Astronomy.” “Paradoxical as it may seem,” Stetson writes on p. 40, “[man’s] chief source of error was the tendency to take Nature at her face value, to accept appearances as the warrant of reality. Yet one without astronomical knowledge can readily reenact much of the drama of human error in gaining a knowledge of the universe, by going into the open on any clear night and looking into the vault above him.”

the fix favored by Protagoras. Almost the entirety of Plato’s Theaetetus is dedicated to dismantling Protagoras’s theory of knowledge, but for the issues I’m addressing here, see especially pp. 12–50. Keeler also provides considerable background on what the Sophists, Plato, and other early philosophers thought about the problem of errors of perception. (See especially pp. 1–21.)

Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 8.

David Brewster. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883), 91. I tracked down this text after reading about it in Sully’s Illusions.

Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. The story of Robert-Houdin in Algeria can be found in Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant (De Capo Press, 2004), pp. 145–146.

I’ve reproduced both illusions in the endnotes (FN). The two illusions are as follows:

CHAPTER 4 OUR MINDS, PART ONE: KNOWING, NOT KNOWING, AND MAKING IT UP

I’m grateful to Rebecca Saxe for suggesting that I look into confabulation, and specifically for guiding me to William Hirstein’s invaluable Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (The MIT Press, 2005). Other useful sources on anosognosia and confabulation include George Prigatano and Daniel L. Schacter, eds., Awareness of Deficit after Brain Injury: Clinical and Theoretical Issues (Oxford University Press, 1991); Gabriel Anton, “Gabriel Anton and ‘Anton’s Symptom’: On Focal Diseases of the Brain Which Are Not Perceived by the Patient (1898),” with an introduction and translation by Hans Förstl, Adrian M. Owen, and Anthony S. David, Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Behavioral Neurology, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1993): 1–8; and from an interview with the neurologist Eric Altschuler of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. The story of “Hannah” comes from Georg Goldenberg, Wolf Tollbachert, and Andreas Nowak, “Imagery without Perception: A Case Study of Anosognosia for Cortical Blindness,” Neuropsychologia, Vol. 33, No. 11 (1995): 1373–1382. Michael Gazzaniga’s experiments on split-brain patients appears in Hirstein, pp. 153–154. I first learned about the pantyhose experiment through Hirstein’s work as well;