The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [37]
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That is, the awareness of our intention to do something trails the initial wave of brain activity associated with that action by about three hundred milliseconds—three-tenths of a second lapsed between the brain making a choice and our awareness of the choice. Add to this processing time the other two-tenths of a second to act on the choice, and it means that a full half second passes between our brain’s intention to do something and our awareness of the actual act of doing it. The neural activity that precedes the intention to act is inaccessible to our conscious mind, so we experience a sense of free will. But it is an illusion, caused by the fact that we cannot identify the cause of the awareness of our intention to act.12 Together these studies show how deeply ingrained patternicity is in our brains, hardwired into our unconscious and generating patterns beneath our awareness.
A final example in our facial-recognition patternicity is the now well-documented facial greeting found in nearly every human group around the world (except where it is culturally suppressed, as in Japan). When greeting over a distance people smile and nod, and if friendly they raise their eyebrows in a rapid movement for approximately one-sixth of a second. In the 1960s, the Austrian ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt traversed the globe filming people with an ingeniously devised camera equipped with an angle lens, in which the camera appeared to be pointed in one direction but the filming was actually taking place at a ninety-degree angle from where it was pointing. Thus, the facial expressions of people from urban Europe to rural Polynesia were “unobtrusively measured” and later analyzed in slow motion. There is an innate pattern of greeting everywhere in the world that people are born understanding without any cultural training. The pattern is not just for happy greetings. Eibl-Eibesfeldt also recorded remarkable similarities across radically different cultures in other emotional expressions, such as anger, characterized by opening the corners of the mouth, frowning, clenching the fists, stamping on the ground, and even hitting at objects.13 Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s research has since been corroborated by Paul Ekman, and together they have presented a body of uncontestable evidence for the evolutionary origins of facial patternicities.14 (See figure 4.)
Figure 4. The Innate Pattern of Face Greetings Around the World
The Austrian ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt traversed the globe filming people with a hidden lens as they greeted one another. He discovered that when greeting over a distance people smile and nod, and if friendly they raise their eyebrows in a rapid movement for approximately one-sixth of a second. This is an example of innate facial patternicity. FROM IRENÄUS EIBL-EIBESFELDT, ETHOLOGY (NEW YORK: HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON), 1970.
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Mimicking Patterns
Mimicry is another form of patternicity. In their paper on the evolution of patternicity discussed above, Foster and Kokko presented three such examples: (1) predators who normally avoid eating dangerous yellow and black insects also avoid harmless insects with similar yellow and black markings;15 (2) predators of snakes who normally avoid preying upon poisonous species also avoid the nonpoisonous varieties that mimic the dangerous types;16 (3) single-celled E. coli (found in the human gut) have been found to swim toward a physiologically inert methylated aspartate because they evolved to digest the physiologically viable true aspartate.17 In other words, these organisms formed meaningful associations between stimuli (visual, taste) and their effects (dangerous, poisonous) because such associations are vital to survival; as such, the ability to make such associations was selected for and could therefore be exploited by other organisms by tricking the system.
What happens