True Believers and Bending the Map

[_truth dancer]

Recently I read, Deep Survival, Who lives, Who dies, and What Makes the Difference, by Laurence Gonzales.

I very much enjoyed the book.

Gonzales takes us through numerous high adventure survival stories, summarizes the extensive research on survival, and extrapolates the information and real life cases of survival, to everyday life.

One interesting phenomenon that particularly caught my attention.

Gonzales describes the experience of being lost, and shares the stages one goes through as they try to manage their situation.

For example if hikers are out on a hike and become lost the first thing that happens is they deny they are lost. There are definite clues they are indeed lost, and to others it is very obvious, but the lost hikers assume they are on the right course they just don't quite remember this particular area, or if they just go around the bend they will come upon that familiar rock. They resist the reality that their environment is not what they think it sould be.

Next, after some time, hikers must come to terms with the reality that they are no longer where they think they are. What happens next amazes me. They, "bend the map." This is the literal term survival experts use. Basically, hikers try to create their real environment to match that of their mental map. Hikers may say things like, "The stream could have dried up," or, "a bear could have eaten those bushes," etc. The lost hikers will adjust what is real to fit what they want to be real.

What Gonzales explains from a neurological perspective is why the brain is uncomfortable with a reality that doesn't match their mental map, and how the brain works to make them match. He says that if a person's reality doesn't match with their mental map they will literally go crazy!

I know cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, etc. etc. have been discussed ad nauseum but I found it interesting to see a similar phenomenon from a different approach.

Makes me think of the the whole, "change your paradigm" idea!

:-)

~dancer~

[_Runtu]

That's a really good way of putting it. Of course, we all 'bend the map.' It's human nature to adjust reality to meet our expectations, not the other way around.

[_karl61]

thanks for the tip and the information.