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Believe It Or Not. What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

There seems to be quite a lot of posters on here who have been boning up on psychology, or maybe studying it at Uni. Well done you, but we are getting lots of off the peg phrases like `cognitive dissonance` and `confirmation bias` and so on.

I believe I was the most recent poster who used confirmation bias, I was being polite. What I meant was self indulgent bollocks. And's that no comment on your post, rather a general impression of the genre.
 
I would ask you - and those with a similar attitude -to try and distinguish between a mood - a mood of weariness - and an actual thought out conclusion.

So you've bean studying `Forteana` (hate the word!) for twenty years. That's quite a long time (although it's been a lot longer for me). So a feeling of `been there/done that` jadedness descends on you. This is natural, but is nothing more than a form of tiredness.

To use an analogy: a guy is heavily into music in his twenties and thirties. He goes to see new bands/concerts, whatever, reads the music press avidly, maybe has a band of his own...and so on. Then somewhere, let's say, in his mid-forties the jadedness creeps in. He starts saying that there's no good new music anymore...and then later on, by extension, he adds that even the stuff that he onced liked is a bit overrated and so on.

Of course this is nonsense: nothing has changed except him. He has become jaded. And being jaded is a subjective state of mind - not a worked out position. Don't be bluffed by it.

A more accurate analogy would be that the guy, having heard the band are great, has gone to see them many times in his twenties and thirties.

However, when he gets there all he ever finds is some other people who say they saw the band yesterday (or last week), and say how good they are. Sadly, they've no other evidence except a few blurry pictures taken from a great distance and some poor quality audio recordings that really could be any rock band recorded from a distance.

By the time he hits his mid forties, he's not 'jaded', he's just realised the band are almost certainly not real.
 
...Another thing to be wary of on the same lines is to think too much within the box of your own specialism. ...

That's a reasonable point, but ...

With the possible exception of the perpetually naive, no one encounters a new story or report as a blank slate. Unless one is happy to passively accept and absorb the story at face value there's little alternative to parsing it, and such parsing is invariably colored by the knowledge and orientations each individual audience member brings to the table.


... It is natural that a psychologist would see everything as being `all in the mind` - because their specialism dictates that. A chemist thinks everything is one big chemical reaction. An ecenomist thinks that everything is dictated by economic forces.A specialist in `the media` thinks that everything is a `media construct` (hence Fortean Times's very own `UFO correspondent`!)

So someone sees - let's say - a `ghost`. The psychologist will immediately focus on the witness as the subject (and potential patient). Why have they hallucianated thus? Of course the witness could have seen a chemical reaction. Or an economic force. Or a media construct. Or maybe even.... a ghost.

As Freud himself said: `Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar`.

It's only fair to point out this is blatantly applicable to true believers / proponents as well. Someone relates an incident involving ephemeral messages seemingly voiced in one's ear. Contactees will frame them as alien transmissions. Folkloric adherents will frame them as fairies' whispers or missives from the gods. ESP fans will frame them as messages from another human. Spirit / ghost fans will frame them as messages from the Great Beyond, and so on ...

To play off your final line: Sometimes an anomalous perception is just an anomalous perception.

One other comment ... Fortean items arrive as reports of someone's observation(s) or experience(s). As a result, an observer / experiencer is inevitably in the mix somewhere and somehow. This in turn means issues of perception, cognition, interpretation, etc., are also always in the mix. This is why psychology represents the field most immediately relevant to delving into a given Fortean report and hence the field you cite first and most prominently.
 
... Then again you wouldn't be over-extrapolating would you? By this I mean drawing a general conclusion from a specific circumstance.

So I used to be entranced by the whole Loch Ness Monster thing. So I read up on it. After much doing so, and some thinking, and some internet exchages of views I concluded with reluctance that there is nothing to the story - it's just a mix of local folklore, misperceptions and the tourist trade.

Now if I were to over-extrapolate I would then attach this conclusion onto all other unexplained mysteries. So the Loch Ness Monster is a sham ergo so must UFOs be - because that's another Unexplained Mystery mentioned in the same breath, isn't it? But this just doesn't follow. ...

Agreed ... Just because you end up rejecting a specific story or report doesn't mean the entire category of anomalies is to be rejected out of hand. It's even less justifiable to impose a blanket rejection on all such categories.

I, too, ended up shedding any acceptance of the notion a (e.g.) relict plesiosaur lives in Loch Ness. This didn't - and shouldn't - mean I was required to reject the notion there are large strange creatures in the world's waters. I still suspect the waters represent the most likely location where cryptids may eventually be proven to exist.
 
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