What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.
— Attributed to business tycoon Warren Buffett.
According to the scientists who make it their business to research dreams, I’ve been having between two and six dreams every night for the past 68 years. That would total somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 dreams, most of which I have retained no conscious memory of, whatsoever. If they are residing in my subconscious — which is certainly a possibility — they have, for the most part, firmly resolved to remain there, permanently inaccessible.
But a few dozen dreams somehow made their way into my conscious memory, and those memories pop up on occasion. A dream where I was riding on a train pulled by a steam locomotive. A dream of people dancing the waltz in an enormous outdoor plaza, unaware that they had recently died. A dream of a jam session with John Lennon.
Why were these particular dreams remembered, and not the others? I cannot say.
The day after Thanksgiving, I awoke from a dream that, unlike most of my dreams — my thousands of dreams — left a mark on my waking consciousness. I was in a cafeteria of some kind; I recall that the room was decorated in shades of aqua-blue. I spoke to a woman who was holding her infant son. (In the dream, she was familiar to me, but upon waking I could not remember who she was.) I asked the baby’s name, and she replied with a very unusual name, which sounded like, “Lob” — as in “to lob a ball.” How do you spell that? I asked. She spelled it. “Laab”.
I moved to a different table in the cafeteria and came across a couple that I’ve known for almost 50 years. In my waking life, this couple (now divorced) are in their late 60s, but in the dream they both appeared to be about 30 years old, and they also had an infant baby boy, asleep in a dark blue stroller. The wife seemed irritated, though I wasn’t sure why. I asked the baby’s name, and heard the wife pronounce the identical name I’d heard from the first woman.
“Laab”.
How curious, I thought, in the dream. Two baby boys with the same curiously unfamiliar name.
When I awoke from the dream, lay there thinking about the name. “Laab.” Where in the world did this name come from?
Then I remembered… the previous day, I’d been listening to an NPR program on my car radio, and a woman chef was discussing ways to use Thanksgiving leftovers. She mentioned that traditional leftovers could be mixed together with warm spices, to make something unexpected and different. Perhaps you could use Thai spices, she suggested, and make a “larb”. That was a word I recognized from Thai restaurant menus.
“Larb” is a traditional Thai dish made of minced meat lightly poached in broth, then dressed with chiles, fresh herbs, and roasted rice powder, and eaten with sticky rice.
What I didn’t recall, as I lay there in my bed, and what I perhaps didn’t even know, is that “Laab” is an alternate spelling for the Thai dish.
Some folks who study nocturnal dreams have proposed that one of the function of dreams is to help the conscious mind consolidate events and memories from the previous day. That theory certainly seemed to apply in this case, where a vaguely-familiar Thai word, heard on a radio program, appeared in my dream the following morning, as an unusual name for two infant boys.
But can such a theory explain the rest of the dream? An aqua-blue cafeteria, and two women with strangely-named babies, one of whom I recognized but haven’t seen or spoken to in perhaps ten years, and the other who generated no waking recognition at all?
And why, of the 100,000 dreams I’ve supposedly dreamed during my lifetime, did this particular dream successfully enter my waking consciousness?
At the end of Part Four, I mentioned the concept of confirmation bias, which — according to scientists — is a real thing, one of several types of ‘irrational’ thought patterns that prevent us humans from seeing clearly what is sometimes right in front of our noses.
Confirmation Bias is the tendency to look for information that supports, rather than rejects, one’s preconceptions, typically by interpreting evidence to confirm existing beliefs while rejecting or ignoring any conflicting data (American Psychological Association).
Confirmation bias is rampant in America in 2020, and perhaps in many other places as well.
If you believe that the 2020 election — conducted by thousands of local county clerks, on behalf of 50 different state governments — was corrupted by massive ‘voter fraud’, you can easily find hundreds of websites that will offer up evidence of voter fraud to help you support your belief. You can, for example, find a 381-page document on WhiteHouse.gov, written by the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, which presents a “Sampling of Election Fraud Cases from Across the Country” — more than 1,000 election fraud cases resulting in criminal convictions or civil penalties, from every state in the Union. (Including ten cases from Colorado.)
By searching for the evidence you want to find, you can easily find the evidence you searched for, and your beliefs can be strengthened. When you find evidence that seems opposed to your existing beliefs, you can dismiss it as “fake news.”
If, on the other hand, you believe that no significant election fraud took place during the 2020 election, you can easily find evidence that election fraud is relatively rare, and further bolster your belief that America conducts free and fair elections, including the most recent one. You can, for example, find that very same 381-page Heritage Foundation document documents 1,000 election fraud cases that occurred between 1948 and 2016 — a period that included no fewer than 18 presidential elections and 36 congressional contests, during which more than 2 billion individual ballots were cast and counted, and determine that 1,000 fraud attempts out of 2 billion votes cast is equal to one proven fraud out of every 2 million ballots cast.
Which can easily suggest that there were probably about 70 criminally-fraudulent ballots cast in the most recent election. And you might come away feeling confident about the fairness of the US election process, and that the “fake news” is coming from the folks who lost the election.
In either cases, you are probably suffering from confirmation bias. You are looking for and finding only the evidence that supports your belief, and you are ignoring the evidence that challenges your belief.
What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.
We all do this. Even scientists do this. I might go out on a limb and say, “Especially scientists do this.”
Read Part Six, tomorrow…