{"id":47185,"date":"2019-07-11T10:56:49","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T15:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47185"},"modified":"2019-07-11T10:56:52","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T15:56:52","slug":"the-reality-bubble-or-pretending-ourselves-to-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47185","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Reality Bubble\u2019: Or Pretending Ourselves to Death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thetyee.ca\/Culture\/2019\/07\/10\/Reality-Bubble-Pretending-to-Death\/\">\u2018The Reality Bubble\u2019: Or Pretending Ourselves to Death<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Our illusions and blind spots keep us happy. And could doom us.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/thetyee.ca\/Culture\/2019\/07\/10\/ZiyaTong1.jpg\" alt=\"ZiyaTong1.jpg\"\/><figcaption>We create a bubble that lets us be blind to the world around us, writes Ziya Tong. And we like it in there.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We are also richly endowed with metaphorical blind spots, which enable us to deceive ourselves even about what can see perfectly well.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tong, a very experienced science communicator, was the co-host of the Discovery Channel\u2019s Daily Planet for a decade. Her book,&nbsp;<em>The Reality Bubble<\/em>, illustrates its argument. It begins with interesting little factoids. Your face is crawling with tiny eight-legged mites; the alarm barks of prairie dogs, analyzed by computer, reveal \u201cwords\u201d defining the nature of the threat: coyote, hawk, tall guy in a blue shirt. We may keep consuming such factoids like salted peanuts and begin to lose the point of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Tong uses every factoid to back up her thesis. We never knew about the mites until the microscope let us examine ourselves up close and very personal. We thought we were the only language users until we used computers that could detect every nuance in a prairie dog\u2019s bark. Our unaided senses operate in a very narrow spectrum, and the \u201creal world\u201d we perceive is just a reconstruction in our brains of electromagnetic and sound waves that impinge on our eyes and ears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Blind spots aren\u2019t just physical. Leeuwenhoek developed the microscope in the 17th century, and promptly discovered microscopic life. It took two more centuries until Louis Pasteur identified microbes as causes of disease, and another century before we began to realize that not all \u201cgerms\u201d are bad: most help keep us alive and healthy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tong writes that we can be blind to the obvious individually, and as a society.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018The Reality Bubble\u2019: Or Pretending Ourselves to Death Our illusions and blind spots keep us happy. And could doom us. We are also richly endowed with metaphorical blind spots, which enable us to deceive ourselves even about what can see perfectly well.&nbsp; Tong, a very experienced science communicator, was the co-host of the Discovery Channel\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11528,669,26245,23884,26246],"class_list":["post-47185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-crawford-kilian","tag-reality","tag-the-reality-bubble","tag-thetyee-ca","tag-ziya-tong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47186,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47185\/revisions\/47186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}