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As I mentioned in another thread ... David Grossman writes this insightful piece:
quote:
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Six months ago the journal Nature published a study about a dangerous mechanism in the human visual system. The study sought to explain why the brain sometimes refuses to see what the eyes convey to it. The scientists, from Israel's Weizmann Institute, suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon is that the brain is flooded with a multitude of interpretations of every reality it faces and that it must, in the end, decide in favour of one of them and act accordingly. The fascinating part of this explanation is the hypothesis that, from the moment the brain decides in favour of a given interpretation of the images it is receiving, all stimuli that support any other interpretation simply "disappear". The brain, as it were, refuses to relate to them.
In the impossible relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, both sides have for years suffered from almost complete blindness to reality's complexity. Each is certain that the other side is ceaselessly deceiving it; that the other side does not want peace at all; that any compromise move by the other side is camouflage for an intrigue designed to bring the other side's victory and the elimination of its own existence.
There's no need for scientific research to understand how easy it is to paint reality this way.
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