Read this quote;

Everything that is happening to this baby is explainable within the internal logic of the homeopathic narrative. If the symptoms get better, then homeopathy is working. If things get worse, then we have an ‘aggravation’. If things stay the same, then change the remedy. At no point would a homeopath stop and ask if they are simply observing the natural course of an illness. They are the agents of everything that happens. Belief in the pills is total. The homeopath has to keep trying different remedies and different potencies – and the patient should avoid the ‘allopath’ at all costs. And a significant part of that narrative is the evil of vaccination and medicine. Anti-vaccination views are not fringe beliefs, but thoroughly mainstream within this world. Rochelle does not have to explain why it is significant that the eczema started after vaccinations. The other homeopaths will understand that these were undoubtedly a probable cause of this baby’s distress.

It is so easy to allow your personal bias, your paradigms, your beliefs, to short-circuit your reasoning. Human beings like patterns. We look for them even when there are none. And when we ‘find’ one, we always explain it with the mental tools we use most often.

To look at it another way, an engineer of the steam age thinks with metaphors of valves and pressure, heat energy. An engineer of the digital age could easily think of the world in terms of silicon, signals, electrical energy. We interpret the world based on the metaphors, the mental patterns most entrenched within us.

This can allow us, in some cases, to assign meanings where there may be none, assuming the actions of others are all in some way connected to you. The butterfly flaps its wings… because it doesn’t like your perfume. It is all about us.

It all comes back to that topic that I love so much – your thoughts creating your reality. All our sensory perception, all the data we take in – our brains re-construct and re-enact every single bit as bursts of energy leap between neurons – and there is no way to entirely escape its bias. The cogwebs run deep. (Ctrl-F to ‘cogweb’ on that linked article, it takes a while to reach the definition. If you’re interested in learning more about cogwebs, check out Katherine Turner’s fantastic book, Brainwashing – The Science of Thought Control <- click for Google Book preview of one of the pages on cogwebs).

I love this topic. So much. Can someone pay me to write about brain science and perception philosophy all day long?