Hi Mr. Erisian. Welcome to the forums. Let's see if we can't clear up some things for you.
I would be interested to hear some skeptical thoughts on Tarot cards. I have recently been playing about with a pack doing readings for friends and family. I'm stunned at how accurate they are. It's incredible!
A lot of seemingly paranormal stuff does seem incredible. That's pretty much why people put so much faith into it - it seems impossible to
not believe in it.
It's VERY strange but my rational mind knows there must be an explanation which goes beyond coincidence. What is it? How do tarot cards work their 'magic'?
There are a few tricks of the brain at work here. Before I address them, however, it pays to understand why it's so convincing.
Our brains evolved to help us survive. They do this by allowing us to work together as a social group to find patterns to exploit in the world around us. In other words, our brains did not evolve to write operas, make ravioli, or deduce mathematical models of nature. That is an accidental and useful side-effect of how our brains function.
However, to do what it does, your brain needs to cut some corners. It's an incredibly energy-hungry meat machine, so to get the most out of its processing it gambles. A lot. Most of your vision, for example, is your brain making an educated guess, which is why optical illusions are so damn funky.
So, these short cuts work the vast majority of the time, and save a lot of time and effort. In eons past, it allowed us to do what organisms do best - make lots of babies. It didn't matter if it also meant we believed that the mountain that overlooked our home has feelings, that we could dance and make it rain or that we could predict the future by looking at animal's entrails. The same pattern-making software in our heads, so to speak, that allowed us to do these things also allowed us to find the best food, avoid snakes and sympathise with our loved ones.
Now, getting to your question;
Our brains are incredibly selective. It's important for them to be this way - the amount of information coming into them every moment of every day is vast. So it constantly matches it with something - anything - and if it can't, it discards it as useless. And you forget it.
Yet, sometimes it finds something that could be significant. The upside is that this is an efficient way of finding needles in a haystack of information. The downside is that there is no way of knowing if it really is a needle, or just another bit of hay. Some patterns are useless.
With your tarot card sessions, I guarantee there were plenty of instances where things were said that never eventuated. You forgot them, because, well, they didn't match anything. It's called 'counting the hits and missing the misses'. Out of a hundred random statements, statistically there are probably going to be a few that simply, accidentally, ring true. Why? Same reason some people win the lottery. With enough spins of the wheel, random events will coincide.
So we are more or less forced by our brains to seize on those coincidences and see them as significant. Even if they aren't. Sure, it seems amazing, but that's the beauty of it. Add to that the fact that we're pretty poor at evaluating probability, and we all tend to think of our lives as being more unique than they really are, and you can start to see our brain isn't really good at making judgements of chance.
Secondly, memory isn't what you think it is. We adjust our memories all the time. It's one of the best tricks our brain has - it is always adjusting what we think we know. Why? Because it's evolved to deal with the possibility of having made a mistake. A poorly formed memory is useless, so with more experience we can modify the memory and learn more from it. The downside, again, is that we have no way of knowing really what happened.
For instance, imagine if somebody had referred to an aunt dying. In retrospect, your brain could very easily modify this to refer to a grandmother, or mother, or friend of the family. This subtle alteration is incredibly powerful - you'll swear on your mother's grave you heard correctly. And, for all purposes, you would think that. You're not lying, but your brain did modify things slightly.
Lastly, if you like the idea of tarot working, you'll read deeper into the language being employed to describe the events and assume more than what is really being said.
There are a number of other shortcuts employed by your cognitive machinery that lead you to think something amazing as happened. However, there are two possibilities - one is that it is indeed paranormal, and I'm wrong about your brain playing tricks. The other possibility is that I'm correct.
Interestingly, when you start to act with this in mind (recording sessions and listening later, for example), the magic disappears. The paranormal always falls apart when it is tested, leaving us with nothing but our energy-efficient and yet fallible brains.
Before you think this is a rather disappointing conclusion, just think - this same brain is also capable of turning onto itself and recognising it is able to make mistakes, and learn from it. That, in itself, is truly magic.
Athon
