You Might Be a Zombie . . . (17 page)

The only reason Komodo dragons haven’t eaten everyone you care about yet is because there are so few of them, and they all exist on the one island.

But then again, we remember a movie about a bunch of giant carnivorous lizards contained on a small island, and that didn’t exactly end in hugs and milk shakes.

1. POUAKAI: MAN-EATING EAGLE

The myth

The Maori people of New Zealand are basical y a death-metal video in human packaging and have the most hard-core monster legends around. Like Pouakai the bird god. Or, as we prefer: the giant man-eating eagle (of death). The Maoris have many stories about this sky demon. They say it would perch out of sight of vil ages and swoop down to pick people off one by one until entire tribes were kil ed off. It was said that the last thing the victims heard was the deafening beating of its immense wings, possibly followed by whatever sound a skul col apsing makes, and then the mournful drizzle of fear urine. Surely such a monstrosity never existed under the same sun as human beings, for our God is a kind god and not prone to creating stealth bombers carved from flesh that think men are delicious, right?

The reality

Roughly one hundred thousand years ago, Australia was populated by megafauna, which basica
l
ly means that all the cute and cuddly animals of today were huge and terrifying. New Zealand, probably overcompensating for mil ennia of being overshadowed by Australia, had something called Haast’s eagle: the largest bird of prey to ever exist.

When human beings final y breezed in from the wider world to find most of New Zealand’s megafauna at the sizes we know of today, they were probably pretty stoked to find an island without lions and god-bears and whatever other massive predators thought it was hilarious that these soft pink monkeys tried to run away from them. Boy, were they in for a tragic, terrifying surprise!

Researchers believe Haast’s eagle was almost certainly the origin of the Pouakai stories.

So that would mean all the horrifying shit that flashed through your imagination a few paragraphs ago—the flapping wings, the fear urine, the entire tribes picked off one by one like slasher-flick victims—that all probably happened.

Although, after a few generations of devouring humans for fun and profit, mankind did final y have the last laugh at Haast’s eagle: We drove it to extinction simply by eating everything else around it and then not providing enough nutrition with our doughy little bodies to sustain the notoriously ravenous diet of the bird gods.

So, yeah . . .
Suck it
, enormous sky raptor of legend! We beat your ass by not having enough calories! Go humanity!

SURE
, our minds are being screwed with by advertisers, politicians, magicians, etc. But as it turns out, the ways in which your head is being truly and royal y messed with the most are coming from inside your skul .

5. CHANGE BLINDNESS

Change blindness is the inability to notice changes that happen right in front of you as long as you don’t watch the actual change take place.

Um, what?

Focus on anyone around you. If their pants spontaneously changed color, you’d notice and probably soil your own. But if you looked away and focused on something else, then came back and found their jeans had turned to khakis, odds are you almost certainly would not notice, even if your attention was elsewhere for only a few seconds.

If your brain processed everything in your visual spectrum you would go insane, so instead it picks and chooses what to focus on. If an image changes while your brain isn’t paying attention, your brain tell s you the change was there all along.

It’s like your brain is sitting in class, staring out the window at a cloud that sort of looks like a penis. When you cal on your brain, it does the same thing you do when a teacher cal s on you in those circumstances: starts bul shitting.

Where it gets really weird . . .

Working with psychologist Susan Greenfield, the BBC decided to take this idea to a ridiculous extreme. They filmed an experiment in which one man worked the counter at a university copy center while another hid below the counter. When a student walked up and requested a form, the first man would duck down behind the counter to get it, and the previously hidden man would pop up and say, “Ah, here it is.” Despite this previously hidden second person looking completely different, most of the students did not freaking notice that they were now talking to a totally different person.

This is probably what made the producers of
Bewitched
think they could just switch Darrins on us.

4. SACCADIC MASKING

Saccadic masking is the forty or so minutes per day that you’re effectively blind.

Um, what?

Look at the wall to your left. When you flicked your eyes over there, for just a moment you were blind. And you didn’t even know it.

Ever watch a movie that gave you motion sickness due to the camera whipping around too fast with that “shaky handheld camera” gimmick? Your brain doesn’t like those rapid changes in vision, which is why some folks ended up puking while watching
Cloverfield
.

Your eye movements are even faster and shakier than that. If you were to look closely at someone else’s eye, you’d notice that it’s never steady for more than a third of a second. Even when you think you’re rol ing your eyes, they’re actually moving in a series of rapid jerky movements known as saccades. To prevent your world from looking like you’re seeing it through a jerky camcorder all day, your brain shuts down your optic nerve during these tiny movements. That’s why we told you to look at your friend’s eyebal instead of looking at your own in a mirror. While it might have created less sexual tension, everyone’s own eyebal will look perfectly stationary to them because they’re blind during each and every jerky saccade. That’s saccadic masking.

Where it really gets weird . . .

The spooky part is the way your brain prevents you from noticing the blackness that occurs several times a second, every time you use your eyes.

Estimates vary, but it’s likely that you’re spending around forty minutes a day with your eyes wide open, and totally blind.

Here’s where saccadic masking and change blindness team up to screw with your mind. A scientist named George McConkie was able to track people’s eye movements down to each individual saccadic movement. This enabled him to introduce changes in words and text without the subject noticing
while they were looking directly at it
. If a change occurs during that fraction of a second when the brain is dodging cal s like the optic nerve was an ex-girlfriend, you won’t notice it. Even when it happens right in front of your damned eyes.

3. PROPRIOCEPTION

Proprioception is your brain’s map of your body, and it steers you wrong on a regular basis.

Um, what?

Proprioception is your brain’s ability to sense where your limbs are. This is how you can put a sandwich in your mouth while your eyes are focused on the TV: Your brain knows where your hand is in relation to your face.

If you’ve ever failed a field sobriety test, you know this kind of self-knowledge is fall ible. Your proprioception is like your brain’s underwear: pretty much the first thing to disappear when you’re any kind of drunk. Basical y, the cops doing the roadside test are trying to see if your brain knows where your fingers are in relation to your nose.

Even though your brain carries around a detailed awareness of exactly where your body parts are at all times, when that awareness gets drunk enough to start lying to you, you’l ignore everything you’ve ever known and say, “Oh, wel . Guess I’ve been wrong about the length of my nose all these years.”

Where it really gets weird . . .

The best example we’ve found so far is “the Pinocchio il usion.” Scientists have found that they can have the subject touch the tip of their nose with their finger while having their biceps electrical y stimulated at the same time. Your brain “feels” your arm muscle extending, but also feels that you’re maintaining contact with the tip of your nose and leaps to the immediate conclusion that your nose has suddenly grown to be about three feet long.

Incidental y, we know exactly which il usion you’re about to try to induce, figuring all it’l take is a girl, a dark room, and the right equipment. Don’t do it. It leads to eventual disappointment.

2. CRYPTOMNESIA

Sometimes called
subconscious plagiarism
, it’s what happens when your brain rips off someone else’s ideas and doesn’t tell you.

Um, what?

Your brain isn’t great at remembering where your ideas come from. Cryptomnesia happens when you find a really good idea and don’t bother to remember that it’s not yours.

Although occurrences are pretty rare, there are still some famous cases: Nietzsche accidental y didn’t write quite a bit of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, George Harrison was forced to shel out almost $600,000 for a song he “borrowed,” and an early
-
incident with cryptomnesia permanently ruined the

celebrity-author career of Helen Kel er, who wrote up a fairy tale that it turned out had been told to her years before—much to her surprise.

This occurs when your brain retains enough memory to recal an event but not the origin of the event, leading to the convenient and mistaken impression that you’re the originator.

You may be wondering at this point how we know cryptomnesia exists at all . After all , how do we know those cases of “accidental” plagiarism weren’t all intentional?

The answer: We don’t. If you haven’t experienced it for yourself, you have no way of knowing whether it’s not just a big fat scam. If you have experienced it, good luck trying to convince that first group.

Where it really gets weird . . .

But there is plenty of evidence that we’re really bad at remembering where our ideas come from. In 2002, the journal
Psychological Science
published an experiment in which scientists implanted a completely fabricated childhood memory in the minds of subjects. The researchers showed the subjects a doctored photograph that depicted them in the basket of a hot-air bal oon. Even though the subjects had never been in a hot-air bal oon, many of them constructed detailed memories to match the fake photograph.

So no matter how confident you are in the originality of an idea, it’s worth Googling around to make sure you didn’t inadvertently steal it. Also, no matter how unlikely it might seem, scientists will take the time to Photoshop you into a hot-air bal oon, just to screw with your head.

1. SUBCONSCIOUS BEHAVIOR, A.K.A. BEST GUESSING

When you’re running down a flight of stairs at top speed, your brain doesn’t have time to think about each and every step you take. Your feet are on autopilot, reaching out for the next step faster than your conscious mind can tell them what to do. well, it turns out that your brain is on autopilot more often than you think. Even when you’re making important choices throughout the course of your day, a part of your brain knows what you’re going to do wel before it lets your conscious mind in on the decision. The technical term for this:
precognition
.