On the counterintuitive in everyday life (3)

3. Boyer’s discovery: minimally counterintuitive concepts are easily noticed, recalled and passed on in human cultures

Boyer’s discovery is that concepts that follow the mental recipe described in the previous post are easily noticed, recalled and passed on in human cultures, and he experimentally proves that along with other scholars, such as Justin Barrett, Charles Ramble and Stewart Guthrie. Why is this the case? They are a lot of reasons, and here are some of them:

• from an early age, human beings have to deal with a lot of information from their environment; this fact implies that they have to determine which ones of these are worthy of their attention, and then to make a selection between them: phenomena which seem to be always identical tend to be forgotten or “automatically” treated, whilst phenomena which violate a particular intuitive expectation are attention-grabbing and tend to be easily recalled;
• counterintuitive phenomena are easily noticed and recalled because they carry a strategic value; not only the fact that we have to interact with other people, but also our prey/predator past, forces us to draw our attention to phenomena which are strategic, in order to interpret them correctly and then preserve our integrity/advantage (what are the intentions of this person towards me? am I in danger? is it a possible prey that makes that bush moving? etc.);
• counterintuitive concepts and phenomena are exciting; they summon up many of our inference systems and permit many associations and projections; they seem to constitute a “synthetic” experience;
• to recall and to pass on noticeable phenomena has been crucial for the survival of the human race: conveying the way to manage something which is noticeable, allowed members of a particular community to preserve themselves from possible dangers, and this with no need to experience it directly (e.g. what is eatable, and what is not?).

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I have summarized very briefly Boyer’s account on minimally counterintuitive concepts and their cognitive advantages. I have done this in a quite free way, and hope that readers will not be too disappointed; I request them to refer directly to Boyer’s very insightful Religion Explained for the complete theory. As announced in the first post, the aim of this series of articles is not to present Boyer’s work in its entirety, but to consider some phenomena of everyday life on the basis of one of his discoveries in the scientific approach to religion, namely the fact that minimally counterintuitive concepts are easily noticed, recalled and passed on. That is what I am getting ready to do now.