Quick, look, another crisis!
Classifying something as a trend, even if it’s not, can provide comfort when the world feels chaotic.
with Stephen Johnson • Thu 31 July, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
I spent last week hiking in Glacier National Park, and I saw animals I’d never seen in the wild: moose, black bears, and an adolescent grizzly who, sitting just 20 feet from the trail with no mama bear in sight, made me turn on a dime and think, “Enough with the Mother Nature for today.” I backtracked toward the trailhead. With my head buzzing from the exercise and delusional thoughts of how I’d beat a 600-pound grizzly in hand-to-claw combat, I looked up to the sky and spotted another animal: a huge turtle, otherwise known as an oddly shaped cloud.
Delirious amateur hikers aren’t the only ones who see creatures in clouds. It’s a common phenomenon called pareidolia, which is our tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random stimuli. This is adaptive in the evolutionary sense: You’re better off regularly mistaking, say, a pile of leaves for a grizzly bear, because sooner or later, it will be the real thing.
But this perceptual reflex doesn’t stop at leaves and clouds — it may also shape how we interpret society itself. This week, social psychologist Adam Waytz argues that pareidolia helps explain why we’re so drawn to sweeping social narratives like the “crisis of democracy” or the “loneliness epidemic,” even when the underlying data for these trends is shaky.
Read on,
Stephen
THE BIG CRISIS
Most social trends aren’t what they seem
Our minds struggle with nonlinear thinking. Case in point: Theoretically, how many times would you need to fold a piece of paper such that its thickness stretched to the Moon? Just 42. It’s a classic example of how wrong our intuitions about exponential growth — a type of nonlinear change — can be. We expect trends to change in smooth and predictable lines. But reality, especially in the social world, is rarely that simple. In this piece, Adam Waytz breaks down some recent high-profile social trends and makes the case for why we may be seeing animals in the clouds rather than real patterns in the data.
Fast Stats
-5 — The correct answer to a simple math question that large language models often get wrong.
6 — The books that changed former NBA player John Amaechi’s life.
3 — The “universal motives” that can illuminate your blindspots, according to Harvard organizational psychologist David McClelland.
THE BIG QUESTION
Ask Ethan: Did our Universe really arise from nothing?
There’s a handful of deep-sounding questions that people enjoy debating at a certain point in life, usually around college age, while high at 3 a.m. What if God is just everything? What if this is all a simulation? I gave up on all these. But one sticks with me: Where did this all come from? It’s a question whose answer is so fundamentally strange, no matter what it turns out to be. Here, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explores how it’s possible that the Universe came from “nothing” (at least, if you accept a particular definition of “nothing”).
MINI PHILOSOPHY
The public-private myth: Why religion can’t be kept behind closed doors
By Jonny Thomson
The annoying truth for any philosopher or psychologist is that when it comes to our beliefs, motivation, and behavior, there are no simple answers. There is hardly ever one thing we can point to and say, “Aha! That’s why they are that way.” Every part of our mental life is only ever half-seen in a murky epistemological haze.
Let’s pick one example: Why you’ve carried on reading this far in this newsletter. The easy and neat answer would be to say, “Oh, Steve’s introductory hook was pure gold.” But in reality, it’s to do with how you slept last night, what you ate this morning, what time of day it is, what other things you’ve got to do, who else is in the room right now, how loud the traffic is outside, and so on.
What goes on inside our heads is complicated, and our thoughts, feelings, and needs spray out into the world like a dropped can of Coke. And of course, our religious beliefs are no different.
Read this week’s Mini Philosophy interview with Simon Critchley about mysticism to find out what I mean.
Subscribe to Mini Philosophy on Substack for even more from Jonny Thomson.
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THE BIG CHANGE
How and why your memories shift over time, explained by neuroscience
Memory feels like truth. In reality, it’s more like storytelling. Neuroscientists André Fenton and Lisa Genova explain how each act of remembering reshapes your past. Memory isn’t fixed. Rather, it’s a living process, tied to perception, identity, and the stories we choose to believe.
Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.
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The Public-Private Myth is the biggest thinking idea I’ve encountered in my Big Think newsletter subscription. To be more specific:
It makes sense to talk about the idea that there is “just life with blurry borders and messy delineations,” but there are also some clear delineations. Also, don’t blame the secular mindset. In the words of Richard Rohr, “Jesus came to reveal that the spiritual and secular are and always have been one.”
That said, to support Rohr’s idea and Critchley’s intent to smash apart and brake down our culture’s misperceptions, I offer the following.
A healthy social system is not free of conflict. Instead, conflicts inevitably emerge, and in a healthy system, they are resolved. Otherwise, the system is unhealthy.
In Matthew 22:40, there is a giant arrow pointing to the two founding principles of Christianity. The two greatest commandments are (first) to resolve the conflicts that inevitably emerge between the mind (reason) and the heart (intuition/gut) and (second) to resolve conflicts with our neighbor (aka our direct personal relationships).
That is the second hardest thing any human can do, but when everyone does, then the system works. The alternative is the hardest thing any human can do, which is to live in an unhealthy system.
The first principle of science is to subject our assumptions to rigorous skepticism because the conflicts that inevitably emerge will otherwise be left unresolved.
The first principle of capitalism is the name of Adam Smith’s book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which involves resolving conflicts that inevitably emerge.
We can’t stop conflicts from emerging, but if we leave them unresolved, then we are breaking the bonds holding civilization together. What’s a good word to represent the need to continuously repair and restrengthen the system’s bonds? How about religion? Get it? A “ligament” can be used to bond things together. But there I am taking credit for an ancient Roman philosopher’s idea.
In other words, a “mystic” is a “logician” kicked up a notch.
Regarding memories, I can understand how memories, not often revisited, could change over time, but, I have memories of a few certain, significant events that I recorded years ago that have not changed much, if any, overtime. Those events, are revisited regularly on a monthly or weekly basis over decades and re-enforced. Is there some accommodation for this by researchers?