Monat: Dezember 2011

There is a theory that there are other civilisations out there far more advanced that ours. They started tens of thousands of years before ours did and so have had more time to develop.
The truth is they only started fifteen minutes before and the reason they are so much more advanced is because they never had to rush to appointments.

Once upon a time, there was a man who was travelling and came to a river. The river was very wlde and wild, and he wondered how he might cross the river in order to continue his journey.
First, he thought that he might try to swim the river, but as soon as he stepped into the river, he realized that the water was too wild and that the river was too wide, and that he would be swept away by the strong current.
So he stood on the river bank for a long time and looked across the wide river and thought deeply about what he could do. And his head was full of crazy ideas and worries, and he even thought about just turning back and going back to the place where he had come from.
Then he decided to build a raft and he spent some time finding the wood along the side of the river and building the raft by tying the pieces of wood together. But when he tried to sail out upon the river, he found that he was immediately pulled down by the current and his raft began to come apart. Quickly he swam back to the safety of the shore before the river could pull him down or that he would be washed away by the river to the sea instead of being able to cross to the other side.
And after waiting a long time, he saw some other travellers who were travelling along beside the river and he called out to them for help. Most of them wouldn’t even stop but instead passed on their own way. One did stop and told him that he was crazy to try to cross the river. That person had already decided that it was impossible and was turning back.
So the man stood frustrated on the banks of the river and wondered what was the best way to go forward, to cross the river.
Eventually, he decided to take a walk to get a new perspective – to see what the river looked like a little further along the shore. And he found something very interesting – something surprising that he hadn’t even imagined.
For as he walked, eventually he came around a bend in the river and ahead of him, he saw a bridge – a lovely old wooden bridge – that crossed the river.
So he smiled to himself and laughed a little at the worries that were already slipping away and he crossed the bridge easily to the other side of the river.
And when he looked back from the other shore of that river, it was strange, but it seemed to him that the river was much smaller than it had been before. He shrugged his shoulders and thought to himself that things can indeed look different from a new perspective. Even crossing the river didn’t seem like such a big thing after all.
And then he looked further beyond the river that he had just crossed, and he saw back in the countryside beyond – the place that he had come from – that there were many rivers. And he realized and remembered that he had already crossed many many rivers.

Participants in this experiment are fitted with a fake facial scar and told they are to be interviewed to see how their deformity influences the way they are treated. Just before the interview last minute adjustments are made to the scar but in fact, and unbeknown to the participant the scar is removed entirely.
Right after the interview, in almost every case, the participants were full of all kinds of examples of how the interviewer behaved negatively due to their „deformity“. Amazingly, in some cases the belief continued even after they were shown on video that the scar had been removed.