I saw an example of biased memory just today. I made the same left turn I make every day on my way home from work, but for some reason, I thought "I'd better get in the left lane."
Ahead, there was a car parked in the right lane with its door open, and then ahead of that, a slow-moving car making a right turn. Good thing I was in the left lane! Maybe there's something to it....
Right?
Oh wait...there have been plenty of other times when I
didn't get into the left lane, and was met with similar (minor) obstacles in the right lane, and needed to slow down or stop.
But this one time stood out more than those times did, because the random chain of events paid off.
It's possible to find a multitude of testimonial/anecdotal letters concerning crop circles, oil additives, alien abductions, energy savers, and divining rods. The problem is that they are all written by the same people.
Homeopathic "medicine." The placebo effect is quite impressive.
"This will make you feel better."
"Wow, that's amazing! I
do feel better! What was it?"
"Nothing. I haven't done anything yet, and this injection is an inert solution."
Your own mind is quite exceedingly proficient at playing games with itself.
A lot of us can even remember some nightly hallucinations. (Dreams.) Your brain does wacky things at night, just because that's what it does, as a result of many years living on a planet which experiences regular periods of darkness, and thus we experience these regular periods of dormancy. In the process, memories are called up in no particular sequence, and the crippled snippets of your conscious mind that do remain active try their best to make sense of the bizarre and fractured information that's being served up. In the process, some new memories may be formed, and eventually, you can wake up with some fresh information that you hadn't had the night before. But just because it's fresh, that doesn't mean that it's inherently
valuable.
Our computers and machines can also come up with random outputs, but we don't try to find "higher meaning" in them. We instead try to repair the problem that caused it.
(Point is, I'd put the notion of "dreams have hidden meaning" under that same heading. Your brain shuffles through a lot of information at night, quite possibly things that are familiar to you. You can then pick and choose from the remaining memories things that are merely coincidental, and attempt to rationalize meaning into them.)
For those who have faith in divining rods; "Faith is believing what you know ain't so".
But what
rational reason is there to believe something if you know that it is either untrue, or even impossible? Or even, what
value is there in that kind of thinking?