A tendency toward self-deception is part of our makeup and enhanced our fitness in interactions with others in groups. If we believe our own stories, then we are much more convincing when we tell our stories to others. Also, a bias toward over-estimating our own abilities can keep us striving for that which is just beyond our current reach.

However, in the increasingly complex world in which we now live, the self-deception that provided social benefits begins to get in the way of accurate perception and effective problem-solving.

As our scope of perception and influence expands to include more of our planetary society, effective decision making, based on accurate perceptions, becomes even more vital.

This section is about understanding the various ways we deceive ourselves, and how to overcome the resulting biases and blindness while maintaining or enhancing our interactions with others.

ESP, UFOs and reincarnation are treated with respect at the world's most bizarre scientific conference

Roger Nelson's formal credentials are in the respectable field of experimental psychology, but the project he has been working on since 1998 would make plenty of scientists cringe. Nelson heads the Global Consciousness Project, which is based on the theory that emotionally charged world events will cause blips in the output of random-number generators scattered around the globe. He and his colleagues believe they have already documented that effect in the aftermath of Princess Di's death, the 9/11 attacks and, more benignly, in the wave of international optimism that seems to settle over the world each New Year's Day. The simple electronic devices that generate the random numbers, he argues, may be picking up some sort of planetwide field of consciousness.

Nelson would have a tough time getting this stuff published in a major journal like Science or Nature. But he doesn't have to, thanks to an organization called the Society for Scientific Exploration, or S.S.E., which held its annual meeting outside Gainesville, Fla., last week.

IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.

"We've got to pick a film that's going to sell in our area. If it's not going to sell, we're not going to take it," said Lisa Buzzelli, director of an IMAX theater in Charleston that is not showing the movie. "Many people here believe in creationism, not evolution."

The film, "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.

Humans lie to themselves, and often choose beliefs for reasons other than how closely those beliefs approximate truth. This is mainly why we disagree. Three future trends may reduce this epistemic vice. First, increased documentation and surveillance should make it harder to lie and self-deceive about the patterns of our lives. Second, speculative markets can create a relatively unbiased consensus on most debated topics in science, business, and policy. Third, brain modifications may allow minds to be more transparent, so that lies and self-deception become harder to hide. In evaluating these trends, we should be wary of moral arrogance.

Confabulation — the production of fictitious stories — has puzzled clinicians for over a century. Recent studies have singled out spontaneous confabulations as a distinct disorder that is characterized by an inability to adapt thought and behaviour to ongoing reality, so that patients act according to presently inappropriate memories. Lesions that lead people to confabulate always involve anterior limbic structures. Studies on healthy subjects and on patients with lesions of this type indicate that the orbitofrontal cortex, through subcortical connections, suppresses presently irrelevant memories even before their content is consciously recognized. The studies indicate that the monitoring of ongoing reality in thought might be a capacity of the brain's reward system.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
- Wittgenstein

There is nothing worse than self-deception – when the deceiver is always at home and always with you – it is quite terrible.
- Socrates