Millions of people have been obsessing about the mystery of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 37. According to experts, this addiction to the unknown is hard-wired in our brain.
Neuroscientist V.S Ramachandran explains in his book titled The Tell-Tale Brain that our minds are naturally programmed to look into patterns and solve everyday situations like puzzles. "When you look at a simple visual scene, your brain is constantly resolving ambiguities, testing hypotheses, searching for patterns, comparing current information with memories and expectations, "quoted from the book.
Furthermore, according to Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl, the disappearance of Flight 370 excites our most primal cognitive functions. In their book, The Scientist in the Crib, they explained that, as babies, we are obsessed in finding the hidden, knowing the unknown. We are addicted to the rewarding sense of finding what we cannot see, and this plays a huge role in our limbic reward system.
They also explained that the mystery is challenging our drive in finding explanations. As creatures, we feel a sense of discomfort whenever there's something in our surroundings that we cannot describe. In the case of the missing plane, we feel uncomfortable when we cannot explain why there are passengers with stolen passports and why the pilot used a flight simulator at home.
"[W]e look beyond the surface of the world and try to infer its deeper patterns. We look for the underlying, hidden causes of events. We try to figure out the nature of things, "a quote from the book says.
Another reason we cannot get enough of this issue if our future-prediction abilities. David Eaglemean explains in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, that our brains function by recalling models of our previous experiences and applying them to new ones, establishing a logical cause and effect relationship. When something happens, we expect another thing to happen, and if this expectation is not satisfied, we tend to look for an explanation.
Lastly, our brain is hard-wired to piece stories together. "Fabrication of stories is one of the key businesses in which our brains engage," Eagleman writes. Stories are our way of making sense and experiments showed that we would take a nonsensical explanation instead of having no explanation. This explains all the supernatural theories about why the plane went missing.
This compilation of book quotations and explanations were gathered by Slate.com.
