Humans have an interesting tendency to find any manifestation of a generic object other than the one they are most familiar with fake. There’s the concept of uncanny valley, a sudden drop in our perception of a human face as real if the face just slightly deviates from normalcy, and — my favorite — the shapes of the continents.

Each one of us sees the world map tens of thousands of times in our life. The continents are always the same shape (maybe slightly modified through different projections, but, there again, there are a very small number of these anyway). We get so used to the shape of the continents that anything that looks remotely different is just weird. We feel that the current shape is somehow right (so it’s funny to catch our reaction when we see the evolution of the outline of the continent,all the way from pangea).

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 10:03 and is filed under human nature, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.