Commonsense is not so common!

Many of us make the mistake of accepting things while being fully aware of what common sense dictates. It is as if our intellect and faith are two disjoint domains!

When you toss a coin and get a head, no sensible person would jump to the conclusion that whenever you toss a coin you will get a head. Even if you toss the coin tens of times there is no guarantee that you would get exactly equal number of heads and tails. We all know that.

The result of a toss gets associated with some certainty only when the toss is performed thousands of times. When we do that, we can be sure that half the time the toss would result in heads and the other half in tails. The otherwise random result becomes a certainty only when the experiment is performed a large number of times.

Have you ever wondered why random is random? When you toss a coin, the result depends on your finger movements, the force exerted by the fingers, the wind velocity at that time and so on. More the variables that interact, more unpredictable is the result.

Now look at our brain. There are billions of neurons that interact with each other at any given time. And this interaction varies not only with time but based on the content of our brains at different times. And this content differs from brain to brain.

Any attempt to arbitrarily perturb this process would end up in just random result unless we study the method of perturbation over a long period of time and with various brains. Only then we can be sure of the result. That is just commonsense.

But we often come across many who claim that “so and so is completely cured of such and such a disease” or ”became very calm as compared to his/her previous aggressive personality” after he/she went to that Guru and followed his ‘magic’ techniques. These are called anecdotal reports which should never be generalized. 

Unless the technique has been tried on a large number of cases, one cannot be sure that it works in a predictable way.  What works for someone may not work for you or it can even be harmful. And that is common sense!