So what about our football fans and the game-winning pass? Although both friends were watching the same game, they were doing so through markedly different lenses. One saw the past is in bounds. The other saw it as out in sports, such arguments are not particularly damaging— in fact, they can be fun. The problem is that the same biased processes can influence how we experience other aspects of our world. These biased processes are in fact, a major source of escalation in almost every conflict, whether Israeli Palestinian, American-Iraqi, Serbian-Croatian, or Indian-Pakistani.

The more we understand the connection between brain and body, the more things that once seemed clear-cut, become ambiguous. Nowhere, is this as apparent, as with the placebo.

If you look at a dollar bill, in fact, it seems to have been designed to conjure up a contract: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, it says in prominent type, with a shadow beneath that makes it seem three-dimensional. And there is George Washington himself (and we all know that he could never tell a lie). And then, on the back, it gets even more serious: IN GOD WE TRUST, it says. And then we've got that weird pyramid, and on top, that unblinking eye! And it's looking right at us!