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Cause of superstitions such as God

If one could evade danger unconsciously, it is quite possible that one feels God’s benevolence. We are blessed by God thanks to our ancestors of 4 billion years. See, for example, 

Lin et al., Capture of Attention to Threatening Stimuli without Perceptual Awareness

Curr Biol  19 1118 (2009)

*We used a visual search task to show that a looming stimulus on a collision path with an observer captures attention but a looming stimulus on a near-miss path does not. Critically, observers were unaware of any difference between collision and near-miss stimuli.

*In the absence of perceptual awareness, the visual system can extract behaviorally relevant details from a visual scene and automatically categorize threatening versus nonthreatening images at a level of precision beyond our conscious perceptual capabilities.

or

Striemer et al., “Real-time” obstacle avoidance in the absence of primary visual cortex

Proc Natl Acad Sci  106 15996 (2009).

(BG) Obstacle avoidance relies on mechanisms in the dorsal visual stream in the posterior parietal cortex.

(Q) Where are the visual inputs to these dorsal-stream mechanisms coming from?

*These mechanisms can operate in `real-time' without direct input from primary visual cortex (V1). 

*These seemingly `primitive’ subcortical visual pathways can control complex everyday behavior without recourse to conscious vision.