The Suspension of Disbelief

Suspension of disbelief is supposed to be a tool for fiction. It’s what allows us to enjoy a novel, a film, a play. 

We willingly lower our guard against implausibility so the story can carry us. 

We know dragons don’t exist. 

We know people don’t time travel. 

But for a few hours, we allow ourselves to believe they might.

What’s strange, and genuinely puzzling, is that this mechanism doesn’t stay in fiction. It appears, uninvited, in real life.

You see it in prank videos. 

A person walks into a room. 

A doll moves slightly, tugged by a wire, triggered by a hidden mechanism, and the person freezes. Then they panic. 

Sometimes they scream, sometimes they run. 

For a moment, they believe the doll is actually moving of its own volition.

And that’s the astonishing part. 

The astonishing part is the mind’s capacity to believe something it knows to be impossible. 

The rules of the world, suspended instantly. 

These are normal people. 

Educated, functioning, reasonable. 

Yet the brain still makes room for the unreal. 

It steps aside for a story that makes no sense. 

It lets something through, just for a moment , because something deeper than logic has been triggered.

Why? 

That’s the mystery.Why does the brain allow this?Why do we even have this switch?

What’s unsettling is that our minds are designed to allow it, that this reflex exists at all, sitting quietly inside every one of us, waiting to be activated.

It raises a quiet, serious question:If the mind can believe a moving doll can move of its own volition, even for a second, what else can it believe, under just the right conditions?

Miracles? 

This is a perfect application of suspension of disbelief.

And it amazes me that in this day and age. People seem to believe, fervently, that saints heal, statues secrete oil, icons protect, souls reincarnate or apparitions occur.

Weird.