Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Shermer

Shermer punctures a stubborn modern myth: that perception is passive recording, and truth is what the footage shows. The image is deliberately contemporary and slightly damning. Video cameras are supposed to be neutral; blank tapes don’t argue back. By choosing that metaphor, he’s not flattering the reader’s common sense, he’s diagnosing it as a comforting technology-shaped delusion.

The intent is to clear space for a more unsettling model of mind: the brain as an active prediction engine, not a storage device. Shermer’s larger project as a skeptic has always been to explain why smart people believe weird things, and this line is a scalpel aimed at “I saw it with my own eyes” confidence. The subtext: eyewitness certainty is not a gold standard, it’s often the first symptom of a story the brain has already decided to tell. Memory isn’t an archive; it’s a rehearsal, revised each time it’s played.

Context matters. Coming from a writer steeped in debunking, the metaphor also takes a shot at the courtroom, the news cycle, and the social-media clip economy, where “raw” video is treated like ultimate proof. Even with actual cameras, framing, compression, and selection shape meaning; with human eyes, those distortions are built in. Shermer’s line works because it weaponizes an everyday analogy to expose a deeper bias: we want objectivity to be effortless, a simple transfer from world to mind. He’s arguing it’s work - and it starts by distrusting the “blank tape” fantasy.