Since the brain doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, when it constructs causal narratives it fills holes in reality with provisional explanations. The problem is that when a group of brains all uses the same placeholder, good-enough-for-now construal to plug such a hole, over time that shared provisional explanation can turn into consensus—a common sense of what is and is not true. This tendency has led to a lot of strange shared beliefs over the centuries, consensus realities that today seem preposterous.

— How Minds Change by David McRaney