The biology of deception: the evolution of cognitive coping as a denial-like process.

We speculate that the development of cognitive processes provided such endowed animals with an additional coping strategy in dealing with stress. This ability depends on a unifying consciousness appearing to control or regulate the many individual processes that potentially summate to make up the mind. Without this unifying component, the significance and uniqueness of this coping strategy would be lost. The cognitive mind would also have to develop, of course by chance, a strong bias to believe in a highly organized world, since this is what would have survival value within one lifetime. This sense of unity as a coping strategy is really a deception or illusion, in that it imposes perceived order. Thus, the biology of deception has been an important development leading to man as a cognitive creative being. Our premise here extends this notion and suggests that denial-like processes are at the core of the cognitive coping mechanisms we have evolved as humans.