In Stephen Jay Gould's essay, "Some Close Encounters of the Mental Kind," Gould discussed how certainty can be both beneficial and dangerous. According to Gould, certainty can be a blessing because it can provide warmth, comfort, and security. However it can also pose a danger because it can trick our mind with false information about what we see and remember in our mind. Gould also talked about the three levels of possible error in direct visual observation: misperception, retention, and recovery. According to Gould, our human mind is nature's greatest miracle and the villain of all tricksters and tricksters mixed together. To support his arguments and claims, he used the example of an experiment that Elizabeth Loftus, a professor at the University of California Irvine, did to her students and a personal experience from his childhood trip to Devils Tower. I agree with Gould that vision and memory do not provide certainty because what we remember is not always true, our mind can be deceptive and trick us into believing that what we see/hear is real due to the three potential errors of visual observation. Certainty is unreliable and complicated. Sometimes, what we see and remember is not always accurate or real. For example, Gould talked about a trip he took to Devil's Tower when he was fifteen, he remembers that he can see Devil's Tower from afar and as it gets closer, it gets higher and bigger. However, about thirty years later, Gould returned to see the Devil's Tower with his family, he wanted to show them the wonderful view of the Devil's Tower when it stands as they approach it, but when they got there everything was different from what they he remembered. Then he discovered that the Devil's tower he had seen as a child was not really... a piece of paper... as people say, even if in reality it is not true because we tend to believe what others say. The memories in our minds can be complicated and get mixed up with what people say; can lead us to believe it is true. This makes them unable to separate what is false, fantasy, from reality. Overall, memories do not provide certainty because what we see or remember may not be reality. Additionally, the way we remember something can change over time, and that memory will eventually fade. While certainty is a blessing because it provides us with warmth, comfort, and security, it is even more of a danger because it provides false information and tricks our mind into believing something that is not real or true. Therefore, I am fully convinced of Gould's essay because I completely doubt what people observe or remember since memories do not provide certainty.