Remembrance of things past

Almost all of us implicitly trust our own memories.

Experiment after experiment, however, has shown that this trust is misplaced.  Even if you leave out people with obvious memory deficits -- victims of dementia, for example -- the rest of us give far too much credence to our brain's version of the past.  In truth, what we remember is a conglomerate of what actually did happen, what we were told happened, what we imagine happened based upon the emotions associated with the event, and pure (if inadvertent) fabrication.  And the scariest part is that absent hard evidence (a video, for example), there's no way to tell which parts are what.

It all feels true.

If you don't believe this, consider what happened to cognitive researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California - Irvine, whose experiments establishing the unreliability of memory are described in neuroscientist David Eagleman's wonderful book The Brain: The Story of You:

We're all susceptible to this memory manipulation -- even Loftus herself.  As it turned out, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool.  Years later, a conversation with a relative brought out an extraordinary fact: that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool.  That news came as a shock to her; she hadn't known that, and in fact didn't believe it.  But, she describes, "I went home from that birthday and I started to think: maybe I did.  I started to think about other things that I did remember -- like when the firemen came, they gave me oxygen.  Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset I found the body?"  Soon, she could visualize her mother in the swimming pool.

But then, her relative called to say he had made a mistake.  It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body.  It had been Elizabeth's aunt.  And that's how Loftus had the experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt.

So it's not like false memories seem vague or tentative.  They're so vivid you can't tell them from real ones.

Which brings us to the strange story of an arcade video game called "Polybius."

In the early 1980s, a rumor began to circulate that there was an arcade game that combined some very frightening effects.  Its visuals and sounds were dark, surreal, and suggestive.  Children who played the game sometimes had seizures or hallucinations, and afterwards experienced periods of amnesia and night terrors.  Worse, there was something about it that was strangely addictive.  People who played it more than two or three times were likely to become obsessed by it, and keep coming back over and over.  Some, they said, finally could think of nothing else and went incurably mad.  Some committed suicide.

Some simply... vanished.

The FBI launched an investigation, removing Polybius from arcades wherever they could find it.  The "Men in Black" got involved, and there were reports of mysterious strangers showing up and demanding that arcade owners provide lists of the names (or at least initials) of high scorers in the game.  Those unfortunates were rounded up for psychological testing -- and some of them never returned, either.

There are webpages and subreddits devoted to people's memories of Polybius, their experiences of playing it, and scary things that happened subsequently.  There's just one problem with all this, and you've guessed it:

Polybius never existed.  Despite many, many people searching, there has never been a single Polybius cabinet found, nor even a photograph from the time period showing one.  Oh, sure, we have mock-ups people made long after the fact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DocAtRS, Polybius Arcade 1 cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But hard evidence of the real deal?  Zero.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

So what happened here?

Part of it, of course, was a deliberate hoax; an "urban legend."  Part of it was confabulation of memory with a real event, when an arcade in Portland, Oregon removed a game that had triggered a couple of kids to have a seizure.  There was also an incident in 1981 where the FBI raided arcades that had converted game stations into illegal gambling machines.  There was a 1980 New York Times article citing research (later largely called into question) that playing violent video games predisposes kids to commit violence themselves.  And in 1982, there was a widely-reported incident that a teenager had died while playing the game Berzerk in a Calumet City, Illinois arcade -- the story was true, but his heart failure was caused by a physical defect, and had nothing to do with playing the game.

Put all that together, and there are still people now -- forty-some-odd years later -- who are certain they remember Polybius, and what it was like to play it.

It's another example of the "Mandela Effect," isn't it?  This phenomenon got its name from certain people's memories that Nelson Mandela died in jail -- when in fact, the reality is that he survived, eventually became president of South Africa, and died peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  Other examples are that the "Berenstain Bears" -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e," not an "a"), that the Fruit of the Loom logo originally had a cornucopia (not just a bunch of fruit), and (I shit you not) that Sri Lanka and New Zealand "should be" in different places.

Almost no one who experiences the Mandela Effect, though, laughs it off and says, "Wow, memory sure is unreliable, isn't it?"  Those memories feel completely real, just as real as memories of stuff you know occurred, that you have incontrovertible hard evidence for.  The idea that you could be so certain of something that never happened is profoundly disconcerting, to the extent that people have looked for some explanation, any explanation, for how their memories ended up with information that is demonstrably false.  Some have even cited the "Many-Worlds" Model of quantum mechanics, and posited that there really is a timeline where Mandela died in prison, the cartoon bears were the "Berenstein Bears," Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, and Sri Lanka and New Zealand were somewhere other than where they now are.  It's just that we've side-slipped into a parallel universe, bringing along our memories of the one where we started -- where all those things were dramatically different.

That's how certain people are that their memories are flawless.  They'd rather believe that the entire universe bifurcated than that they're simply remembering wrong. 

How many times have you been in an argument with a friend, relative, or significant other, and one of you has said, "I know what happened!  I was there!", often with a self-righteous tone that how dare anyone question that they might be recalling things incorrectly?  Well, the truth is that none of us are remembering things correctly; what remains in our mind is a partial record, colored by emotions and second-hand contamination and imagination, blended so well there's no way to tease apart the accurate parts from the inaccurate.  What our memories for sure are not is a factual, blow-by-blow account, a mental video of the past that misses nothing and mistakes nothing.

I know this is kind of a terrifying thing.  Our memories are a huge part of our sense of self; if you want a brilliant (fictional) example of the chaos that happens when our memories become unmoored from reality, watch the fantastic movie Memento, in which the main character (played to perfection by Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a cognitive disorder where he can't form any new short-term memories.  To compensate for this, he takes Polaroid photographs of stuff he thinks is important, and if it's really important he tattoos it onto his skin.  But then the problem is, how does he know the contents of the photos and tattoos are true?  He has no touchstone for what truth about the past actually is.

Although Pearce's character has an extreme form of this problem, in reality, all of us have the same issue.  Those neural firings in the memory centers of our brain are all we have left of the past -- that, and certain fragmentary records, objects, and writings.  

So, how accurate is our view of the past?

No way to tell.  Better than zero, but certainly far less than one hundred percent.

And there's not even any need for a cursed arcade game to screw around with your perception.  We're built like this -- like it or not.

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Expanding the umwelt

The concept of the umwelt is a little mind-boggling.

It's defined as "the world as perceived by a particular organism."  In superficial terms we know that a dog must perceive life differently than we do.  For example, we know their senses of smell are a lot more keen than ours are, but the magnitude is staggering.  They have about fifty times the number of olfactory receptors than we do (three hundred million as compared to six million), so their world must be as vivid a tapestry of smells as ours is a tapestry of sights and sounds.

While it might be possible to imagine what it's like to have an enhanced sense, what about having a sense we lack entirely?  A number of animals, including sharks, platypuses, and knifefish, have an ability to sense electric fields, so the voltage change in the water around them registers as a sensory input, just as light or sound or taste does for us.  They use this sense to locate prey, because the neuromuscular systems of the animals they're hunting create a weak electrical discharge, which all of these animals can "see."

In the amazing 2015 TED Talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?",  neuroscientist David Eagleman explores what it would be like to expand our umwelt.  He has designed a vest, to be worn against the skin, that has a series of motors that create tiny vibrations.  The vest's input can be whatever you want; in one demonstration, sounds picked up by a microphone are the input used to create a pattern of vibrations on the chest and back.  With only a couple of days of training, a profoundly deaf individual was able to translate the patterns into a perception of the sounds, and correctly identify spoken words.

His brain had basically taken a different peripheral input device and plugged it into the auditory cortex!

Experiments with other "peripherals" have included using a pattern of weak electrical tingles transmitted onto the tongue via a horseshoe-shaped flat piece of metal to allow blind people to navigate around objects while walking, and even get good enough with it that they can throw an object into a basket.  One of Eagleman's experiments with the vest trained people using an input from an unidentified source -- all they did was press one of a pair of buttons and found out if their choice was right:

A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds.  Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice.  He doesn't know what's going on.  He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second.  Now, here's the thing: the subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press.  He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions.  And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not.  And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umwelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet.

The wildest thing is that the peripheral you add doesn't have to be input; it can be output.  Two different papers, both in the journal Science, have shown that you can add an output device, and like with the inputs -- all it takes is a little training.

In the first, "A Brain-Computer Interface that Evokes Tactile Sensations Improves Robotic Arm Control," test subjects have a computer interface device implanted into their brain, which then translates thoughts into movements of a robotic arm, analogous to what an intact neuromuscular system is doing to our actual arms.  This has been doable for a while, but the advance in this study is that the robotic arm has sensors that provide feedback, again just like our own systems do when working properly.  Think about picking up a coffee cup; you adjust the pressure and position of your grip because you're constantly getting feedback, like the temperature of the cup, the weight and balance, whether your fingers are hanging on well or slipping, and so forth.

Here, the feedback provided by the sensors on the robotic arm cut in half the time taken for doing an action without mishap!  The brain once again picked up very quickly how to use the additional information to make the output go more smoothly.

In the second, people were trained with a "third thumb" -- an artificial extra digit strapped to the hand on the pinky-finger side.  It's controlled by pressure sensors under the toes, so you're using your feet to move something attached to your hand while simultaneously using your brain to control your other hand movements, which seems impossibly complicated.  But within a day, test subjects could perform tasks like building a tower from wooden blocks using the augmented hand... even when distracted or blindfolded!

Study author Paulina Kieliba, of University College - London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said, "Body augmentation could one day be valuable to society in numerous ways, such as enabling a surgeon to get by without an assistant, or a factory worker to work more efficiently.  This line of work could revolutionize the concept of prosthetics, and it could help someone who permanently or temporarily can only use one hand, to do everything with that hand.  But to get there, we need to continue researching the complicated, interdisciplinary questions of how these devices interact with our brains."

Co-author Tamar Makin summed it up: "Evolution hasn’t prepared us to use an extra body part, and we have found that to extend our abilities in new and unexpected ways, the brain adapts the representation of the biological body."

I think what amazes me most about all this is the flexibility of the brain.  The fact that it can adjust to such radical changes in inputs and outputs is phenomenal.  Me, I'm waiting for something like Tony Stark's suit in Iron Man.  That'd not only allow me to fight crime, but it'd make yard chores a hell of a lot easier.

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Hearing through your skin

I first ran into David Eagleman when a student of mine loaned me his phenomenal book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

Even considering that I have a decent background in neuroscience, this book was an eye-opener.  Eagleman, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, not only is phenomenally knowledgeable in his field, he is a fine writer (and needless to say, those two don't always go together).  His insights about how our own brains work were fascinating, revealing, and often astonishing, and for anyone with an interest in cognitive science, it's a must-read.  (The link above will bring you to the book's Amazon page, should you wish to buy it, which all of you should.)

I've since watched a number of Eagleman's videos, and always come away with the feeling, "This guy is going to turn our understanding of the mind upside down."  And just yesterday, I found out about a Kickstarter project that he's undertaking that certainly makes some strides in that direction.

It's widely known that the brain can use a variety of inputs to get sensory data, substituting another when one of them isn't working.  Back in 2009, some scientists at Wicab, Inc. developed a device called the BrainPort that gave blind people the ability to get visual information about their surroundings, through a horseshoe-shaped output device that sits on the tongue.  A camera acts as a sensor, and transmits visual data into the electrode array on the output device, which then stimulates the surface of the tongue.  After a short training period, test subjects could maneuver around obstacles in a room.

And the coolest part is that the scientists found that the device was somehow stimulating the visual cortex of the brain -- the brain figured out that it was receiving visual data, even though the information was coming through the tongue.  And the test subjects were sensing visual images of their surroundings, even though nothing whatsoever was coming through their eyes.

So Eagleman had an idea.  Could you use a tactile sense to replace any other sense?  He started with trying to substitute tactile stimulation for hearing -- because, after all, they both work more or less the same way.  Touch and hearing both function because of mechanoreceptors, which are nerves that fire due to vibration or deflection.  (Taste, which is a chemoreceptor, and sight, an electromagnetic receptor, are much further apart in how they function.)

Thus we have the VEST -- the vibrational extra-sensory transducer.

It's a vest that's equipped with a SmartPhone, and hundreds of tiny motors -- the transducer activates the motors, turning any sounds picked up by the phone into a pattern of vibrations on your upper body.  And just as with the BrainPort, a short training period is all that's needed before your can, effectively, hear with your skin.

Trials already allowed deaf individuals to understand words at a far higher rate than chance guessing; and you can only imagine that the skill, like any, would improve with time.  Eagleman writes:

We hypothesize that our device will work for deaf individuals, and even be good enough to provide a new perception of hearing. This itself has a number of societal benefits: such a device would cost orders of magnitude less than cochlear implants (hundreds-to-thousands as a opposed to tens-of-thousands), be discrete, and give the wearer the freedom to not be attached to it all the time. The cost effectiveness of the device would also make it realistic to distribute it widely in developing countries. 

More exciting than this, however, is what this proof of principle might enable: the ability to feed all sorts of new and profound sensory information into our brains.

I find this sort of thing absolutely fascinating.  The brain, far from being the static and rigid device we used to believe it was, has amazing plasticity.  Given new sources of information, it responds by integrating those into the data set it uses to allow us to explore the world.  And even though the VEST is currently being considered primarily for restoration of a sense to individuals who have lost one, I (like Eagleman) can't help but wonder about its use in sensory enhancement.

What sorts of things are we missing, through our imperfect sensory apparatus, that such a device might allow us to see?

Consider giving Eagleman's Kickstarter your attention -- he's the sort of innovative genius who could well change the world.  Just what he's done thus far is phenomenal, moving us into possibilities that heretofore were confined to science fiction.

And man, do I want to try one of those vests.  I hear just fine, but still.  How cool would that be?