Misremembering the truth

There are two distinct, but similar-sounding, cognitive biases that I've written about many times here at Skeptophilia because they are such tenacious barriers to rational thinking.

The first, confirmation bias, is our tendency to uncritically accept claims when they fit with our preconceived notions.  It's why a lot of conservative viewers of Fox News and liberal viewers of MSNBC sit there watching and nodding enthusiastically without ever stopping and saying, "... wait a moment."

The other, dart-thrower's bias, is more built-in.  It's our tendency to notice outliers (because of their obvious evolutionary significance as danger signals) and ignore, or at least underestimate, the ordinary as background noise.  The name comes from the thought experiment of being in a bar while there's a darts game going on across the room.  You'll tend to notice the game only when there's an unusual throw -- a bullseye, or perhaps impaling the bartender in the forehead -- and not even be aware of it otherwise.

Well, we thought dart-thrower's bias was more built into our cognitive processing system and confirmation bias more "on the surface" -- and the latter therefore more culpable, conscious, and/or controllable.  Now, it appears that confirmation bias might be just as hard-wired into our brains as dart-thrower's bias is.

I recently read a paper that shed some light on this rather troubling finding in Human Communication Research, describing a study conducted by a team led by Jason Coronel of Ohio State University.  In "Investigating the Generation and Spread of Numerical Misinformation: A Combined Eye Movement Monitoring and Social Transmission Approach," Coronel, along with Shannon Poulsen and Matthew D. Sweitzer, did a fascinating series of experiments that showed we not only tend to accept information that agrees with our previous beliefs without question, we honestly misremember information that disagrees -- and we misremember it in such a way that in our memories, it further confirms our beliefs!

The location of memories (from Memory and Intellectual Improvement Applied to Self-Education and Juvenile Instruction, by Orson Squire Fowler, 1850) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What Coronel and his team did was to present 110 volunteers with passages containing true numerical information on social issues (such as support for same-sex marriage and rates of illegal immigration).  In some cases, the passages agreed with what (according to polls) most people believe to be true, such as that the majority of Americans support same-sex marriage.  In other cases, the passages contained information that (while true) is widely thought to be untrue -- such as the fact that illegal immigration across the Mexican border has been dropping for years and in the last five years has been at its lowest rates since the mid-1990s.

Across the board, people tended to recall the information that aligned with the conventional wisdom correctly, and the information that didn't incorrectly.  Further -- and what makes this experiment even more fascinating -- is that when people read the unexpected information, data that contradicted the general opinion, eye-tracking monitors recorded that they hesitated while reading, as if they recognized that something was strange.  In the immigration passage, for example, they read that the rate of immigration had decreased from 12.8 million in 2007 to 11.7 million in 2014, and the readers' eyes bounced back and forth between the two numbers as if their brains were saying, "Wait, am I reading that right?"

So they spent longer on the passage that conflicted with what most people think -- and still tended to remember it incorrectly.  In fact, the majority of people who did remember wrong got the numbers right -- 12.8 million and 11.7 million -- showing that they'd paid attention and didn't just scoff and gloss over it when they hit something they thought was incorrect.  But when questioned afterward, they remembered the numbers backwards, as if the passage had actually supported what they'd believed prior to the experiment!

If that's not bad enough, Coronel's team then ran a second experiment, where the test subjects read the passage, then had to repeat the gist to another person, who then passed it to another, and so on.  (Remember the elementary school game of "Telephone?")  Not only did the data get flipped -- usually in the first transfer -- subsequently, the difference between the two numbers got greater and greater (thus bolstering the false, but popular, opinion even more strongly).  In the case of the immigration statistics, the gap between 2007 and 2014 not only changed direction, but by the end of the game it had widened from 1.1 million to 4.7 million.

This gives you an idea what we're up against in trying to counter disinformation campaigns.  And it also illustrates that I was wrong in one of my preconceived notions; that people falling for confirmation bias are somehow guilty of locking themselves deliberately into an echo chamber.  Apparently, both dart-thrower's bias and confirmation bias are somehow built into the way we process information.  We become so certain we're right that our brain subconsciously rejects any evidence to the contrary.

Why our brains are built this way is a matter of conjecture.  I wonder if perhaps it might be our tribal heritage at work; that conforming to the norm, and therefore remaining a member of the tribe, has a greater survival value than being the maverick who sticks to his/her guns about a true but unpopular belief.  That's pure speculation, of course.  But what it illustrates is that once again, our very brains are working against us in fighting Fake News -- which these days is positively frightening, given how many powerful individuals and groups are, in a cold and calculated fashion, disseminating false information in an attempt to mislead us, frighten us, or anger us, and so maintain their positions of power.

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Watching the clock

I've posted before about the phenomenon of dart-thrower's bias; the tendency of humans to notice outliers, and therefore give them more weight in our attention (and memory) than the ordinary background noise with which we are constantly bombarded.  And once we notice a particular outlier, we're more likely to notice it next time -- further reinforcing the effect.

I remember having an experience of this a while back.  On two consecutive work days, I noticed, when I glanced at the clock after finishing breakfast, that it was 6:43.  On the face of it, this wasn't that odd, since my alarm was always set for the same time, and I did more-or-less the same sequence of actions to get ready for work, in more-or-less the same order, every day.  But I did notice it.  And subsequently, every time I glanced at the clock after breakfast and it was 6:43, it registered.  I was less likely to pay any kind of serious attention if it was 6:46 or 6:39, because I'd already primed my brain to be more aware of one particular time.

But if you think this exemplifies dart-thrower's bias, you ain't heard nothin' yet.  There's a guy named Jordan Pearce who posted over at SpiritScience and has had a similar experience, but doesn't chalk it up to a perceptual bias in the human brain...

... he thinks it's evidence we're going to have a "planetary shift of consciousness."

For him, the time was 11:11.  Despite my feeling that 11:11 is simply the most convenient way to get from 11:10 to 11:12, Pearce thinks that this time is deeply meaningful.  Here's what he has to say:

I’ll bet that if I asked publicly how many people saw 11:11 regularly, we’d probably see a huge sea of hands popping up all over the place. Its [sic] pretty common nowadays, there’s something to it, and its about time we decoded it.

In case you answered that you’ve never noticed 11:11, I would remind you that you’re reading a blog about it right now.  Welcome to the beginning of your 11:11 synchronistic voyage.

There was a time only a few years ago when I hadn’t heard a thing about 11:11.  It was brand new to me, until it wasn’t anymore.  Interestingly enough, my 11:11 synchronicities started right around the time when I began learning about a planetary shift of consciousness… The Shift.

Okie-dokie.  But isn't something being "new until it isn't anymore" kind of the usual way things work?  Anyhow, the upshot is, if you notice 11:11, you're heading toward enlightenment, or something.  So yay for you.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, Big Ben Clock Face, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then he throws in a lengthy quote from Uri Geller, who I really wish would go away.  You'd think Geller's popularity would have waned after his conspicuous inability to telekinetically bend spoons on The Tonight Show decades ago, but no, he's still around, and still making grandiose statements about psychic stuff and global consciousness and spiritual ascension.

So Geller doesn't really add anything to Pearce's credibility.  But Pearce goes on, undaunted, and tells us that it all... means something:

11:11 is a wake-up call of sorts, an initiation into the “aha” of realization that something big was going on.  Something that connected everyone.  In truth, the numbers are only a representation of what’s really going on.  A symbol for the connection taking place all over the world.  The numbers aren’t significant, but their meaning.

Well, it would certainly be a wake-up call for me, because if I rolled over in bed and saw the time was 11:11, it would mean that I'd overslept by six hours.  But that's not what he's driving at, of course.  And what sort of meaning does he ascribe to all of this?

When you observe 11:11, you notice some interesting things.  The first thing that I see is that it is a balanced equation.

Actually, it's not an equation at all, given that an equation needs an equals sign somewhere.  But do carry on.

Not only is it two elevens, but two elevens with a : in between.  Two sides of a balanced equation, that equal out at zero.  They have a stable equilibrium were they a mathematical equation.

Yes!  Two elevens with a pair of dots!  And that equals zero!  Except when it equals four:

They also come down to 4.  I feel it like a 4 elements equation, a perfect balancing of a yin and yang energy.  If you know anything about Tarot, you might think of the 4 leaders.  Prince, Princess, Queen, and King/Knight.

I thought that the Tarot cards had a King, Queen, Knight, and Page, but what do I know?  I mean, he's basically making shit up as he goes on, so may as well make this up too, right?  But it gets even better:

Now, the magic about 11:11 is not just that it’s happening to you, but it’s happening everywhere.  11:11 is a global event, it is something that people all over the world, including you right now (because you’re reading this) is experiencing.

Well, I agree that 11:11 is a global event.  In fact, it happens twice a day, no matter what time zone you're in.  That's got to be significant somehow, don't you think?

And he ends with a bang:

You are not alone.  We are all growing and learning different things, and in truth we’re really all learning the same thing.  How to love.  What is love, what does love look like, and what it means to embody Christ.

So 11:11 = 0 = 4 = synchronicity, and therefore Christ?

I mean, this is taking dart-thrower's bias and raising it to the level of performance art.  Sometimes patterns are meaningful, and sometimes they just... aren't.  Imposing some kind of cosmic significance on something that is a random occurrence doesn't make it real.

So anyhow, there you are.  I just glanced at the clock, and it's 5:36, which as times go, is all higgledy-piggledy and unbalanced, and probably points to the fact that I am feeling particularly unenlightened at the moment because I haven't had any coffee yet.  Maybe I'll feel better at 5:55, although by then I'll probably be in the shower.

Maybe I'll see what happens at 6:43.  That's bound to be interesting, right?

Of course right.

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Patterns and meaning

I remember a couple of years ago noticing something odd.  While eating breakfast on work days, I'd finish, and always give a quick glance up at the digital clock that sits on the counter.  Three times in a row, the clock said 6:19.

I know there's a perfectly rational explanation; I'm a total creature of habit, and I did the same series of actions in the same order every single work morning, so the fact that I finished breakfast three days in a row at exactly the same time only points up the fact that I need to relax a little.  But once I noticed the (seeming) pattern, I kept checking each morning.  And there were other days when I finished at exactly 6:19.  After a few weeks of this, it was becoming a bit of an obsession.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, LED digital wall clock (Seiko), CC BY-SA 3.0]

So being a rationalist, as well as needing a hobby, I started to keep track.  And very quickly a few things became obvious:

• I almost always finished breakfast (and checked the clock) between 6:16 and 6:22.
• 6:19 is the exact middle of that range, so it would be understandable if that time occurred more often.
• Even considering #2, 6:19 turned out to be no more likely than other times.  The distribution was, within that six minute range, fairly random.

So I had fallen for dart-thrower's bias, the perfectly natural human tendency to notice the unusual, and to give it more weight in our attention and memory.  The point is, once you start noticing this stuff, you're more likely to notice it again, and to overestimate the number of times such coincidences occur.

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia called, "Angel Numbers Guide: Why You Keep Seeing Angel Number Sequences."  I'm not going to recommend your going to the site, because it's pretty obviously clickbait, but I thought the content was interesting from the standpoint of our determination that the patterns we notice mean something.

The site is an attempt to convince us that when we see certain numbers over and over, it's an angel attempting to give us a message.  If you notice the number 1212, for example, this is an angel encouraging us to "release our fears and apprehensions, and get on with pursuing our passions and purpose... [asking you to] stay on a positive path and to use your natural skills, talents, and abilities to their utmost for the benefit of yourself and others."

Which is good advice without all of the woo-woo trappings.

Some numbers apparently appeal not only to our desire for meaningful patterns, but for being special.  If you see 999 everywhere, "you are amongst an elite few... 999 is sometimes confrontative, and literally means, 'Get to work on your priorities.  Now.  No more procrastinating, no more excuses or worries.  Get to work now."

Since a lot of the "angel numbers" involve repeated digits, I had to check to see what 666 means.  I was hoping it would say something like, "If you see 666, you are about to be dragged screaming into the maw of hell."

But no. 666 apparently is "a sign from the angels that it's time to wake up to your higher spiritual truth."  Which is not only boring, but sounds like it could come from a talk by Deepak Chopra.

So the whole thing turns out to be interesting mostly from the standpoint of our desperation to impose some sense on the chaos of life.  Because face it; a lot of what does happen is simply random noise, a conclusion that is a bit of a downer.  I suspect that many religions give solace precisely because they ascribe meaning to everything; the Bible, after all, says that even a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without the hand of God being involved.

Me, I think it's more likely that a lot of stuff (including birds dying) happens for no particularly identifiable or relevant reason.  Science can explain at least some of the proximal causes, but as far as ultimate causes?  I think we're thrown back on the not very satisfying non-explanation of the universe simply being a chaotic place.  I understand the appeal of it all having meaning and purpose, but it seems to me that most of what occurs is no more interesting than my finishing breakfast at 6:19.

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I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

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

It is your mind that bends

Yesterday I was in my car on the way to an appointment in Ithaca, and I was listening to some classical music on satellite radio.  The announcer came on with some of the usual sort of background information before a piece is played.  In this case, she said, "Next, we're going to hear from one of the masters of the classical guitar."  And immediately, I thought, "it's going to be Narciso Yepes."

And she continued, "... here's Narciso Yepes, playing Bach's Lute Suite #1."

Now, it's odd that I thought of Yepes at all.  I don't know much about classical guitar players -- the two I've heard the most often are Andrés Segovia and Christopher Parkening, but even them I only listen to intermittently.  I think I have one CD of Yepes, but I'm not sure where it is and I don't think I've listened to it in years.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kirkwood123, Matao MC-1 classical guitar 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the certainty of my thought is peculiar from a couple of standpoints, even if you believe that it wasn't a premonition (which, predictably, I don't).  The first is that I came up with the name of a guitarist I barely know at all, as soon as the announcer mentioned "classical guitar;" and the second, of course, is that it turned out to be right.

Interestingly (and you might consider this another synchronicity), just yesterday a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix which is devoted to exactly these sorts of occurrences.  The name, of course, comes from the movie The Matrix, in which odd coincidences and experiences of déjà vu are indicative that the Machines are making minor alterations to the computer simulation inside which we all live. 

The fact that we all have these experiences now and again certainly deserves some consideration. Let's take a look at three excerpts from the subreddit:

For about 5 or 6 years now (I'm 21 as of now), I've noticed that, whether it's the time that I check my phone, or it's a donation on a Twitch stream, or any number of other things, there's a decent chance that it'll be the number 619.  It's nothing I'm too worried about, but it pops up every so often naturally that it just doesn't seem like a simple coincidence anymore.  It's something that I noticed happened, and then it continued to happen long after that... 

I'll notice the time as 6:19 every once in a while, and at first I chalked it up to being stuck in the same routine, but it continued to occur after several changes in sleep schedules and school/work schedule.  Again, it's not only the time of day either, but I'll notice it in a phone number, or any number of places.  It's gotten to be like my own private joke that people or places attached to the number must mean something to me, although I never act on it... 

So any theories on my special little number?  Does anyone else have a number or idea "follow" them around like this?  Or is this an underlying symptom of a mental disorder that I've been ignorant of for 21 years?

Here's another:

One of the most terrifying experiences I've ever encountered was with my friend Gordie last summer and to this day still makes me feel uncomfortable to talk about because I genuinely can not explain what happened on any logical level.

We were driving to Mission and on the way back I noticed I had forgotten something at the store.  By this time we were in downtown Maple Ridge and considering we had nothing to do so we went back.  It's about a 20 minute drive to Mission from where we were.  The clock read 3:23.

The clock reads 3:37. Gordie and I look at each other.  And he asks me "what happened?"  Neither of us remember the drive between Maple Ridge and Mission.  We lost 15 minutes of lives and we have no idea where it went.  All we know is that in between post A and B nothing or probably something happened.

Not a single word was said.  The last thing we remember talking about was how Skyrim will never have a follow up.  Then at the snap of a universal finger.  Nothing.  15 minutes gone.

The rest of the ride was very quiet and we were both very much on edge and uncomfortable.  We have both experienced something completely unexplainable but yet at the same time we experienced nothing.

I'm the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes seems inconsequential and minimal to the many minutes in our life.  But nevertheless it remains unknown as to where time went.

My only explanation is that I passed though a wormhole and somehow ended up on the other side.

And one last one:

I had a problem with a programming question, so I googled it, and I went to the forum Stackoverflow (in which I had signed up 2 years ago).  I found an excellent answer that solved my problem, and I told myself "Oh...  So many intelligent people out there...  I would have never been able to write something like that."  

And then I realized... the author of the answer is my account.  It's me...  

I am convinced this is caused by a glitch in the matrix.  Most probably, many answers on the forum are generated by the matrix, and the glitch was to attribute my username to it.  Of course, a couple of seconds after that, I was getting a vague idea that I may have written the answer (false memory), but I am not fooled!

So, given that we are starting from the standpoint of there being a natural explanation for all of this, what is going on here?

I think the key is that all of these rely on two things; the general unreliability of perception and memory, and our capacity for noticing what seems odd and ignoring pretty much everything else.  Starting with our 619-noticer, consider how many times (s)he probably looks at clocks, not to mention other sources of three-digit numbers, and it's not 619.  Once you have a couple of precedents -- most likely caused, as the writer noted, by being in the same routine -- you are much more likely to notice it again.  And each subsequent occurrence reinforces the perception that something odd is going on.

As far as the time-slip friends, I think what happened here is a simple failure of attention.  I've driven on auto-pilot more than once, especially when I'm fatigued, and suddenly sat up straight and thought, "How the hell did I get here?"  I honestly had no memory at all of driving the intervening distance.  But a mysterious time-slip is less likely than my brain being elsewhere (leaving some portion of my attention still focused on my driving, fortunately).

And the last one, the person who answered him/herself on an internet forum, certainly has to be a case of a lost memory.  I have a friend from college who has an excellent memory for details from the past, and periodically reminds me of things that happened to the two of us -- and more than once I've had to admit to him that I have no recollection of the events whatsoever.  It's disconcerting, but our memories are far less thorough and accurate than we think they are.

My own premonition-like decision that the radio announcer was going to be playing a piece by Narciso Yepes is clearly something of the sort.  Considering how often I listen to the radio, and hear the announcer give a bit of information about the next selection, it's likely I have thoughts like, "I hope she plays something by Scarlatti next!" several times a day.  Most of them, of course, are wrong predictions, and because that's the norm, such events are immediately forgotten.  It's only the coincidental ones, the outliers, that get noticed -- yet another example of our old friend dart-thrower's bias.

But even so, I think I'll dig up that Yepes album and put it on.  Whether or not it was a glitch in the matrix, he's a pretty damn good guitarist.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

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

Cause and effect

In 1960, Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity in his book of the same name, and defined it as follows:

How are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their causality?  The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable...  It is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP [extrasensory perception], or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy.  This makes an end of the causal explanation as well, for "effect" cannot be understood as anything except a phenomenon of energy.  Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity.  Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have picked on the term "synchronicity" to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation.

Synchronicity is a peculiar thing, and when it happens to us it can be extremely startling.  I recall going to a doctor's appointment one day, and in the car I was listening to a station that plays classical music.  When I arrived I was in the middle of the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, a piece I love -- but I was right on time for the appointment and couldn't sit and listen to the rest of it.

So I shut the engine off, got out of my car, and went into the doctors' office.  I checked in, went to the waiting room...

... and over the speakers came the ethereal notes of the piano playing the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, picking up almost exactly where I had left off five minutes earlier.

This would have been surprising but not really all that peculiar if they had simply been tuned to the same station on Sirius-XM satellite radio as I was; but they weren't.  As I found out from sitting there for the next half hour (just because I was on time for my appointment doesn't mean the doctor was), the music being piped in was just a collection of "atmospheric piano music" for waiting rooms and the like.  The fact that it seemed to pick up exactly where I'd turned the radio in my car off was pure coincidence.

Or, if you like Jung's term, synchronicity.  I'm wary of it for two reasons.  First, it immediately turns on our conviction that occurrences like this Mean Something, that it was more than simple random chance at work.  Second, this kind of magical thinking is at the heart of dart-thrower's bias -- our tendency to notice (or overemphasize) the hits and ignore the misses.  In this case, all of the millions of times I've walked into a waiting room or elevator or grocery store and the speakers weren't playing a tune I was just listening to or thinking about.  All of that randomness gets subsumed into the background white noise of life.  I only noticed it this time, and remembered it afterward, because the music I heard was unexpected in some way.

The reason this comes up is because of an article at Insider about a phone app called "Randonautica," which takes the concept of synchronicity to new levels.  What the app does is to give you a random set of coordinates within a ten minute drive of your home, and then acts as a GPS to get you there.  Before you leave, you're supposed to "set an intention" -- something you want to find or learn when you arrive -- with the expectation that at the site, you'll discover something relevant to that intention.

Various "Randonauts" have reported all sorts of things -- creepy abandoned buildings, unexpected beautiful spots hidden away from view, cryptic graffiti on walls that seemed in some way to connect to the seekers' intention, and so on.  One group had a horrifying experience; Randonauts in Seattle stumbled upon a suitcase that contained human remains in a plastic garbage bag.

Now, I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade (although finding a dead body certainly would quell my enthusiasm for the whole enterprise).  I can see how Randonautica could be a great deal of fun, and in fact, it's related in spirit to a hobby my wife and I both participate in, geocaching.  But it's an interesting question to consider whether what the Randonauts are finding is meaningful.

My take on it is that sure, it's meaningful, but the meaning is something the Randonauts are imposing upon what they find.  Put another way, there's nothing mystical to this; if you go to a strange place and look for something, with the only criterion being that it has to be relevant to a broad intention to "find something strange," then you're almost certain to succeed.  I can pretty much guarantee that no matter where you go, if you look for weird and unexpected stuff, you'll find something.

But that's just me being a hyperrational type, and there are people who absolutely swear by synchronicities that even I would find a little hard to explain as dart-thrower's bias.  Jung, for example, told the story of a patient who had a vivid dream of a golden scarab beetle, and asked him what relevance it had to her life.  While she was telling him this, he heard a noise, and saw there was an insect trying to get out of the window -- and reached out his hand and caught it.  Guess what it was?  He handed the shining green-gold beetle to the patient, and said, "Here is your scarab."

"This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance," Jung wrote.  "The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So who knows?  Maybe there's more to this than I'm seeing.  I'd encourage you to try Randonautica if you're so inclined, and let me know if anything untoward happens.  I may well do the same -- although I wonder what would happen if your intention contains the subclause, "... but there's probably nothing mystical going on here."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is for anyone who likes quick, incisive takes on scientific topics: When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by the talented science writer Jim Holt.

When Einstein Walked with Gödel is a series of essays that explores some of the deepest and most perplexing topics humanity has ever investigated -- the nature of time, the implications of relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics, the perception of beauty in mathematics, and the ultimate fate of the universe.  Holt's lucid style brings these difficult ideas to the layperson without blunting their scientific rigor, and you'll come away with a perspective on the bizarre and mind-boggling farthest reaches of science.  Along the way you'll meet some of the key players in this ongoing effort -- the brilliant, eccentric, and fascinating scientists themselves.

It's a wonderful read, and anyone who is an aficionado of the sciences shouldn't miss it.

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

Misremembering the truth

There are two distinct, but similar-sounding, cognitive biases that I've written about many times here at Skeptophilia because they are such tenacious barriers to rational thinking.

The first, confirmation bias, is our tendency to uncritically accept claims when they fit with our preconceived notions.  It's why a lot of conservative viewers of Fox News and liberal viewers of MSNBC sit there watching and nodding enthusiastically without ever stopping and saying, "... wait a moment."

The other, dart-thrower's bias, is more built-in.  It's our tendency to notice outliers (because of their obvious evolutionary significance as danger signals) and ignore, or at least underestimate, the ordinary as background noise.  The name comes from the thought experiment of being in a bar while there's a darts game going on across the room.  You'll tend to notice the game only when there's an unusual throw -- a bullseye, or perhaps impaling the bartender in the forehead -- and not even be aware of it otherwise.

Well, we thought dart-thrower's bias was more built into our cognitive processing system and confirmation bias more "on the surface" -- and the latter therefore more culpable, conscious, and/or controllable.  Now, it appears that confirmation bias might be just as hard-wired into our brains as dart-thrower's bias is.

A paper appeared this week in Human Communication Research, describing research conducted by a team led by Jason Coronel of Ohio State University.  In "Investigating the Generation and Spread of Numerical Misinformation: A Combined Eye Movement Monitoring and Social Transmission Approach," Coronel, along with Shannon Poulsen and Matthew D. Sweitzer, did a fascinating series of experiments that showed we not only tend to accept information that agrees with our previous beliefs without question, we honestly misremember information that disagrees -- and we misremember it in such a way that in our memories, it further confirms our beliefs!

The location of memories (from Memory and Intellectual Improvement Applied to Self-Education and Juvenile Instruction, by Orson Squire Fowler, 1850) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What Coronel and his team did was to present 110 volunteers with passages containing true numerical information on social issues (such as support for same-sex marriage and rates of illegal immigration).  In some cases, the passages agreed with what (according to polls) most people believe to be true, such as that the majority of Americans support same-sex marriage.  In other cases, the passages contained information that (while true) is widely thought to be untrue -- such as the fact that illegal immigration across the Mexican border has been dropping for years and is now at its lowest rates since the mid-1990s.

Across the board, people tended to recall the information that aligned with the conventional wisdom correctly, and the information that didn't incorrectly.  Further -- and what makes this experiment even more fascinating -- is that when people read the unexpected information, data that contradicted the general opinion, eye-tracking monitors recorded that they hesitated while reading, as if they recognized that something was strange.  In the immigration passage, for example, they read that the rate of immigration had decreased from 12.8 million in 2007 to 11.7 million in 2014, and the readers' eyes bounced back and forth between the two numbers as if their brains were saying, "Wait, am I reading that right?"

So they spent longer on the passage that conflicted with what most people think -- and still tended to remember it incorrectly.  In fact, the majority of people who did remember wrong got the numbers right -- 12.8 million and 11.7 million -- showing that they'd paid attention and didn't just scoff and gloss over it when they hit something they thought was incorrect.  But when questioned afterward, they remembered the numbers backwards, as if the passage had actually supported what they'd believed prior to the experiment!

If that's not bad enough, Coronel's team then ran a second experiment, where the test subjects read the passage, then had to repeat the gist to another person, who then passed it to another, and so on.  (Remember the elementary school game of "Telephone?")  Not only did the data get flipped -- usually in the first transfer -- subsequently, the difference between the two numbers got greater and greater (thus bolstering the false, but popular, opinion even more strongly).  In the case of the immigration statistics, the gap between 2007 and 2014 not only changed direction, but by the end of the game it had widened from 1.1 million to 4.7 million.

This gives you an idea what we're up against in trying to counter disinformation campaigns.  And it also illustrates that I was wrong in one of my preconceived notions; that people falling for confirmation bias are somehow guilty of locking themselves deliberately into an echo chamber.  Apparently, both dart-thrower's bias and confirmation bias are somehow built into the way we process information.  We become so certain we're right that our brain subconsciously rejects any evidence to the contrary.

Why our brains are built this way is a matter of conjecture.  I wonder if perhaps it might be our tribal heritage at work; that conforming to the norm, and therefore remaining a member of the tribe, has a greater survival value than being the maverick who sticks to his/her guns about a true but unpopular belief.  That's pure speculation, of course.  But what it illustrates is that once again, our very brains are working against us in fighting Fake News -- which these days is positively frightening, given how many powerful individuals and groups are, in a cold and calculated fashion, disseminating false information in an attempt to mislead us, frighten us, or anger us, and so maintain their positions of power.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is brand new; Brian Clegg's wonderful Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Hidden 95% of the Universe.  In this book, Clegg outlines "the biggest puzzle science has ever faced" -- the evidence for the substances that provide the majority of the gravitational force holding the nearby universe together, while simultaneously making the universe as a whole fly apart -- and which has (thus far) completely resisted all attempts to ascertain its nature.

Clegg also gives us some of the cutting-edge explanations physicists are now proposing, and the experiments that are being done to test them.  The science is sure to change quickly -- every week we seem to hear about new data providing information on the dark 95% of what's around us -- but if you want the most recently-crafted lens on the subject, this is it.

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

Invasion of the randonauts

Today the following happened:

• In the last few months I've been watching episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot, and last night I watched the amazing "And Then There Were None."  Today on Facebook, one of my friends was participating in the thing that's going around to post your seven favorite book covers, and she posted the cover of the book by the same name.
• When I went outside ten minutes ago, the cows in the field across the street were all staring in my direction.
• An acquaintance who moved away five years ago emailed me last night saying he was in town for a couple of days and asking if I wanted to get together for coffee.  Today I went to the grocery store, and who should be there but him.
• I looked out of my office window a few minutes ago, exactly at the right time to see a hawk zoom by, only about ten feet from the window.
• I noticed that my angel's trumpet plant has nine new flowers on it.  The scientific name of the plant, Brugmansia, has ten letters, and today is September 9 (9-10).

Why all this stuff comes up is because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, about a new hobby some people have -- they call themselves the "Randonauts."  The gist is that these folks are trying to prove that we're either in some kind of computer simulation, or else there's some Weird Shit going on, or both.

The way they do it is that you log into a site with a random number generator (the full instructions are in the link), and it will use those to plot out latitudes and longitudes of places near you.  After doing this a bunch of times, it will spit out the set of coordinates that got the most hits.  You go there, and...

... stuff is supposed to happen.  Here are a few things people have reported when doing this:

• an upside-down airplane
• a llama, standing totally still
• three identical black cats
• a family of horses in a public park
• a bird that also refused to move
• various "derelict locales and creepy signage"

All of this is supposed to signify that our lives are being controlled, either by some super-intelligent power or by a simulation, and this is making the random number generator not so random -- and directing us to where there are leaks in the matrix, or something.

Tamlin Magee, who wrote the article for The Outline I linked above, was only mildly impressed by her experiences, which I encourage you to read about.  Here's her conclusion:

Whatever you think of the validity of hacking reality or the nature of our possibly deterministic universe, my time randonauting pushed me to pay closer attention to my environment, to stop and notice things, like artwork, signs, symbols, nature, and objects, that I might have otherwise filtered out by default. 

Do I understand the theories behind it all?  Absolutely not.  Do I think I’m challenging a demiurgical Great Programmer, jumping into alternate dimensions or tearing apart the space-time continuum?  Probably also not.  But my trips, nonetheless, felt imbued by a strangely comforting, esoteric mindfulness.  And if only for that reason, I will be randonauting again.

Now, far be it from me to criticize weird and semi-pointless hobbies.  I'm a geocacher, after all, not to mention a birdwatcher (a hobby a former student aptly described as "Pokémon for adults").  So I'm glad Magee had fun, and in that spirit, I'd like to participate myself.

But I don't buy the conclusion any more than she did -- that you're more likely to see weird stuff when you do this than you are at any other time.  I think, as Magee points out, what happens is you're more likely to notice it.

I mean, think about it.  You go anywhere, and your instructions are: notice anything weird.  No restrictions.  Not even any definition of what qualifies as "weird."

My guess is that this would work in every single location in the world you might consider going to.  Because, face it, Weird Shit is everywhere.

So what we have here is a bad case of dart-thrower's bias -- our naturally-evolved tendency to notice outliers.  That, and the desire -- also natural -- that there be some meaning in what happens around us, that it isn't all just chaos.  (We took a look at the darker side of this drive yesterday.)

Anyhow, I think this sounds like it could be entertaining, as long as you don't put too much stock in your results showing that we're in a simulation.  Although I have to admit, given how bizarre the news has been lately, it's crossed my mind more than once that maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the aliens running the simulation have gotten bored, and now they're just fucking with us.

Certainly would explain a lot of what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: science historian James Burke's Circles: Fifty Round Trips Through History, Technology, Science, and Culture.  Burke made a name for himself with his brilliant show Connections, where he showed how one thing leads to another in discoveries, and sometimes two seemingly unconnected events can have a causal link (my favorite one is his episode about how the invention of the loom led to the invention of the computer).

In Circles, he takes us through fifty examples of connections that run in a loop -- jumping from one person or event to the next in his signature whimsical fashion, and somehow ending up in the end right back where he started.  His writing (and his films) always have an air of magic to me.  They're like watching a master conjuror create an illusion, and seeing what he's done with only the vaguest sense of how he pulled it off.

So if you're an aficionado of curiosities of the history of science, get Circles.  You won't be disappointed.

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

The cursed footballer

One of the hardest biases to overcome is dart-thrower's bias, which is the tendency to notice outliers and ignore all of the background noise.  The reason it's hard is because our brains are pattern-seeking devices; we evolved to notice what's odd, because the odd is often dangerous (or at least worth paying attention to).  But it leads to an inevitable tendency to overestimate the weird stuff -- strange coincidences, cases where dreams seem to be precognitive, times you and a friend said the same thing at the same time -- and underestimate all of the millions of times when those things didn't happen.

But in science, we have to keep track of both the hits and the misses.  As an example of what happens if you don't, let's look at the case of the cursed football player.

Aaron James Ramsey is a Welsh footballer (or soccer player, as we'd call him here in the States) who plays for Arsenal and also for the Welsh national team.  And a strange superstition has grown up around him -- that whenever he scores a goal, a famous person somewhere in the world dies.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jon Candy, Aaron Ramsey v Cardiff 2013, CC BY-SA 2.0]

August 2009, and three days after Ramsey scored a goal, Teddy Kennedy died.  May 2011, he scored the day before Osama bin Laden was killed.  It happened twice in October of that year -- first three days before Steve Jobs died, and second the day before Muammar Gaddafi was killed.

On and on it goes.  The "Ramsey curse" has been blamed for the deaths of basketball player Ray Williams, actors Paul Walker, Robin Williams, and Alan Rickman, and rock legend David Bowie.  The demise of Nancy Reagan, screenwriter Bruce Forsythe, comedian Ken Dodd, physicist Stephen Hawking, and champion darts player Eric Bristow were all blamed on the Ramsey curse phenomenon.

Okay, so here's the problem.

According to his online statistics, Ramsey has had 32 goals in his professional career, but the article about the "curse" (linked above) says that only sixteen of them were followed by deaths of prominent individuals.  So this is already giving the "curse" a 50% success rate.

But there are two other problems.  First is how we're defining the word "famous."  I don't know about you, but of the fourteen "famous people" I listed above that Ramsey has allegedly killed, I'd never heard of four of them -- Ray Williams, Forsythe, Dodd, and Bristow.  No offense to darts enthusiasts, but even a champion darts player isn't quite in the same league as David Bowie.  So if you're defining "famous" that loosely, you've got a big field to choose from.

Second, though -- can you find a date that didn't have a famous death somewhere immediately following it?  There are so many people in the news, in sports, and in entertainment that there are bound to be deaths pretty much every week (especially if you have that broad a definition of fame).  So in order to establish whether there really was a "Ramsey curse," we'd have to keep track of all of his goals and all deaths of famous people, and show that deaths were statistically more likely to happen closer to his scoring a goal.

As far as Ramsey goes, he (understandably) scoffs at the whole idea.  "The most ridiculous rumour I’ve heard is that people die after I score.  There have been loads of occasions where I’ve scored and nobody has died.  That’s just a crazy rumour.  I didn’t really find it funny.  Although I took out some baddies!"

So anyhow, Arsenal fans don't need to panic every time Ramsey scores a goal.  These kinds of coincidences are bound to happen -- and once someone notices them, they stand out, making them more likely to be noticed next time.

But if I'm wrong, I do wish he'd spared Stephen Hawking and Alan Rickman.  Still haven't gotten over those, actually.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

• Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
• We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
• An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
• The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000 , or about 0.63.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen.  In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or an unusual pattern.  (Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't.)  The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

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In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]