Fast modules, slow modules, and ghost photographs

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a YouTube video link about the frightening paranormal legends from the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.  The video doesn't provide much in the way of evidence but I have to admit it was pretty atmospheric.  Well, one thing led to another, and soon I was looking at photographs of alleged ghosts, and completely creeping myself out.

Just so I can share the experience with you, here are a few that I found especially shiver-inducing.

First, from a security camera in a library in Evansville, Indiana, comes this image of a hunched, shadowy creature creeping across the floor... of the Children's Reading Room:

Or how about this one, an old photograph from the 1940s that shows a screaming ghost reaching out towards an unsuspecting young couple:

Or this shot of a stern man standing behind an elderly woman -- a man who supposedly wasn't there when the photograph was taken:

Or the shadow in the kitchen -- a shadow cast by no object visible in the photograph.  This one immediately reminded me of the episode "Identity Crisis" from Star Trek: The Next Generation -- one of the flat-out scariest episodes they ever did.  If you've seen it, you probably recall the moment Geordi is in the Holodeck, one by one removing the shadows of all of the individuals in the simulation he's standing in -- and ending up with one shadow left over:

So, anyway, there I am, getting more and more weirded out (and still, for some reason, not simply switching to a website with cute pictures of puppies, or something).  And I thought, "Why am I freaking out about all of this?  Not only have I never had a single experience of anything supernatural, I don't even believe in any of this stuff.  I am morally certain that all of these photographs were either deliberate hoaxes, or were camera malfunctions/artifacts, or are examples of pareidolia -- some completely natural explanation must be responsible.  So why am I scared?"

And my mind returned to a book that was a Skeptophilia book-of-the-week a while back, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.  Kahneman's specialty is why humans make irrational decisions; his research into how that applies to economic decision-making is why he won the Nobel.  More interesting to me, though, is the facet of his research that shows that human thinking is split into two discrete modules -- a fast module and a slow one.  And those two modules are frequently at odds with one another.

The fast module is what allows us to take quick stock of what's around us.  It is, for example, what allows us to do an immediate assessment of the following photograph:

No "rational thinking" is needed to come to the conclusion that this woman is angry.  On the other hand, the slow module is invoked when doing a math problem, like what is 223 x 1,174?  The vast majority of us could solve that problem, but it would take time and concentration.  (The fact that there are savants who can solve problems like that nearly instantaneously makes me wonder if their brains are somehow wired to do math with the fast module of the brain; merely a speculation, but it's suggestive.)

As an example of how the two modules can be at odds, consider the "Linda Problem."  Participants in a study were told a story about Linda, a single woman, intelligent and outspoken, who was very concerned with issues of social justice.  The participants were then asked which of the following possibilities was more likely: (1) Linda is a bank teller; or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.  By a vast majority, participants chose option 2.  (Did you?)

The problem is, option 2 is wrong.  Not just maybe wrong, it's completely wrong, as in impossible.  How could the likelihood of Linda's being a feminist bank teller exceed the likelihood of her being a bank teller?  All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers; adding an extra detail to the description can only have the effect of decreasing the probability.  (To make this clearer, how can there be more brown dogs than there are dogs?)  But the fast module's quick assessment of the situation was that from the information given, she was very likely to be a feminist; the likelihood that she was a bank teller was equal in both possibilities; so it jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that the combined probability was higher.

So, you can see how the fast module, however useful it is in making the snap judgments that are essential in getting us through the day, is not, at its basis, rational.  It is primed by previous experience, and is inherently biased toward finding the quickest answer possible, even if that answer is completely contrary to rationality.

And that, I think, explains why a diehard skeptic can still be completely weirded out by ghost pictures.  The slow module in my brain thinks, "Okay, pareidolia.  Or the photo was doctored.  No way is this real." My fast module, on the other hand, is thinking, "Good lord, that's terrifying!  Time for to dump a liter or two of adrenaline into my bloodstream!"  And no amount of soothing talk from my slow module seems to make any difference.

Especially the photo with the creeping thing in the library.  That one is freakin' scary.

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One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

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

The selfie from hell

"Selfies" are all the rage these days. Heaven knows why, because they're usually poorly composed and not in focus.   They also tend to be taken at inadvisable times, such as when the subject-and-photographer has had one too many strawberry daiquiris, which is almost certainly what resulted in the invention of the truly unfortunate cultural phenomenon of "duck lips."

I won't say that I haven't succumbed to the temptation myself once or twice, although I hasten to add that it was sans daiquiris and "duck lips."  Here's one I took a few weeks ago to document my progress toward having completely unmanageable hair, given that all the barbershops are closed because of the pandemic:

So they don't all turn out terrible or embarrassing, although it still bears keeping in mind that the camera can still only do so much with the material it's given.  At least this one isn't the kind of thing I'll look at later and say, "How the hell did this end up on my phone?"

Which was apparently the question that was asked by one Gina Mihai, 34, of an unnamed village in Romania, according to a story in The Daily Mirror sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Mihai says she was looking through the photographs on her phone one day recently, and found the following rather horrifying image:

Pretty scary.  Mihai was understandably creeped out, but she had an explanation ready at hand.  She told reporters, "When I switched the phone on I was horrified to see my dead grandmother’s face.  She had what looked like a snake around her neck, and the whole image looked as if it had been taken through a hole, like it was shot through a tear in the fabric that separates the living from the dead."

In other words, poor grandma ended up in hell, and for some reason decided to send her granddaughter what amounts to an infernal selfie.  For comparison purposes, here's grandma in real life, just before she died:

I don't really see a lot of resemblance, myself.  But maybe that's because being in hell, not to mention having a snake around your neck, would kind of have a tendency to change your facial expression.

Mihai followed up the experience with a visit to a fortune-teller, because of course that's who you'd want to see if you wanted a touchstone of reality.  And the fortune-teller said that Mihai was right, granny was in hell, and the snake around her neck was because she was "being punished for certain sins."

The trouble is, the article also had a photograph of Mihai herself, which I include below:

And what strikes me is that the "selfie from hell" looks more like Mihai than it does like her grandmother.  My contention is that Mihai digitally altered a photograph of herself, an easy enough thing to do with any ordinary image modification software, and now is getting her fifteen minutes of fame by disparaging her poor grandma.

But even if her contention is correct, and grandma is in hell, I thought that once you were there, it amounted to solitary confinement in the Lake of Fire?  It's hard to imagine Satan allowing texting:

Grandma:  Excuse me, Your Infernal Evilness, can you hang on a minute?  I just need to send a message to my granddaughter.  *takes pic of herself with her phone*

Satan:  Well, okay, I'll let it go this time.  Just so long as you don't do "duck lips."  That earns you five more years in the red-hot lava pit.

Grandma:  How about the snake around my neck?  I can show my granddaughter that, right? 

Satan: Sure.

So the whole thing seems pretty improbable to me, just as improbable as claims of Jesus or various saints showing up on slices of toast.  You'd think that being powerful supernatural beings, they'd pick more direct ways of speaking to us, wouldn't you?  Like gigantic burning bushes or pillars of fire or hosts of heavenly and/or demonic entities rushing about.  But you never see any of that stuff, despite what you hear in all the folklore.

I wonder why that is.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

One of the more curious ghost stories I've ever heard is the tale of the "Brown Lady," named after her drab clothing, who has been allegedly seen many times in Raynham Hall Manor in Norfolk, England.

I first ran across the story in a collection called 50 Great Ghost Stories by John Canning, which from the inscription inside the front cover -- "October 29, 1977 -- Mon cher ami -- mieux vaut tard que jamais -- Amélie" -- I received three days after my seventeenth birthday from a family friend.

It's a pretty cool book, although (like many of this ilk) it mixes myth and folklore with stories that actually have some historical veracity.  The tale of the Brown Lady is one of the second type, because the people involved are actual historical figures, although the evidence for the haunting itself is still a little on the sketchy side.

The facts of the case are pretty well documented.  Lady Dorothy Walpole (18 September 1686 - 29 March 1726), who was the sister of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of England, was married to Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend.  Townshend had been married before, to one Elizabeth Pelham, by whom he had five children; he and Dorothy Walpole had seven more, the youngest of which was the mother of Charles Cornwallis, who signed the surrender at the Siege of Yorktown and ended the American Revolutionary War.

Dorothy Walpole wasn't happy, however, partly because Charles Townshend was more interested in growing turnips (I kid you not) than in devoting himself to his wife and family, and also because supposedly he had a nasty temper, which I would too if I had to eat turnips.  Be that as it may, Dorothy Walpole Townshend sought solace elsewhere, but unfortunately for her, she chose Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton, as a lover.

Well, the story goes that either Townshend or Wharton's wife (the legend varies) caught Dorothy and Thomas in flagrante delicto, and Townshend decided the only proper response was to lock his wife up in Raynham Hall to prevent her from cheating on him again.  She stayed there for the rest of her life, dying in 1726 at the young age of 40, possibly of smallpox -- although if she was never allowed outside her room, you have to wonder who she caught it from.

Be that as it may, once Dorothy Walpole Townshend's sad and short life had ended, people started to report the presence of a specter haunting Raynham Hall.

The most famous of the encounters was with novelist Frederick Maryatt, who was a friend of Charles Dickens.  Maryatt's daughter, Florence, wrote in 1891 about her father's meeting with the Brown Lady :

…he took possession of the room in which the portrait of the apparition hung, and in which she had been often seen, and slept each night with a loaded revolver under his pillow.  For two days, however, he saw nothing, and the third was to be the limit of his stay.  On the third night, however, two young men (nephews of the baronet), knocked at his door as he was undressing to go to bed, and asked him to step over to their room (which was at the other end of the corridor), and give them his opinion on a new gun just arrived from London.  My father was in his shirt and trousers, but as the hour was late, and everybody had retired to rest except themselves, he prepared to accompany them as he was.  As they were leaving the room, he caught up his revolver, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," he said, laughing.  When the inspection of the gun was over, the young men in the same spirit declared they would accompany my father back again, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," they repeated, laughing also.  The three gentlemen therefore returned in company. 

The corridor was long and dark, for the lights had been extinguished, but as they reached the middle of it, they saw the glimmer of a lamp coming towards them from the other end.  "One of the ladies going to visit the nurseries," whispered the young Townshends to my father.  Now the bedroom doors in that corridor faced each other, and each room had a double door with a space between, as is the case in many old-fashioned houses.  My father, as I have said, was in shirt and trousers only, and his native modesty made him feel uncomfortable, so he slipped within one of the outer doors (his friends following his example), in order to conceal himself until the lady should have passed by. 

I have heard him describe how he watched her approaching nearer and nearer, through the chink of the door, until, as she was close enough for him to distinguish the colors and style of her costume, he recognised the figure as the facsimile of the portrait of "The Brown Lady."  He had his finger on the trigger of his revolver, and was about to demand it to stop and give the reason for its presence there, when the figure halted of its own accord before the door behind which he stood, and holding the lighted lamp she carried to her features, grinned in a malicious and diabolical manner at him.  This act so infuriated my father, who was anything but lamb-like in disposition, that he sprang into the corridor with a bound, and discharged the revolver right in her face.  The figure instantly disappeared - the figure at which for several minutes three men had been looking together – and the bullet passed through the outer door of the room on the opposite side of the corridor, and lodged in the panel of the inner one.  My father never attempted again to interfere with "The Brown Lady of Raynham."

Now, to be fair, Florence Maryatt isn't exactly what you might call an impartial witness.  She was heavily into spiritualism, and was the author of books with titles like There is No Death and The Spirit World.  So I'm inclined to take anything she says with a grain or two of salt.

Which, of course, I would have anyhow.

Maryatt, however, wasn't the only one to claim seeing the Brown Lady in person.  In 1936, a photographer named Hubert Provand, who worked for Country Life magazine, was taking photos of Raynham Hall for a feature article.  They were setting up for a shoot of the wide interior staircase when Provand's assistant, Indre Shira, pointed at "a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman moving down the stairs towards us."  Provand took a photo of the apparition, which has since become one of the most famous ghost photographs ever:

The incident was investigated by Harry Price, a noted paranormal researcher whose reputation for accepting questionable evidence led to his leaving the skeptical and science-based Society for Psychical Research, and founding his own rival organization, the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, because the obvious answer to skepticism is to start a group that will see things your way.  (One of the more famous examples of Price's dubious approach to investigation was the debacle of Borley Rectory, the "most haunted house in England," the evidence for which subsequent inquiries found was almost entirely fabrication.)

For what it's worth, which is probably not much, Price declared the Brown Lady photograph authentic, saying "the negative is entirely innocent of any kind of faking."  But like Florence Maryatt, he's not exactly the most reliable source of information.  Further analysis showed that the image is most likely a double exposure (note the pale lines above the stair treads, and the double reflections on the bannisters).  The ghost figure itself shows a lot of similarity to a traditional Madonna statue, down to a foggy impression below the face that appears to be hands folded in prayer.

Even if the photograph is a fake, of course, it doesn't mean that the other accounts aren't true.  But at the moment, the story doesn't have much to recommend it -- other than a second-hand and probably biased account, and a famous photograph that is almost certainly a fake, the Brown Lady doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

It's still kind of a cool story, however, and I'd love to visit Raynham Hall myself.  If I ever get to go, however, allow me to reassure Dorothy Walpole Townshend that I plan on being entirely unarmed, and even if I were to bring a gun for some reason, I'd never think of shooting her in the face with it.  I mean, it's all very well to get scared in those kinds of situations, but that kind of breaches the rules of etiquette even so.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

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

The selfie from hell

"Selfies" are all the rage these days.  Heaven knows why, because they're usually poorly composed and not in focus.  They also tend to be taken at inadvisable times, such as when the subject-and-photographer has had one too many strawberry daiquiris, which is almost certainly what resulted in the invention of the truly unfortunate cultural phenomenon of "duck lips."

I won't say that I haven't succumbed to the temptation myself once or twice, although I hasten to add that it was sans daiquiris and "duck lips."  Here's a twofer selfie my wife and I took while we were hiking in the Grand Tetons a couple of weeks ago:

So they don't all turn out terrible, or embarrassing, the kind of thing you look at later and say, "How did this end up on my camera?"

Which was apparently the question that was asked by one Gina Mihai, 34, of an unnamed village in Romania, according to a story in The Daily Mirror (and reported on Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, which is where I ran across it).  Mihai says she was looking through the photographs on her cellphone one day recently, and found the following rather horrifying image:

Pretty scary.  Mihai was understandably creeped out, but she had an explanation ready at hand.  She told reporters, "When I switched the phone on I was horrified to see my dead grandmother’s face.  She had what looked like a snake around her neck, and the whole image looked as if it had been taken through a hole, like it was shot through a tear in the fabric that separates the living from the dead."

In other words, poor grandma ended up in hell, and for some reason decided to send her granddaughter what amounts to an infernal selfie.  Here's grandma in real life, just before she died:

I don't really see a lot of resemblance, myself.  But maybe that's because being in hell, not to mention having a snake around your neck, would kind of have a tendency to change your facial expression.

Mihai followed up the experience with a visit to a fortune-teller, because of course that's who you'd want to see if you wanted a touchstone of reality.  And the fortune-teller said that Mihai was right, granny was in hell, and the snake around her neck was because she was "being punished for certain sins."

The trouble is, the article also had a photograph of Mihai herself, which I include below:

And what strikes me is that the "selfie from hell" looks more like Mihai than it does like her grandmother.  My contention (and Sharon Hill's, too) is that Mihai digitally altered a photograph of herself, an easy enough thing to do with any ordinary image modification software, and now is getting her fifteen minutes of fame by disparaging her poor grandma.

But even if her contention is correct, and grandma is in hell, I thought that once you were there, it amounted to solitary confinement in the Lake of Fire?  It's hard to imagine Satan allowing texting: 

Grandma:  Excuse me, Your Infernal Evilness, can you hang on a minute?  I just need to send a message to my granddaughter.  *takes pic of herself with her cellphone*  

Satan:  Well, okay, I'll let it go this time.  Just so long as you don't do "duck lips."  That earns you five more years in the red-hot lava pit.

Grandma:  How about the snake around my neck?  I can show my granddaughter that, right?

Satan:  Sure.

So the whole thing seems pretty improbable to me, just as improbable as the claim we looked at a couple of days ago wherein god was allegedly communicating with a chef via patterns of seeds inside an eggplant.  You'd think that being powerful supernatural beings, they'd pick more direct ways of speaking to us, wouldn't you?  Like gigantic burning bushes or pillars of fire or hosts of heavenly and/or demonic entities rushing about.  But you never see any of that stuff, despite what you hear in all the folklore.

I wonder why that is.

Weeping ghosts and hospital demons

It's a phenomenon we've seen here before; the tendency of people to wave photographs around, claiming that they are evidence of the paranormal despite the fact that the image quality is generally lousy (either from magnification and subsequent pixillation, or else from a photograph that wasn't very good to begin with).  Blurry photographs, of course, leave your mind open to interpreting what you're looking at, which is dangerous ground if you're trying to do so skeptically and fairly.  If you add to that a dash of pareidolia, a shot of wishful thinking, and a heaping handful of being told ahead of time what you're seeing, and you've got a nice recipe for proving the existence of ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, and pretty much whatever else you want.

I ran into two really good examples of that a couple of days ago.  The first one was presented over at The Crypto Crew as being a ghost standing behind a grieving man in a cemetery:

What immediately struck me about this one is that if it hadn't been for the three red arrows, I would never have thought there was anything odd about this photograph in the first place.  Even with the arrows it took me a while to see the "ghost."

A second one has a decidedly darker implication.  I first saw it on Facebook, but have since run into it on Twitter and a couple of the dicier paranormal sites.  It purports to show a dying woman in a hospital bed -- and a demon standing over her, presumably ready to whisk her soul off to hell as soon as she crosses into the netherworld:

Well, even over at Unexplainable.net they're not buying this one, and heaven knows they've had some pretty sketchy stuff over there and haven't raised an eyebrow.  Here's how they parse the Demon Photograph:

What I find most interesting about this is how our brains force an interpretation -- once we've been told that there's a demon there, we see the demon even if (like me) you don't believe in demons in the first place.  Grainy data can be turned into anything -- even, apparently, by skeptics.

It also strikes me how you never get a clear photograph of any of this stuff.  In these days where the average cellphone shot has better resolution than a photograph taken with an expensive camera did twenty years ago, why hasn't anyone been able to take a photograph that shows any real detail?  (Of course, I have a favored answer to this, but it's not one that's popular amongst the woo-woos.)

So that's the latest from the Creepy Photograph Department.  Myself, I think the guys in Quality Assurance need to have a look over there, because things seem to be slipping a little.  Next thing you know, we'll be seeing the folks over at Phantoms & Monsters giving up on paranormal photographs, and at that point we'll really know we're headed to hell in a handbasket.

Just like the poor lady in the hospital bed.

Fast modules, slow modules, and ghost photographs

So, yesterday, I was looking at photographs of alleged ghosts, and completely creeping myself out.

Just so I can share the experience with you, here are a few that I found especially shiver-inducing.

First, from a security camera in a library in Evansville, Indiana, comes this image of a hunched, shadowy creature creeping across the floor... of the Children's Reading Room:

Or how about this one, an old photograph from the 1940s that shows a screaming ghost reaching out towards an unsuspecting young couple:

 
Or this shot of a stern man standing behind an elderly woman -- a man who supposedly wasn't there when the photograph was taken:

Or the shadow in the kitchen -- a shadow cast by no object visible in the photograph (this one immediately reminded me of the episode "Identity Crisis" from Star Trek: The Next Generation -- one of the flat-out scariest episodes they ever did):

So, anyway, there I am, getting more and more weirded out (and still, for some reason, not simply switching to a website with cute pictures of puppies, or something).  And I thought, "Why am I freaking out about all of this?  Not only have I never had a single experience of anything supernatural, I don't even believe in any of this stuff.  I am morally certain that all of these photographs were either deliberate hoaxes, or were camera malfunctions/artifacts, or are examples of pareidolia -- some completely natural explanation must be responsible.  So why am I scared?"

And my mind returned to a book I just finished last week, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.  Kahneman's specialty is why humans make irrational decisions; his research into how that applies to economic decision-making is why he won the Nobel.  More interesting to me, though, is the facet of his research that shows that human thinking is split into two discrete modules -- a fast module and a slow one.  And those two modules are frequently at odds with one another.

The fast module is what allows us to take quick stock of what's around us.  It is, for example, what allows us to do an immediate assessment of the following photograph:

No "rational thinking" is needed to come to the conclusion that this woman is angry.  On the other hand, the slow module is invoked when doing a math problem like, what is 223 x 1,174?  The vast majority of us could solve that problem, but it would take time and concentration.  (The fact that there are savants who can solve problems like that nearly instantaneously makes me wonder if their brains are somehow wired to do math with the fast module of the brain; merely a speculation, but it's suggestive.)

As an example of how the two modules can be at odds, consider the "Linda Problem."  Participants in a study were told a story about Linda, a single woman, intelligent and outspoken, who was very concerned with issues of social justice.  The participants were then asked which of the following possibilities was more likely:  (1) Linda is a bank teller; or (2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.  By a vast majority, participants chose option 2.  (Did you?)

The problem is, option 2 is wrong.  Not just maybe wrong, it's flat-out wrong, as in impossible.  How could the likelihood of Linda's being a feminist bank teller exceed the likelihood of her being a bank teller?  All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers; adding an extra detail to the description can only have the effect of decreasing the probability.  (To make this clearer, how can there be more brown dogs than there are dogs?)  But the fast module's quick assessment of the situation was that from the information given, she was very likely to be a feminist; the likelihood that she was a bank teller was equal in both possibilities; so it jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that the combined probability was higher.

So, you can see how the fast module, however useful it is in making the snap judgments that are essential in getting us through the day, is not, at its basis, rational.  It is primed by previous experience, and is inherently biased toward finding the quickest answer possible, even if that answer is completely contrary to rationality.

And that, I think, explains why a diehard skeptic can still be completely weirded out by ghost pictures.  The slow module in my brain thinks, "Okay, pareidolia.  Or the photo was doctored.  No way is this real."  My fast module, on the other hand, is thinking, "Good lord, that's terrifying!  Time for some adrenaline!"  And no amount of soothing talk from my slow module seems to make any difference.

Especially that one with the creeping thing in the library.  That one is freakin' scary.