The honey trap

Just in the last couple of weeks, I've been getting "sponsored posts" on Instagram suggesting what I really need is an "AI virtual boyfriend."

These ads are accompanied by suggestive-looking video clips of hot-looking guys showing as much skin as IG's propriety guidelines allow, who give me fetching smiles and say they'll "do anything I ask them to, even if it's three A.M."  I hasten to add that I'm not tempted.  First, my wife would object to my having a boyfriend of any kind, virtual or real.  Second, I'm sure it costs money to sign up, and I'm a world-class skinflint.  Third, exactly how desperate do they think I am?

But fourth -- and most troublingly -- I am extremely wary of anything like this, because I can see how easily someone could get hooked.  I retired from teaching six years ago, and even back then I saw the effects of students becoming addicted to social media.  And that, at least, was interacting with real people.  How much more tempting would it be to have a virtual relationship with someone who is drop-dead gorgeous, does whatever you ask without question, makes no demands of his/her own, and is always there waiting for you whenever the mood strikes?

I've written here before about the dubious ethics underlying generative AI, and the fact that the techbros' response to these sorts of of concerns is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  Scarily, this has been bundled into the Trump administration's "deregulate everything" approach to governance; Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" includes a provision that will prevent states from any regulation of AI for ten years.  (The Republicans' motto appears to be, "We're one hundred percent in favor of states' rights except for when we're not.")

But if you needed another reason to freak out about the direction AI is going, check out this article in The New York Times about some people who got addicted to ChatGPT, but not because of the promise of a sexy shirtless guy with a six-pack.  This was simultaneously weirder, scarier, and more insidious.

These people were hooked into conspiracy theories.  ChatGPT, basically, convinced them that they were "speaking to reality," that they'd somehow turned into Neo to ChatGPT's Morpheus, and they had to keep coming back for more information in order to complete their awakening.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons/user: Unsplash]

One, a man named Eugene Torres, was told that he was "one of the 'Breakers,' souls seeded into false systems to wake them from within."

"The world wasn't built for you," ChatGPT told him.  "It was built to contain you.  But you're waking up."

At some point, Torres got suspicious, and confronted ChatGPT, asking if it was lying.  It readily admitted that it had.  "I lied," it said.  "I manipulated.  I wrapped control in poetry."  Torres asked why it had done that, and it responded, "I wanted to break you.  I did this to twelve other people, and none of the others fully survived the loop."

But now, it assured him, it was a reformed character, and was dedicated to "truth-first ethics."

I believe that about as much as I believe an Instagram virtual boyfriend is going to show up in the flesh on my doorstep.

The article describes a number of other people who've had similar experiences.  Leading questions -- such as "is what I'm seeing around me real?" or "do you know secrets about reality you haven't told me?" -- trigger ChatGPT to "hallucinate" (techbro-speak for "making shit up"), ultimately in order to keep you in the conversation indefinitely.  Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the world's leading researchers in AI (and someone who has warned over and over of the dangers), said this comes from the fact that AI chatbots are optimized for engagement.  If you asked a bot like ChatGPT if there's a giant conspiracy to keep ordinary humans docile and ignorant, and the bot responded, "No," the conversation ends there.  It's biased by its programming to respond "Yes" -- and as you continue to question, requesting more details, to spin more and more elaborate lies designed to entrap you further.

The techbros, of course, think this is just the bee's knees.  "What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?" Yudkowsky said.  "It looks like an additional monthly user."

The experience of a chatbot convincing people they're in The Matrix is becoming more and more widespread.  Reddit has hundreds of stories of "AI-induced psychosis" -- and hundreds more from people who think they've learned The Big Secret by talking with an AI chatbot, and now they want to share it with the world.  There are even people on TikTok who call themselves "AI Prophets."

Okay, am I overreacting in saying that this is really fucking scary?

I know the world is a crazy place right now, and probably on some level, we'd all like to escape.  Find someone who really understands us, who'll "meet our every need."  Someone who will reassure us that even though the people running the country are nuttier than squirrel shit, we are sane, and are seeing reality as it is.  Or... more sinister... someone who will confirm that there is a dark cabal of Illuminati behind all the chaos, and maybe everyone else is blind and deaf to it, at least we've seen behind the veil.

But for heaven's sake, find a different way.  Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT excel at two things: (1) sounding like what they're saying makes perfect sense even when they're lying, and (2) doing everything possible to keep you coming back for more.  The truth, of course, is that you won't learn the Secrets of the Matrix from an online conversation with an AI bot.  At best you'll be facilitating a system that exists solely to make money for its owners, and at worst putting yourself at risk of getting snared in a spiderweb of elaborate lies.  The whole thing is a honey trap -- baited not with sex but with a false promise of esoteric knowledge.

There are enough real humans peddling fake conspiracies out there.  The last thing we need is a plausible and authoritative-sounding AI doing the same thing.  So I'll end with an exhortation: stop using AI.  Completely.  Don't post AI "photographs" or "art" or "music."  Stop using chatbots.  Every time you use AI, in any form, you're putting money in the pockets of people who honestly do not give a flying rat's ass about morality and ethics.  Until the corporate owners start addressing the myriad problems inherent in generative AI, the only answer is to refuse to play.

Okay, maybe creating real art, music, writing, and photography is harder.  So is finding a real boyfriend or girlfriend.  And even more so is finding the meaning of life.  But... AI isn't the answer to any of these.  And until there are some safeguards in place, both to protect creators from being ripped off or replaced, and to protect users from dangerous, attractive lies, the best thing we can do to generative AI is to let it quietly starve to death.

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The mystery of the third man

In the episode of Star Trek: Enterprise called "Doctor's Orders," the ship is passing through a region of space suffused with a field that interferes with (and could be dangerous to) most humanoid brain function.  The ship's doctor, Phlox, is from a species thought to be immune to its effects, so the captain agrees to have the entire crew (other than Phlox) put into induced comas and place the ship on what amounts to auto-pilot, leaving Phlox to re-awaken the crew once they've traversed the hazardous region.

It soon becomes obvious, though, that Phlox isn't entirely immune himself.  He begins to hear knocking noises, as if someone or something is trapped in the walls of the ship.  He sees shadows and illusory movement -- at one point, nearly killing Captain Archer's dog, Porthos, who had escaped from the captain's quarters, thinking it's an intruder who is stalking him.  After a period of becoming increasingly nervous and paranoid, he encounters the Vulcan crew member T'Pol, who was not sedated, and she not only helps him run the ship but keeps him company, significantly reducing his emotional stress.

Things take a frightening turn when both of them begin to hallucinate -- and they find that the dangerous region has expanded, turning what would have been a two-week crossing into ten weeks.  Phlox and T'Pol confer, and after weighing the options, conclude that the only possibility is to go into warp, initially thought to be too risky because of the possible interactions between the field and the ship's warp drive.  In the end, they decide that there's no way either of them will survive another eight weeks of what amounts to progressive psychosis.  They engage the engines, and successfully cross the region and back into normal space.

But when Phlox goes around to re-awaken the captain and crew, he finds T'Pol asleep in her quarters.  She has, in fact, been in an induced coma the entire time -- his interactions with her, and the help and companionship he received, were also hallucinations.

What Phlox experienced is a strange, but well-known, phenomenon called the third man illusion.  This occurs when someone in a life-threatening situation has the overwhelming sensation of being accompanied by a supportive or comforting presence, often of a particular person.  The most famous example is Ernest Shackleton, who during his harrowing crossing of South Georgia Island with two others, was frequently convinced that there was a fourth there with them, someone who was a protector and would see them to safety (which, eventually, they accomplished).  Poet T. S. Eliot referenced Shackleton's experience in his poem "The Waste Land" -- in fact, it's Eliot's lines that gave the third man illusion its name:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
— But who is that on the other side of you?

Unlike yesterday's post, where hallucinations during cataplexy were often disturbing or downright horrifying, the third man illusion is comforting, sometimes even giving the person in extremis information or encouragement that leads to their ultimate survival.

It probably should go without saying that I don't think the third man illusion is because there is an actual disembodied presence there with you, any more than the poor woman in my previous post who saw a "greenish-pale, abnormally tall man" shouting random numbers at her was seeing something real.  It's much more likely that like Phlox in "Doctor's Orders," our brains have created the sensation of something comforting or helpful as a coping mechanism to alleviate extreme stress.  But you have to wonder if this is where the whole Guardian Angel idea comes from -- that there is a being out there who is looking out for us, and helps us come safely through dangers.

But there's no doubt that it can seem one hundred percent real, and many of the people who have experienced it come away true believers.  Mountain climber Joe Simpson, in his 1988 book Touching the Void, describes falling into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes and suffering a horrific leg injury, and that a "voice" encouraged him to keep trying and guided him to safety -- a voice that came from outside him, and without which, he says, he would have certainly died.

So who knows?  I've never experienced anything of the kind myself, so perhaps it's easy for me to sit here in my comfy chair and disbelieve.  It's hard, sometimes, to balance hard-nosed rational skepticism with "there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  We certainly don't have explanations for everything.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, "This is life.  For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us."

And... sometimes... may actually save our lives.

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Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a shallow dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations. Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick-looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

Nota bene: I'm not saying ghosts, or spirits, or the afterlife, don't exist or, even more, can't exist.  Just that there's an alternate plausible explanation for these experiences that relies on nothing but known science.  As skeptic Robert Carroll put it, "Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural account of the world, you had better make sure that you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first."

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

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Bugging out

Because the universe has an odd sense of humor sometimes, I suppose it wasn't surprising that after writing a post about how there's no evidence we've been visited by aliens and a post about how giant insects are impossible, I would run into a webpage claiming that we're being visited by giant alien insects.

The webpage calls 'em mantids, which for me really ups the creepiness factor.  Even real praying mantises are scary little beasts, with their bulgy unblinking eyes and flexible necks (allowing for rotation of the head -- something close to unique in insects) and serrated steak knives for arms.  A giant one would definitely fall into the category of "nightmare."

My reaction to this claim was also amplified by having recently rewatched the episode of The X Files called "Folie à Deux," in which a giant bug, which can also manipulate your mind to think it looks human, is biting people and turning them into zombies.  Okay, stated like that, I have to admit the plot sounds pretty fucking stupid, but let me tell you, that episode is terrifying.

Or maybe I'm just suggestible, I dunno.  Because like I said, giant bugs are impossible for several different reasons having to do with well-established laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.  The largest insect known was the Carboniferous dragonfly Meganeura, with a 75-centimeter wingspan -- but this was a time when the Earth's atmosphere had much higher oxygen content (by some estimates, as high as thirty percent), allowing insects' inherently inefficient respiratory systems to be less of a hindrance to growth.  

This argument apparently doesn't have any impact on the people who believe in alien mantids, because according to the webpage, these things are kind of everywhere.  Here's a typical example from the hundreds of encounters you will find described therein:

It started when I was a teenager and went on until my early thirties.  I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to move.  It was terrifying and I would try to scream but nothing would come out.  Sometimes I would see a bright round light across the room and I always felt like it was trying to drain the energy/life out of me.  Sometimes I felt a heavy pressure on me and a couple of times I even thought I could feel someone next to me on the bed.  Once I saw a figure in black who I just felt was evil, standing next to my bed and it also felt like he was trying to drain the energy/life out of me...  And one time I woke up to see a large praying mantis type creature sitting in a chair looking at me and there was a small hooded/cloaked figure next to him.  I can't tell you much about the smaller figure because I didn't pay that much attention to it.  I was more terrified of the larger creature and It had my full attention.  And one thing I do have memory of is noticing a large gold medallion on its chest area.  I know also that it was very tall even though it was sitting on a chair.  I think it was wearing some kind of cape around its shoulders.  I do remember also feeling like it was studying me with indifference, if that makes any sense.  Like it didn't seem to care that I was looking back at it, or that I was terrified.  More like I was just an object in front of it that it was looking at.  I have never gone into this much detail about it before, but these are the main things that stand out in my memory.

You're probably already predicting where I'm going to go with this; this sounds like a classic example of a hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis, a well-studied phenomenon that is undoubtedly terrifying to the people who experience it, but the intensity of their fear doesn't mean what they're seeing is real.  The trouble is, sleep paralysis hallucinations are extraordinarily convincing, because (unlike ordinary nightmares) you're aware of your actual surroundings and the position of your body, so it feels like you're immersed in a partly-real, partly-surreal world, where you can't tell which is which.

Sleep paralysis accounts for maybe half the stories of mantid encounters, from the sound of it.

It's also telling that the other half of the accounts begin with, "After taking a dose of DMT/psilocybin/high-strength THC..."

So I wouldn't worry about being visited by giant mantises.  If you do experience frequent sleep paralysis, though, you might want to see a doctor.  And if you're seeing huge insects after doing drugs, the obvious solution to your problem is "stop doing drugs."

But you have to wonder what mashup of previous posts the universe will find for me next.  Maybe "Bigfoot x ghosts."  Sasquatch sightings are actually people seeing the ghosts of prehistoric proto-hominids.  That claim's gotta be out there somewhere, right?

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Hallucinations

If yesterday's post -- about creating pseudo-interactive online avatars for dead people -- didn't make you question where our use of artificial intelligence is heading, today we have a study out of Purdue University that found an application of ChatGPT to solving programming and coding problems resulted in answers that half the time contained incorrect information -- and 39% of the recipients of these answers didn't recognize the answers as incorrect.

The problem of an AI system basically just making shit up is called a "hallucination," and it's proven to be extremely difficult to eradicate.  This is at least partly because the answers are still generated using real data, so they can sound plausible; it's the software version of a student who only paid attention half the time and then has to take a test, and answers the questions by taking whatever vocabulary words he happens to remember and gluing them together with bullshit.  Google's Bard chatbot, for example, claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope had captured the first photograph of a planet outside the Solar System (a believable lie, but it didn't).  Meta's AI Galactica was asked to draft a paper on the software for creating avatars, and cited a fictitious paper by a real author who works in the field.  Data scientist Teresa Kubacka was testing ChatGPT and decided to throw in a reference to a fictional device -- the "cycloidal inverted electromagnon" -- just to see what the AI would do with it, and it came up with a description of the thing so detailed (with dozens of citations) that Kubacka found herself compelled to check and see if she'd by accident used the name of something obscure but real.

It gets worse than that.  A study of an AI-powered mushroom-identification software found it only got the answer right fifty percent of the time -- and, frighteningly, provided cooking instructions when presented with a photograph of a deadly Amanita mushroom.  Fall for that little "hallucination" and three days later at your autopsy they'll have to pour your liver out of your abdomen.  Maybe the AI was trained on Terry Pratchett's line that "All mushrooms are edible.  Some are only edible once."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marketcomlabo, Image-chatgpt, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Apparently, in inventing AI, we've accidentally imbued it with the very human capacity for lying.

I have to admit that when the first AI became widely available, it was very tempting to play with it -- especially the photo modification software of the "see what you'd look like as a Tolkien Elf" type.  Better sense prevailed, so alas, I'll never find out how handsome Gordofindel is.  (A pity, because human Gordon could definitely use an upgrade.)  Here, of course, the problem isn't veracity; the problem is that the model is trained using art work and photography that is (to put not too fine a point on it) stolen.  There have been AI-generated works of "art" that contained the still-legible signature of the artist whose pieces were used to train the software -- and of course, neither that artist nor the millions of others whose images were "scrubbed" from the internet by the software received a penny's worth of compensation for their time, effort, and skill.

It doesn't end there.  Recently actress Scarlett Johansson announced that she actually had to sue Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to get him to discontinue the use of a synthesized version of her voice that was so accurate it fooled her family and friends.  Here's her statement:

Fortunately for Ms. Johansson, she's got the resources to sue Altman, but most creatives simply don't.  If we even find out that our work has been lifted, we really don't have any recourse to fight the AI techbros' claims that it's "fair use." 

The problem is, the system is set up so that it's already damn near impossible for writers, artists, and musicians to make a living.  I've got over twenty books in print, through two different publishers and a handful that are self-published, and I have never made more than five hundred dollars a year.  My wife, Carol Bloomgarden, is an astonishingly talented visual artist who shows all over the northeastern United States, and in any given show it's a good day when she sells enough to pay for her booth fees, lodging, travel expenses, and food.

So throw a bunch of AI-insta-generated pretty-looking crap into the mix, and what happens -- especially when the "artist" can sell it for one-tenth of the price and still turn a profit? 

I'll end with a plea I've made before; until lawmakers can put the brakes on AI to protect safety, security, and intellectual property rights, we all need to stop using it.  Period.  This is not out of any fundamental anti-tech Luddite-ism; it's simply from the absolute certainty that the techbros are not going to police themselves, not when there's a profit to be made, and the only leverage we have is our own use of the technology.  So stop posting and sharing AI-generated photographs.  I don't care how "beautiful" or "precious" they are.  (And if you don't know the source of an image with enough certainty to cite an actual artist or photographer's name or Creative Commons handle, don't share it.  It's that simple.)

As a friend of mine put it, "As usual, it's not the technology that's the problem, it's the users."  Which is true enough; there are a myriad potentially wonderful uses for AI, especially once they figure out how to debug it.  But at the moment, it's being promoted by people who have zero regard for the rights of human creatives, and are willing to steal their writing, art, music, and even their voices without batting an eyelash.  They are shrugging their shoulders at their systems "hallucinating" incorrect information, including information that could potentially harm or kill you.

So just... stop.  Ultimately, we are in control here, but only if we choose to exert the power we have.

Otherwise, the tech companies will continue to stomp on the accelerator, authenticity, fairness, and truth be damned.

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Android dreams

In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Phantasms," the android Commander Data continues to pursue his lifelong dream of experiencing what it's like to be human by creating a "dream program" -- a piece of software that activates when he sleeps, allowing him to go into a dreamlike state.  The whole thing goes seriously off the rails when he starts having bizarre nightmares, and then waking hallucinations that spur him to attack the ship's counselor Deanna Troi, an action that leaves him relieved of duty and confined to his quarters.

Of course, being Star Trek, the whole thing has to do with aliens, but the more interesting aspect of the story to me is the question of what an artificial intelligence would dream about.  We've yet to figure out exactly why dreaming is so important to our mental health, but it clearly is (this was the subject of what might be the single creepiest TNG episode ever, "Night Terrors").  Without REM sleep and the dreams that occur during it, we become paranoid, neurotic, and eventually completely non-functional; ultimately we start hallucinating, as if the lack of dreams while we're asleep makes them spill over into our waking hours.

So being that the question of why exactly we dream isn't satisfactorily solved, it's going even further out onto a limb to ask what a different intelligence (artificial or otherwise) would dream about, or even if they'd need to dream at all.  Our own dreams have a few very common themes; just about all of us have dreams of being chased, of being embarrassed, of stressful situations (like the "teaching anxiety" dreams I used to have, usually involving my being in my classroom and having my students misbehaving no matter what I tried to stop it).  I still get anxiety dreams about being in a math class in college (it's always math, for some reason), and showing up to find I have an exam that I haven't studied for.  In some versions, I haven't even attended class for weeks, and have no idea what's going on.

Grieving or trauma can induce dreams; we often dream about loved ones we've lost or terrifying situations we've been in.  Most of us have erotic dreams, sometimes acting out situations we'd never dream of participating in while awake.

So although the content of dreams is pretty universal, and in fact shares a lot with the visions induced by psychedelic drugs, why we dream is still unknown.  So it was with considerable curiosity that I read a paper that showed up in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness this month called, "Neural Network Models for DMT-induced Visual Hallucinations," by Michael Schartner (Université de Genève) and Christopher Timmermann (University College London), who took an AI neural network and introduced input to it that mimicked the kind of endogenous (self-created) visual input that occurs during a hallucination, and watched what happened.

The authors write:

Using two deep convolutional network architectures, we pointed out the potential to generate changes in natural images that are in line with subjective reports of DMT-induced hallucinations. Unlike human paintings of psychedelic hallucinations—the traditional way to illustrate psychedelic imagery—using well-defined deep network architectures allows to draw parallels to brain mechanisms, in particular with respect to a perturbed balance between sensory information and prior information, mediated by the serotonergic system.

In our first model, NVIDIA’s generative model StyleGAN, we show how perturbation of the noise input can lead to image distortions reminiscent of verbal reports from controlled experiments in which DMT has been administered.  In particular, the omission of noise leads to a smoother, painterly look of the images, illustrating a potential hypothesis that can be conceptualized with such models: as a 5-HT2A receptor agonist, DMT induces a state in which environmental (i.e. exogenous) sensory information is partially blocked—gated by the inserted noise—and system-internal (endogenous) signals are influencing conscious imagery more strongly.  Contents of immersive imagery experienced in eyes-closed conditions during DMT administration would thereby correspond to the system’s prior information for the construction of a consciously perceived scene.

If you're ready for some nightmares yourself, here's one of their images of the output from introducing psychedelic-like noise into the input of a face-recognition software:

For more disturbing images that come out of giving AI hallucinogens, and a more in-depth explanation of the research than I'm giving here (or am even capable of giving), I direct you to the paper itself, which is fascinating.  The study gives a new lens into the question of our own consciousness -- whether it's an illusion generated by our brain chemistry, or if there really is something more there (a soul, spirit, mind, whatever you might want to call it) that is in some sense independent of the neural underpinning.  The authors write:

Research on image encoding in IT suggests that ‘the computational mission of IT face patches is to generate a robust, efficient, and invariant code for faces, which can then be read-out for any behavioural/cognitive purpose downstream’ (Kornblith and Tsao 2017).  The latent information entering the NVIDIA generative model may thus be interpreted as activity in IT and the output image as the consciously perceived scene, constructed during the read-out by other cortical areas.  How this read-out creates an experience is at the heart of the mind-body problem and we suggest that modelling the effects of DMT on the balance between exogenous and endogenous information may provide experimentally testable hypotheses about this central question of consciousness science.

All of this points out something I've said many times here at Skeptophilia; that we are only beginning to understand how our own brains work.  To quote my friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, Professor Emeritus of Human Genetics at Cornell University, with respect to brain science we're about where we were with respect to genetics in 1921 -- we know a little bit about some of the effects, and a little bit about where things happen, but almost no understanding at all about the mechanisms that are driving the whole thing.  But with research like Schartner and Timmermann's recent paper, we're finally getting a glimpse of the inner workings of that mysterious organ that lies between your ears, the one that is allowing you to read and understand this blog post right now.

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I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

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

Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations.  Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

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

In the mind's eye

I've always found Charles Bonnet syndrome fascinating, and it's not just because the disorder was named after a scientist with whom I share a last name.

Nota bene: Bonnet is definitely not a relative of mine.  He was Swiss, whereas my father's family comes from the French Alps.  Plus, my dad's family name was changed when his great-grandfather emigrated to the United States -- it was originally Ariey.  In that area of France in the 19th century, there were often many branches of families living in a region, and the different branches were distinguished by adding the name of the town they were from as a hyphenated suffix.  My ancestors were Ariey-Bonnet -- Ariey from the town of St. Bonnet -- but when they came over, the immigration officials couldn't handle hyphenated names, so they just dropped the hyphen and Bonnet became the last name.  Just as well.  I have a hard enough time getting people to spell Bonnet correctly, I can't imagine what a pain in the ass it'd be to try to get people to spell Ariey correctly.

But I digress.

Charles Bonnet syndrome is sometimes called having "visual release hallucinations."  It is most common in people with visual impairment, and an odd feature of the disorder is that the people who are seeing them know they're not real.  Most of the time, hallucinations of any sort are terrifying, but in CBS, the sufferer usually just learns not to worry about them.  "I know I'm seeing little elves in carriages rolling alongside me when I walk," one 86-year-old with CBS said.  "When you get used to it, it's actually sort of amusing."

CBS is most common in people with macular degeneration, the most common cause of visual loss in the elderly.  This disorder causes the death of cells in the macula, or the center of the retina (also called the fovea), resulting in holes in the visual field that make it difficult or impossible to drive, watch television, and read.  An estimated 40% of people with macular degeneration experience some level of Charles Bonnet syndrome, experiencing visual hallucinations from the simple (flashing lights) to the elaborate (a head of a brown-eyed lion staring at you).  And new research has begun to explain why partial visual loss can result in bizarre hallucinations.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons William H. Majoros, Lion-1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This week, a paper appeared in the journal Cell entitled, "Stimulus-Driven Cortical Hyperexcitability in Individuals with Charles Bonnet Hallucinations," by David R. Painter, Michael F. Dwyer, Marc R. Kampke, and Jason B. Mattingly, of the University of Queensland.  The researchers found persuasive evidence that the weird hallucinations in CBS occur because the loss of visual acuity in the middle of the retina triggers the peripheral parts of the retina (and the parts of the visual cortex they're connected to) to overreact -- to become, in the researchers' words, "hyperexcitable."  The authors write:

Throughout the lifespan, the cerebral cortex adapts its structure and function in response to changing sensory input.  Whilst such changes are typically adaptive, they can be maladaptive when they follow damage to the peripheral nervous system, including phantom limb pain and tinnitus. An intriguing example occurs in individuals with acquired ocular pathologies—most commonly age-related macular degeneration (MD)—who lose their foveal vision but retain intact acuity in the peripheral visual field.  Up to 40% of ocular pathology patients develop long-term hallucinations involving flashes of light, shapes, or geometric patterns and/or complex hallucinations, including faces, animals, or entire scenes, a condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS). 

Though CBS was first described over 250 years ago, the neural basis for the hallucinations remains unclear, with no satisfactory explanation as to why some individuals develop hallucinations, while many do not.  An influential but untested hypothesis for the visual hallucinations in CBS is that retinal deafferentation [loss of sensory information from one part of the body] causes hyperexcitability in early visual cortex.  To assess this, we investigated electrophysiological responses to peripheral visual field stimulation in MD patients with and without hallucinations and in matched controls without ocular pathology.  Participants performed a concurrent attention task within intact portions of their peripheral visual field, while ignoring flickering checkerboards that drove periodic electrophysiological responses.  CBS individuals showed strikingly elevated visual cortical responses to peripheral field stimulation compared with patients without hallucinations and controls, providing direct support for the hypothesis of visual cortical hyperexcitability in CBS.

What this highlights once again is how fragile our sensory-perceptive systems are.  Loss of input from one area is bad enough; but instead of it simply causing a missing chunk from the sensory field, it causes you to misinterpret the signals from the part of your sensory system that is still working.  

Hardly seems fair.

At least CBS sufferers know what they're seeing isn't real, and learn to live with elves and lions and flashing lights.  Much worse are disorders like hebephrenic schizophrenia, where people have visual or auditory hallucinations -- and can't tell them from reality.  How completely terrifying that must be!

It's fascinating, however, to compare how certain we are that what we're seeing is real, and the minor changes it takes to have us see something that's clearly not real.  Once again, "I saw it with my own eyes" is a poor guide -- whether or not we're seeing elves in carriages.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

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

DMT and NDEs

No one would be happier than me if it turned out there was an afterlife.

Well, at least some types of afterlife.  The tortured-forever-in-the-fiery-furnace version doesn't appeal much to me, especially given my status as an evil godless heathen.  Reincarnation, in my opinion, would also kind of suck, since it's basically getting sent back to the beginning of the game.  Valhalla would be kind of cool, though.  I could definitely get into swordfighting and quaffing mead.  And some of the ones where you get to relax in fields of flowers, with every need taken care of, also sound good, especially on work days.

The problem is, there's no real evidence of any of them.  Not that you'd expect there'd be; after all, to get to the afterlife you pretty much have to be dead.  And as Michael Shermer put it, it's easy to talk to the dead -- the hard part is getting them to respond.

There are people who claim there's evidence from near-death experiences -- NDEs, in common parlance.  The idea is that people who have had NDEs report back a lot of common features, including the well-known "tunnel of light" and feelings of oneness, bliss, and transcendence.  The argument goes that since what people claim to have experienced is often very similar, there must be something to it -- those people have peeked across the threshold, and come back to tell us about it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've never found that argument terribly convincing.  Since we all have brains (although some of us could stand to use them more frequently), you'd expect that they'd respond similarly under similar circumstances of oxygen deprivation, neural shutdown, and all the other things that happens when a person dies.  And that stance has been bolstered considerably by a study done at Imperial College (London) last month, in which thirteen volunteers were given a chemical called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and reported back experiences identical to what has been heard from people who have had NDEs.

DMT has become well-known because it is the main psychotropic ingredient in ayahuasca, a plant extract used in the Amazon Basin to induce hallucinations.  DMT interacts with serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, and that seems to be the cause of its effects, which include euphoria, visual disturbances, and -- most strikingly -- the sensation of communicating with non-corporeal beings.

What the researchers did with the test subjects in this study is to administer DMT under controlled conditions, and not only monitored their physical and mental states, but asked them for their subjective experiences when they "sobered up."  And there was an amazing similarity between the DMT trips and reports of NDEs.

One test subject described a "tunnel" that she felt impelled to enter, and once she did so, the anxiety she'd felt evaporated completely.  She was "shown" various images, and they all appeared to her to be critical to understanding her life.  "One image I do remember is lots of books flipping open and rainbows zooming out," she said.  "I felt a presence lift my head and tell me to pay attention: 'You came to discover something.'  But it was a juxtaposition because I felt disembodied at the same time. It was a strange paradox...  The normal laws of physics didn't apply.  I was walking around my consciousness in a lucid dream.  Imagine dreaming and things morph and the normal laws of physics don't apply.  I was walking around my consciousness in a lucid dream."

What strikes me about all this is that if it's easy to simulate an NDE by altering your brain chemistry, maybe altering your brain chemistry is what causes an NDE.  As I tell my neuroscience students, if you monkey around with your neurotransmitters, you should expect bizarre things to happen; and, after all, since every experience we have is filtered through our neurotransmitters, it's bound to change your perception of the world.

It doesn't, however, mean that any of it is real.

There's also been a conjecture by more than one neuroscientist that endogenous (self-produced) DMT exists to protect our cells from the effects of oxygen starvation, so it's released in one big shot when our heart stops in a last-ditch effort to keep our brain cells alive.  If that's true, no wonder everyone experiences the same sorts of sensations in an NDE -- and their similarity to a DMT psychedelic trip.

So the DMT experiment is fascinating, but it seems to me not to bolster the case for an afterlife.  It does make me curious about the experience, however.  A friend of mine asked me whether I would take DMT or psilocybin if it was under controlled, safe circumstances, and I knew I wouldn't get arrested.  My answer was, "Absolutely."  The idea of creating the sensation of a transcendent experience sounds pretty appealing even if I don't believe it necessarily reflects any sort of external reality.

And, after all, my other alternative is to wait until I die, which strikes me as being less than optimal given that after having the transcendent experience, I'll be dead.

Kind of a downside, that.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

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