Invention of things past

On July 7, 2005, an Islamic suicide bomber detonated an explosive device on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, London, killing thirteen people and injuring dozens of others.  It was part of a coordinated series of attacks that day that took 52 lives.

Understandably, investigators put a tremendous amount of effort into trying to determine what exactly had happened on that horrible day.  They questioned eyewitnesses, and of course the case was all over the news for weeks.  Three years later, a man named James Ost, of the University of Portsmouth, became interesting in finding out what impact the event had made on people who lived nearby at the time, and began to interview locals.

A common theme was how traumatizing it had been to watch the CCTV footage of the actual Tavistock explosion.  Four out of ten people Ost interviewed had details seared into their brains -- hearing the screams, seeing the debris flying in all directions.  One man said he remembered actually seeing someone -- he wasn't sure if it was a passenger or the bomber himself -- blown to bits.  More than one said they had felt reluctant to watch it at the time, and afterwards regretted having done so.

All of which is fascinating -- because there is no CCTV footage of the explosion.  In fact, no video record of the bombing, of any kind, exists.

Ost's study was not the first to look at the phenomenon of false or invented memory, but it's justifiably one of the most famous.  A couple of things that are remarkable about this study are the Ost didn't give much of a prompt to the test subjects about video footage; he simply asked them to recall as much as they could about what they'd seen of the bombing, and the subjects came up with the rest on their own.  Second, the memories had astonishing detail, down to the color of clothing some of the people in the imagined video were wearing.  And third -- most disturbingly -- was the power of the false memory.  Several test subjects, when told there was no footage of the attack, simply refused to believe it.

"But I remember it," was the common refrain.

Our memories are incomplete and inaccurate, filled with lacunae (the psychological term for gaps in recall), and laced through with seemingly sharp details of events that never actually happened.  Those details can come from a variety of sources -- what we were told happened, what we imagine happened, what happened to someone else that we later misremembered as happening to us, and outright falsehoods.  Oh, sure, some of what we remember is accurate; but how do you know which part that is, when the false and inaccurate memories seem just as vivid, just as real?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons, Brain memory, CC0 1.0]

The scariest part is how quickly those errors start to form.  In the last fifteen seconds, I took a sip of my morning coffee, looked out of the window at a goldfinch on my bird feeder, noticed that my dog had gotten up because I could hear him eating his breakfast in the next room.  How in the hell could I be remembering any of that incorrectly, given that it all happened under a minute ago?

Well, a paper that appeared last week in PLOS-One, about a study done at the University of Amsterdam, showed that inaccuracies in our memories increase by 150% in the time between a half-second and three seconds after the event occurs.

The study was simple and elegant.  Test subjects were shown words with highlighted letters, and asked to recall two things; which letter was highlighted, and whether the highlighted letter was shown in its normal orientation or else reversed right-to-left.  Most people were pretty good at recalling what the highlighted letter was, but because seeing mirror-image letters is not something we expect, recognizing and recalling that took more effort.

And if you wait three seconds, the error rate for remembering whether the letter was reversed climbs from twenty to thirty percent.  Evidently, our memory very quickly falls back on "recalling" what it thinks we should have seen, and not what we actually did see.

It's a profoundly unsettling finding.  It's almost like our existence is this moving window of reality, and as it slips by, the images it leaves behind begin to degrade almost immediately.  "I know it happened that way, I remember it clearly" is, honestly, an absurd statement.  None of us remembers the past with any kind of completeness or clarity, however sure we feel about it.  Unless you have a video of the events in question, I'd hesitate to trumpet your own certainty too loudly.

And, of course, it also means you have to check to see if the video itself actually exists.

****************************************

The mental delete key

About ten years ago, some students in my AP Biology class decided to do an experiment on false memory as their final project.

The setup was simple and elegant.  One of the students sat behind a small card table on which there were two dozen objects of various types and sizes, initially covered by a cloth.  The test subject came in, sat down, and was told (s)he would be given a memory test at the end of three minutes' time to study the objects on the table.  The cloth was removed, the timer started.

At a minute and a half in, the other student running the study -- who until then had been offstage -- came in, picked up one of the objects, and walked off with it.  Naturally enough, the test subjects focused on which object she'd picked up.

When the three minutes were up, the test subject was read aloud a series of twelve questions about the experience.  The answers to only three of them mattered -- the first one and the last two:

• Question 1: What object did the girl in the blue shirt remove from the table?
• Question 11: The girl who came in and removed an object -- what color was her shirt?
• Question 12: How do you know what color her shirt was?

You've probably already guessed that her shirt wasn't blue; in fact, it was brilliant red.  But 95% of the fairly sizable number of test subjects answered "blue."  Only two test subjects said "red;" several of them said "I don't remember."

But where it got seriously interesting was how the subjects who said "blue" answered question #12.  Because the vast majority of them said, "I remember seeing it."  Once again, there were only a couple of outliers who said "Because you told me it was blue in question #1," and one or two who said, "I'm not sure."  The remainder were convinced they remembered seeing it.  When informed that the other member of the scientific team had been wearing a red shirt, several people flat-out didn't believe it and asked that she come back and prove it to them.  One of them even accused her of having changed her shirt!

This has always been one of my favorite examples of how plastic and unreliable human memory is.  "I know it happened that way, I remember it" is remarkably thin ice.  My students' clever experiment is innocuous enough, but think of the role false memories could play in a court of law -- where someone's freedom, perhaps their life, depends on the people on the witness stand remembering what actually happened.

So that's kind of sobering.  But a study this week which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives us some encouraging news; false memories are easier to eradicate than real memories -- indicating they may be stored differently in the brain, and don't get the same weight as memories of events that we really witnessed.

[Image "Brain/Memory" licensed under the Creative Commons © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons]

In "Rich False Memories of Autobiographical Events Can Be Reversed," Aileen Oeberst (University of Hagen), Merle Madita Wachendörfer (Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien), Roland Imhoff (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz), and Hartmut Blank (University of Portsmouth) show us a simple protocol by which people can be induced to purge their brains of false or implanted memories.  They took a test group of 52 individuals whose parents had also agreed to participate.  Without being told what exactly was going on, the test subjects were given a period during which their parents recalled with them a series of childhood memories -- but in each case, two of the "memories" were false and the rest were not.  (Examples of false memories implanted were incidents like running away from home, getting lost, or being in a car accident -- more serious and emotion-laden than what shirt someone was wearing!)

As with previous experiments, the test subjects afterward were unable to tell apart the real memories from the false ones; both seemed to exist in their minds with equal intensity.  Then the researchers tried two approaches to eradicate the false memories: (1) alerting the test subjects to the possibility that their memories were false, and were due to other sources, such as family narratives; and (2) asking test subjects to describe how they know their memories were true (a little like the "How did you know her shirt was blue?" question my students asked).

Both of them worked, and more interesting still, memories of real events were unaffected when the researchers tried the same strategy on them.  Put differently, asking people to slow down and consider their brain's fallibility, and the sources of what they think they recall, had the effect of deleting false memories but not real ones.

Even more interesting was how persistent the effect was.  A one-year followup on the test subjects found that the implanted memories were virtually all gone -- asked whether an unreal event had happened in their childhood, almost all the volunteers rejected it.

"By raising participants' awareness of the possibility of false memories, urging them to critically reflect on their recollections and strengthening their trust in their own perspective, we were able to significantly reduce their false memories. Moreover, and importantly, this did not affect their ability to remember true events," said study senior author Hartmut Blank, in an interview with Science Daily.  "We designed our techniques so that they can principally be applied in real-world situations.  By empowering people to stay closer to their own truth, rather than rely on other sources, we showed we could help them realize what might be false or misremembered -- something that could be very beneficial in forensic settings."

Very encouraging indeed.  Nice to hear that our brains aren't quite as easily duped as we'd thought.  It does make me wonder, though, how these more-easily-eradicated false memories are encoded in the brain.  Is there a neurological reason why the false memories are susceptible to a mental delete key, and the real ones aren't?  What I'd love to see is a comparison of fMRI results of people recalling real and implanted memories.

Maybe a direction for a subsequent experiment.  But at least now we have some hope of sifting out the wheat from the chaff in our brains -- and remembering more accurately what really happened, even if it's just what color shirt someone was wearing.

********************************

If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

[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.

**********************************

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!]

Remembrance of things past

Sometimes science uncovers things that are profoundly unsettling.  The problem is, as Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe it."

Believing it, though, can run counter to our own intuition.  Consider, for example, the work of Julia Shaw, psychologist and lecturer at London South Bank University, which indicates that much of what we think we remember is simply wrong.

Shaw is a specialist in "false memory," our brain's ability to craft completely convincing memories of events that never happened.  And they're not minor and uncommon glitches, but pervasive and unavoidable.  "The question isn't whether our memories are false, it's how false are our memories," Shaw says, in an interview with Scientific American earlier this year.  "Complex and full false memories (of entire events) are probably less common than partial false memories (where we misremember parts of events that happened), but we already naturally fill in so many gaps between pieces of memories and make so many assumptions, that our personal past is essentially just a piece of fiction."

Nor are they always about small and insignificant pieces of our past.  In a study by Maryann Garry and Matthew P. Gerry, of the University of Wellington (New Zealand) Department of Psychology, the researchers found that complex and detailed false memories could be implanted by the simple expedient of a cleverly doctored photograph -- inducing one test subject to "remember" taking a hot-air balloon ride that never happened.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I find this deeply unnerving, mostly because of how rock-solid my memories seem to me.  "Of course it happened that way," my brain says to me.  "I remember it.  I can picture it.  It happened."

Shaw and others, however, have conclusively shown that this is a fallacious stance.  "I have always been self-conscious about my autobiographical memories, since I have always been really bad at remembering things that happen in my personal life," Shaw says.  "I am pretty good, on the other hand at remembering facts and information.  This is part of why I was confident my research on creating false memories could work, since if my memory was like this surely there must be others out there whose memories also don't work perfectly."

Which turns out to be an understatement.  "While I was always cautious about memory accuracy (as far as I remember, hah!)," Shaw continues, "now I am convinced that no memories are to be trusted. I am confident that we create our memories every day anew, if ever so slightly.  It's such a terrifying but beautiful notion that every day you wake up with a slightly different personal past."

For me, emphasis on the "terrifying" part, especially considering how much faith most of us have in our memories.  Eyewitness testimony is considered one of the strongest pieces of evidence in courts of law, and the work of Shaw and others has shown that it is in fact one of the weakest.  But on a more personal level, it's distressing to realize that so much of what we think of as our personal history might well be false.  It brings to mind the numerous instances when my wife and I have argued over the way a particular event happened.  Each of us was dead certain we remembered it right.  In fact -- it might be that neither of us was right.

The scariest thing to me is that there seems to be no way to tell the false memories from the accurate ones.  "[O]nce they take hold false memories are no different from true memories in the brain," Shaw says.  "This means that they have the same properties as any other memories, and are indistinguishable from memories of events that actually happened. The only way to check is to find corroborating evidence for any particular memory that you are interested in 'validating'."

Which, of course, isn't always possible.  So the unsettling truth is that what you remember of your past is a patchwork quilt of real events, partially misremembered events, and complete made-up bullshit your brain has invented.  The next time you're arguing with a friend over something in the past...

... remember that.

Remembrance of things past

In the movie Memento, the main character, a fellow named Leonard Shelby, has anterograde amnesia, a brain disorder that prevents the formation of new short-term memories.  He forms his knowledge of the world from labeled Polaroid snapshots of people, and (for really important things) information that he has tattooed on his own skin.  The problem is, because he has no ability to reference memories of those people and events, he doesn't know if what he has written on the photographs and on himself is true -- if he was wrong, or being lied to, when he wrote the information down.

It's a fantastic, but highly unsettling, film.  Our worlds are made of a skein of remembered events, and without that network of referents, we are completely adrift.

The problem is that even for those of us who do not suffer from anterograde amnesia, what we remember is far less reliable than we think it is.  Consider that even those of us who admit "I have a terrible memory" are still quite convinced that what they do remember of the past is accurate.

And they should not be.  None of us should be.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole topic comes up because of a ridiculous claim sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  In it, a rather hysterical sounding guy tells us that the scientists at CERN have gone back in time and altered the past so as to change the title of Interview with a Vampire to Interview with the Vampire.   As evidence, he shows us that the top search words beginning with "interview with" are "interview with a vampire."  Q.e.d., apparently.

As for why CERN physicists would bother to do such a thing, the narrator says, "Maybe it's just a test.  I dunno."  But whatever the reason, his two-minute video sure struck a chord with some people. Amongst the comments we find:

Its [sic] interview with a vampire!!!!!  i remember it distinctly and clearly..... when i checked google after watching your video i got goose bumps, felt strange..... if you search for cached files on google its listed as 'A' vampire on an old Amazon link, and there are some old videos posted with the title 'Interview with a vampire 2'..... in the words of Tom Baker "somethings [sic] going on contrary to the laws of time!, i must find out what!!"

and

this is totally fucked up whats [sic] going on I am really scared...  what really really scares me is how some of us remember it the other way cause that means some of use [sic] are being manipulated and they changed our thinking some how and we don't know... but the caches support our old claims cause if it was always the new alternate reality the old searches for the proper names would not be cached in the search engines... 

The possibility of simply misremembering is apparently much more far-fetched to these people.

And the problem is that all of us misremember.  A lot.  Lawrence Patihis, a psychological researcher at the University of California-Irvine, found that even people with "Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory" -- the rare individuals who can tell you what they wore, did, and ate for breakfast on October 23, 2004 -- still get it wrong some of the time.   For their ordinary memories (at least the ones that can be cross-checked against hard evidence), they have a three-percent failure rate; but when they are presented with information that deliberately screws around with their recollections, they end up with false/implanted memories 20% of the time.  Here's how science writer Erika Hayasaki describes the experiment:

Twenty people with such memory were shown slideshows featuring a man stealing a wallet from a woman while pretending to help her, and then a man breaking into a car with a credit card and stealing $1 bills and necklaces.  Later, they read two narratives about those slideshows containing misinformation.  When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory. 

In another test, subjects were told there was news footage of the plane crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, even though no actual footage exists.  When asked whether they remembered having seen the footage before, 20 percent of subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory indicated they had, compared to 29 percent of people with regular memory. 

“Even though this study is about people with superior memory, this study should really make people stop and think about their own memory,” Patihis said.  “Gone are the days when people thought that [only] maybe 20, 30 or 40 percent of people are vulnerable to memory distortions.”

The bottom line is that even the best of us have unreliable memories, which puts the rest of us slobs straight into "You're probably remembering almost everything incompletely and incorrectly" territory.  It's a frightening conclusion; what we remember seems so solid, so incontrovertible, that it's hard to imagine that what is in our memory centers is an amalgam of actual fact, stuff we were told by others, and stuff that we spun straight from whole cloth.  And without anything to compare it to, we're not much better off than Leonard Shelby with his photographs and tattoos.

So there's no need to accuse the scientists at CERN of going back in time to change one word in a book title.  First off, they have many better things to do, such as creating black holes to destroy the Earth and developing targeted weather death rays to send hurricanes to places that strangely enough always get hurricanes anyway.  It's not that we don't know that people forget things or get things wrong... it's just that we get uncomfortable when we realize that our memories are far worse than we like to admit.

It is your mind that bends

Two days ago, I was in my car on the way to a gig with my band, 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 courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

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 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 of which we all live.  (On second thought, the reader sending me the link is not so surprising after all; it was in response to yesterday's post on déjà vu.)

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, 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.

Many worlds

I've always had a fairly good memory -- for certain things, at least.  I usually lecture my classes without notes, for example.  I find that it keeps my teaching fluid, much more so than it would be if I were just reading from a script.  (Every once in a while, though, the technique fails me, and I have to check something, or simply can't remember a particular term -- an occurrence I'm finding ever more common as I mosey my way through my 50s.)

At the same time, though, I'm constantly aware of how plastic and unreliable human memory is.  We form impressions of events, and sometimes those impressions are actually very far from correct.  The odd thing is that these pseudomemories don't seem inaccurate, or fuzzy.  My personal experience is that memories which are flat wrong seem perfectly solid -- until someone points out that facts demonstrate conclusively that what I'm remembering can't be correct.

It is this seeming certainty that is puzzling, and sometimes alarming.  A study back in 2005 by James Ost, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Portsmouth (England), demonstrated all of this with frightening clarity.  Ost took a group of volunteers in England and in Sweden, and asked them if they'd seen CCTV footage of the 2005 Tavistock Square bombing, when in fact no such footage exists.  50% of the Swedish participants said they had, and a full 84% of the English ones did!  Further, when Ost asked the volunteers who had responded "yes" for details about the video footage, they gave surprising amounts of information.  Ost asked one participant, "Was the bus moving when the bomb went off?" and received the following response: "The bus had just stopped to let two people off, when two women got on, and a man.  He placed the bag by his side, the woman sat down and doors closed.  As the bus left there was an explosion and then everyone started to scream."

So, as unsettling as it seems, a lot of what we remember didn't happen that way, or perhaps didn't happen at all.  Not a pleasant thought, but it seems like it's pretty universal to the way the human mind works.

Ost's study makes what I ran across yesterday all the more bizarre.  On a website called "The Mandela Effect," we are introduced to a woman named Fiona Broome, whose interest lies in exactly the sort of memory side-slips that Ost researched.  Her curiosity about such occurrences started when she realized how many of her acquaintances "remembered" that Nelson Mandela had died in jail -- even recalled details of his funeral from news stories they'd read.  But instead of coming to Ost's conclusion, which is that human memory is simply unreliable, Broome has reached a different explanation.

Broome thinks that these represent memories accessed from alternate realities.

"That’s not a conspiracy theory," Broome writes.  "It’s related to alternate history and parallel realities.  Exploring the quantum / 'Sliders' concept further, I discovered an entire world of shifting realities that people try to reconcile daily...  These aren’t simple errors in memory; they seem to be fully-constructed incidents (or sequential events) from the past.  They exceed the normal range of forgetfulness.  Even stranger, other people seem to have identical memories."

What are these "identical memories" that many people supposedly share?  They include:

• The deaths of Billy Graham, actors Henry Winkler, Shirley Temple, and David Soul, and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
• Plots and various other details on Mystery Science Theater and Star Trek: Voyager.
• Details and release dates of the movies Avatar and Terminator.
• Various PS1 games that don't exist.
• The locations of New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

And apparently, Fiona Broome and the others of her mindset actually think that all of this is better explained by their somehow accessing an "alternate universe" than it is by their simply not remembering stuff correctly.

Even if you buy the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics -- a conjecture which is far from settled amongst physicists, however many plots of science fiction movies depend on its being correct -- there's absolutely no reason to believe that we still have access to alternate timelines once splitting has occurred.  If that were true, and people could jump back and forth between universes, it kind of throws the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy right out of the window.  And that law pairs up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as two of the most fundamental building blocks of our understanding of the universe, and -- more importantly -- they are two laws for which no exception has ever been shown.

[image of "Schrödinger's Cat and Universe Branching" courtesy of Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

Even ardent many-worlds supporters like Hugh Everett and John Archibald Wheeler believed that once the timeline has forked, the two universes are permanently sealed off from one another.  No information, much less matter and energy, can get from one to the other, which means that if many-worlds is right, there's no way to prove it (this, in fact, is one of the main objections from detractors).  So even though timeline-jumping is a central trope in my novel Lock & Key, I am very much of the opinion that the entire idea rests on a physical impossibility (which is why the novel is filed in the "fiction" section).

Sadly, this leaves Fiona Broome et al. kind of getting sliced to ribbons by Ockham's Razor.  Bit of a shame, really, because it would be cool if we could get a glimpse of alternate universes.  It brings to mind a quote from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian:

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No. Nobody is ever told that."

It may well be that Broome's conjecture is more appealing than Ost's is; that our memory lapses represent the glittering remains of sideward steps into other worlds instead of simple neural failures.  But unfortunately, Ost's conclusion lines up better with the evidence.  Other studies, showing how easy it is to implant false memories, and how completely convincing those pseudomemories seem, indicate that what's really happening is that we are creating our recollections as we go, and some of them are simply invented from bits and pieces, from suggestions, or out of thin air.

The world, it seems, is far more solid than our memory of it.  So if Sri Lanka appears to have moved to the southeast, as some people apparently believe, then it's much more likely that you simply don't remember your geography very well than it is that you've had a glimpse of an alternate Earth in which the island is anchored elsewhere.

Creating the past

Okay, this post may be a bit off-the-wall.   I'm perfectly willing to believe that what I'm going to say here might be entirely bogus.  That said, bear with me for a moment, and if you still think that by the end, feel free to let me have it right between the eyes.

A friend of mine told me an interesting anecdote a while back.  Her teenage son had lost his car keys, and she knew that his keys were on a worn blue carabiner.   She suddenly had this mental picture of them, sitting on a blanket or a bedsheet, and was convinced she'd seen them earlier that day.

"I think they're either in your bedroom or on the sofa or something," she told him.  "I know I saw them, on some kind of blanket or cloth or something, just recently."

So the two of them tore the house apart, looking on every such cloth surface they could find.  Oddly, the more they looked (without finding them) the more certain she became; she had a clear visual image of the keys on a tangled-up blanket.  Finally they gave up, but it was driving her crazy, because she knew she'd seen them earlier that day.

Well, when the son went out to his car (using a spare key), he found the key ring -- still hanging from the ignition, where he'd left it the night before.

My friend was baffled.   The visual image was so clear, so real, that she couldn't imagine that it wasn't true.   I asked her if she might have seen them a day or two ago on a bed or something, and simply misremembered when she'd seen them.

"No," she said. "I talked to my son about that afterward.   He said he almost never leaves his car keys anywhere but on the kitchen counter.   He was confused, himself, when I told him I'd seen them on a blanket, because he couldn't imagine how they'd have gotten there, but he said I sounded so sure.  And not only did I have a crystal-clear visual image of them, I was certain that it was that day that I'd seen them."

So, off and running my mind goes, and I say to her: "That makes me wonder how much of what we remember of our past actually happened."

And her eyes got really big, and she said, "I know.  I've been wondering the same thing.  Are our memories of our past real, or are they just stories we've told to ourselves long enough that they have become what we actually remember?"

The human memory is a remarkably plastic thing; well-controlled experiments have been performed which have conclusively demonstrated that memories can be implanted.  This was the subject of a final lab project from one of my AP Biology student groups some years ago.  The experiment was ostensibly to test people's memory of a variety of objects on a table, but the actual question had to do with implanted memories.  Subjects were given three minutes to study a set of twenty objects; then, during the test, one of the experimenters (who had before been hiding, out of sight) came out and took one object off the table, and then walked back out of the room with it.   A read-aloud questionnaire given afterwards asked (along with a number of irrelevant distractor questions), "What object did the girl in the blue shirt take off the table?"  Well, the girl had been wearing a red shirt, but not only did not one single subject mention that when the question was read, when they got to the last question -- "What color shirt was the girl wearing who came in and took an object?" -- almost every test subject answered "blue."  Further, when the subjects were told that the girl had been wearing a red shirt, several of them simply didn't believe it -- to the extent that one test subject demanded that the partner come back into the room, and when she appeared wearing a red shirt, he accused the pair of a ruse wherein the hidden partner had changed her blue shirt to red while she was out of the room the second time!

Of course, this has major implications for "leading the witness" in criminal trials -- given the right prompting, people can be induced to "remember" something that didn't actually happen.  While this is an interesting topic, what concerns me is more personal.  I wonder how many of my own life's memories are of events that didn't happen?  How much is implanted memory, formed of what my parents or friends told me happened, and which I then incorporated into my brain as if I actually remembered it myself?  What parts are memories of events which occurred but were remembered inaccurately, and then repeated so often that the inaccurate memory seems real?  What memories are an out-and-out fabrication on the part of my rather capricious brain?   I consider myself to be a fairly truthful person; but how can you not lie when an untruth has become part of your remembered past?

Worse yet, with no corroborative evidence, how could we ever tell factual memories from fictional ones?  As my friend's experience shows (however insignificant the actual event was), we can talk ourselves into believing, fervently, something which is entirely false.  When you remember your past, is your memory really a composite of truth, half-truth, and cleverly (if inadvertently) crafted fiction?