A voice from the static

There's a fallacy out there that is a little on the tricky side, even more so because it appears so straightforward at first.  It's called the single-cause fallacy.

Put simply (pun intended) it's the idea that complex realities can be attributed to single, often easy-to-state, causes.  The debate over slavery caused the American Civil War.  Teen violence is attributable to violent movies, TV, and video games.  High crime in American border states is caused by illegal immigration.

The problem is, the universe is a complex place, and it is rare to find just about anything that is solely due to one causative factor.  But it's a natural human tendency to gravitate toward simplistic explanations -- the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is something we all fall prey to.

Critical thinking, after all, is hard work.

I ran into an interesting (and less fraught, at least for most people) example of this in an article called "Electronic Voice Modulation: Voices of the Dead?", by James Alcock.  Because this article is from Scientific American, it follows Betteridge's Law -- the answer is "No" -- so the question, of course, is, "If they're not the disembodied voices of dead people, what are they?"

For those of you unfamiliar with EVPs, the gist is that you usually start with one of two things -- either an audio recording made in an empty room, or presumed "white noise" (such as the static from a radio tuned between nearby stations).  You then listen and see if you can hear words, phrases, or entire sentences.  And according to many people, these are communications from the spirits of the departed.  They're often really hard to hear, such as this one that is supposed to be a male voice whispering "Save me" (I've been through it several times, and I'm still flummoxed.)  This one is a little clearer, and includes phrases like "She'll never believe us," "She's back," and "Oliver."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Omegatron, White-noise, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's difficult about this is that even setting aside two of the more obvious explanations -- (1) EVPs really are communications from the dead, and (2) they're hoaxes -- there are multiple explanations proposed for what's going on here:

1. Cross-modulation.  This happens with radio and TV static, where a device picks up snippets of a broadcast from some other medium.
2. Apophenia.  Apophenia is a brain phenomenon, where we look for (and often find) patterns in random stimuli.  Our brains are pattern-seeking devices; they often misfire and see or hear patterns that aren't there.
3. Suggestion/priming.  Note that lots of recorded examples of EVPs caption the audio track (at the relevant moment) with what the Dead Person is supposedly saying.  As James Randi said, "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there."  (This is often what's going on with allegations of backmasking, where singers are accused of including encoded, usually satanic, messages in their songs that can only be deciphered when the song is played backwards.  The message is usually indecipherable until the listener is told what it supposedly says -- at which point it jumps out.)
4. Artifacts.  These can be inadvertent alteration of the original recording because of filtering, frequency enhancement, and application of noise reduction, or even -- in old EVP claims from the days of cassette tapes -- re-recording over previous audio that didn't completely erase the original.
5. Raising the noise floor of the recording. The noise floor is the sum of all the noise produced by the electronic device itself, and thus a way to produce white noise from which EVP enthusiasts can then try to extract signals.  The problem is, this introduces another post-recording effect, because the white noise itself is usually then filtered, often using a spectral glide filter to enhance any vowel-like sounds that might occur in the recording -- something familiar to anyone who likes the music of rockers like Peter Frampton.  The processing is actually making the recording more likely to sound like speech to listeners, even if there's nothing there.
6. Wishful thinking.  It's no coincidence that positive responses to EVPs where there was no priming occur in people who already believed that EVPs are communications from the spirit world -- nor that EVP investigators almost always hear messages in their own native languages.

So EVPs -- prominently featured on all the ghost hunting programs, YouTube channels, and so on -- are not attributable to one simple cause, and that's even if you set aside for the moment the possibility that they're missives from the disembodied souls of the dead.

And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  You have some strange set of phenomena, and perhaps you explain one of them (e.g. "this particular EVP was cross-modulation, where we picked up a blip from a nearby radio station"), but you can't then jump to the conclusion that they all have that explanation.  Each instance has to be evaluated on its own merits, which is time-consuming and often frustrating.

It's why I have some sympathy for the skeptics who are inclined to dismiss them all (as well as all UFO sightings, cryptid sightings, and so on) and be done with it.  The danger, of course, is throwing out the wheat with the chaff.  You may have seen a strange story that was making the rounds -- a paper in Nature, of all places -- that was about the discovery of some odd UFOs (or UAPs -- unidentified aerial phenomena -- as I guess we're now calling them) on eighty year old photographic plates from Palomar Observatory, that showed some mysterious moving objects that "are not easily accounted for by prosaic explanations."  There was a weak correlation between their appearance and known nuclear testing, but even that seems to be a stretch.  Even the ordinarily hard-edged skeptic Sabine Hossenfelder admits that they're a mystery.  As one commenter responded, "It's never aliens... until it is."

So we're back to "critical thinking is difficult."  Blanket disbelief (i.e. cynicism) is just as lazy as gullibility is.  We have to come back time and again to the actual evidence, logic, and principles of scientific induction -- and keep your mind open, although (as Walter Kotschnig put it) "... not so open that your brains fall out."

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Primed and ready

One of the beefs a lot of aficionados of the paranormal have with us skeptics has to do with a disagreement over the quality of evidence.

Take, for example, Hans Holzer, who was one of the first serious ghost hunters.  His work in the field started in the mid-twentieth century and continued right up to his death in 2009 at the venerable age of 89, during which time he not only visited hundreds of allegedly haunted sites but authored 120 books documenting his experiences.

No one doubts Holzer's sincerity; he clearly believed what he wrote, and was not a hoaxer or a charlatan.  But if you read his books, what will strike anyone of a skeptical bent is that virtually all of it is comprised of anecdote.  Stories from homeowners, accounts of "psychic mediums," recounting of old tales and legends.  None of it is demonstrated scientifically, in the sense of encounters that occur in controlled circumstances where credulity or outright fakery by others can be rigorously ruled out.

After all, Holzer may well have been scrupulously honest, but that doesn't mean that the people he worked with were.

I'll just interject my usual disclaimer; none of this constitutes disproof, either.  But in the absence of evidence that meets the minimum standard acceptable in science, the most parsimonious explanation is that Holzer's many stories are accounted for by human psychology, flaws in perception, and the plasticity of memory, and the possibility that at least some of his informants were exaggerating or lying about their own experiences.

As an illustration of just one of the difficulties with accepting anecdote, consider the phenomenon of priming.  What we experience is strongly affected by what we expect to experience; even a minor interjection ahead of time of a mental image (for example) can alter how we see, interpret, and remember something else that occurred afterward.  A simple example -- if someone is shown a yellow object and afterward asked to name a fruit, they come up with "banana" or "lemon" far more frequently than someone who was shown a different color (or who wasn't primed at all).  It all occurs without our conscious awareness; often the person who was primed didn't even know it was happening.

This becomes more insidious when it starts affecting how people understand the world around them.  To take another lightweight example, but which gets at how claims of the supernatural start, take the currently popular "paranormal game" called "Red Door, Yellow Door."  "Red Door, Yellow Door" is a little like the game that all of us Of A Certain Age will remember, the one called "Bloody Mary."  The way "Bloody Mary" works is that you stand in front of a mirror, stare into it, and chant "Bloody Mary" over and over, and after a moment, nothing happens.

What's supposed to happen is that your face turns into the blood-dripping visage of a woman, or else you see her over your shoulder.  Most of us who tried it, of course, got what the paranormal investigators call "disappointing results."  But "Red Door, Yellow Door" moves even one step further from verifiable reality,  because the whole thing takes place in your mind.  You're supposed to lie down and close your eyes, while a friend (the "guide") massages your temples and says, "Red door, yellow door, any other color door" over and over.  You're supposed to picture a hallway in your mind, and as soon as you've got a clear image, you give a hand signal to the guide to stop chanting.  Then you describe it, entering doors as you see fit and describing to the guide what you're seeing.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons dying_grotesque from Richards Bay, South Africa, Red Door (3275822777), CC BY 2.0]

Thus far, it's just an exercise in imagination, and innocent enough; but the claim is, what you're seeing is real -- and can harm you.  Because of the alleged danger, there are a variety of rules you are supposed to remember.  If a room you enter has clocks in it, get out fast -- you can get trapped permanently.  If there are staircases, never take one leading downward.  If you meet a man with a suit, open your eyes and end the game immediately, because he's evil and can latch on to you and start following you around in real life if you don't act quickly enough.

Oh, and to add the obligatory frisson to the whole thing: if you die in the game, you actually die.

What's striking about "Red Door, Yellow Door" is that despite the fact that its claims are patently absurd, there are huge numbers of apparently completely serious people who have had terrifying experiences while playing it -- not only manifestations during the game, but afterward.  (If you search for the game, you'll find hundreds of accounts, many of them warning people from ever playing it because they were so traumatized by it.)  The thing is, what did they expect would happen?  They'd been primed by all of the setup; it's unsurprising they saw clocks and eerie staircases descending into darkness and evil guys in suits, and that those same images haunted their memories for some time after the game ended.

And if a silly game for gullible teenagers can do that, how much more do our perception and memory get tainted by how we're primed, especially by our prior notions of what might be going on?  Hang out in graveyards and spooky attics, and you're likely to see ghosts whether or not they're there.

As I recounted in Monday's post, I've been fascinated by tales of the supernatural since I was a kid, and on some level, I'm like Fox Mulder -- "I Want To Believe."  But the fact is, the evidence we have thus far just isn't enough.  Humans are way too suggestible to rely entirely on anecdote.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it most succinctly: "In science, we need more than 'you saw it.'  When you have something tangible we can bring back to the lab and analyze, then we can talk."

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Cause and effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Image is in the Public Domain]

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

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

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

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

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