Batman's watching you

Lately, the political scene in the United States has been dominated by not just the single-cause fallacy (the tendency to attribute complex phenomena to one root cause), but the simple-cause fallacy.  This is the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) writ large; make everything the result of one, easy-to-understand origin, and you'll have a convenient scapegoat when things go to hell.

How many times have you heard our current government officials saying stuff like "(Some bad thing) is because of (pick one: illegal immigrants, Democrats, brown people doing bad stuff, socialism, LGBTQ+ people)."  And unfortunately, this kind of thing has its appeal.  Complexity is challenging.  We often don't like to be confronted with difficult-to-solve problems, especially when solving those problems involves (1) working with people we disagree with, and (2) facing situations where the solution involves painful compromises.

It's why there was very little pushback a couple of days ago when J. D. Vance, somehow maintaining a straight face the entire time, said that high housing prices were due to illegal immigrants.  Lest you think I'm making this up, here's his exact quote:

A lot of young people are saying, housing is way too expensive.  Why is that?  Because we flooded the country with thirty million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought by right go to American citizens.  And at the same time we weren’t building enough new houses to begin with even for the population that we had.

This is in spite of the fact that as of the latest data, the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States is less than half that, and the awkward question of how illegal immigrants (all thirty million of them, apparently) would get bank loans to purchase homes without steady, good-paying jobs -- and Social Security Numbers.  Despite this, the person interviewing him -- unsurprisingly, it was Sean Hannity -- nodded as if what Vance just said made complete sense.

I saw a fascinating example of this tendency just yesterday, which I saw more than once appended to commentary to the effect of "Wow, people sure are stupid."  It's a study in Nature by a team led by Francesco Pagnini, of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan, and is entitled, "Unexpected Events and Prosocial Behavior: The Batman Effect."

What the researchers did was send a volunteer who was visibly pregnant onto a train, and counted the number of people who offered her a seat.  Then they did the same thing, but right after she boarded, a man dressed up as Batman boarded as well.  The number of people who gave up their seat for her almost doubled -- from 38% to 67%.  And the vast majority of the posters and commenters I've seen mention this study were snickering about how gullible people are.  Did the passengers really think that was Batman, and he was going to go all Justice League on their asses if they didn't give up their seat for the pregnant lady?  One even went into a long diatribe about how our current online culture has made it hard for people (especially young people, he says) to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons William Tung, San Diego Comic-Con 2024 Masquerade - Cosplay of Batman 3, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Well, okay, maybe that's one possibility; that being reminded of a character who stands for fair play makes people think they should Do The Right Thing, too.  But I can easily think of two other reasons this might have happened -- one of which the authors go into, right in the damn paper.  (Highlighting another unfortunate tendency, which is that people often comment on social media posts just from the tagline, and without even clicking the link.  I can't even tell you the number of times I've had someone post a comment on a Skeptophilia link that left me thinking, "Bro, did you even read the fucking post?")

The explanation that the authors went into is that having something unusual happen -- like a guy showing up in costume -- makes people take notice.  I don't know about you, but when I've ridden trains, I'm seldom giving a lot of attention to the other passengers.  (I've usually got my nose in a book.)  Unless, that is, one of them is doing something peculiar.  It wouldn't have to be Batman, or anyone associated with Smiting Evildoers; all it would have to be is something odd.  Then I'd look up -- and be more likely to notice other things, such as a pregnant lady standing there hanging onto the grab bar.

The other possible explanation, though, is one that definitely would have occurred to me; if there's a guy standing there nonchalantly, dressed like Batman, is this part of a stunt?  If so, there'd certainly be others watching and waiting to see what the other passengers do -- and possibly filming it.  That would cause me to look around.  It might induce me toward more prosocial behavior, too; if I know I'm being filmed, I wouldn't want to end up enshrined forever on YouTube as the lazy bum who sat there while a pregnant woman was hanging on for dear life trying not to fall down when the train lurches.

The point here is that an interesting finding (people are more prosocial when somebody nearby is dressed as Batman) is not proof that the passengers think that Batman is real, and (by extension) that they don't know the difference between fact and fiction.  That might be true, at least for a few of them.  But in this case, the simple (and wryly amusing) explanation is a vast overconclusion.

The fact that it has shown up over and over, though, is yet another example of confirmation bias; the people who are claiming this interpretation of the experiment obviously already think that humanity is irredeemably stupid, and this was just another nail in the coffin.  So instead of doing what we all should do -- thinking, "what are other possible explanations for this?" -- they stop there, sitting back with smug expressions, because after all if they see how dumb everyone else is, it must mean they're smart themselves.

Or maybe I'm just falling for the single-cause fallacy myself.  It's why I wouldn't want to be a psychologist; people are way too complicated.

But one conclusion I will stand by is that this phenomenon only gets worse with people like J. D. Vance, who not only falls back on simple one-liner explanations, he makes up the data as he goes to support them.

So anyway.  Despite what you may have heard, most people don't think Batman is real, and therefore act nicer when he's around.  My guess is people would have had exactly the same reaction if someone had showed up dressed as the Joker.  It's always best to stop and question your assumptions and biases before jumping to a conclusion -- or commenting on a link just based on the tagline.

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Retracting the backfire

In general, I always cringe a little when I see that a scientific study has been called into question.

These days, especially in the United States (where being anti-science is considered a prerequisite for working in the federal government), the last thing the scientific endeavor needs is another black eye.  It's bad enough when the scientists were trying their hardest to do things right, and simply misinterpreted the data at hand -- such as the recent study that might have invalidated the Nobel-Prize-winning research that demonstrated the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the existence of dark energy.

It's worse still when the researchers themselves apparently knew their work was bogus, and published it anyhow.  It seems to validate everything Trump and his cronies are saying; the experts are all lying to you.  The data is inaccurate or being misrepresented.  Listen to us instead, we'd never lie.

Today, though, I came across an allegation that a very famous piece of research was based on what amounts to the researchers lying outright about what had happened in their study -- and if this debunking bears out, it will be about the best news we could have right now.

You ready?

You've probably all heard of the devastating paper called "When Prophecy Fails," published in 1956 by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.  If you're a long-time follower of Skeptophilia, you might well have read about it here, because I've cited it more than once.  The gist is that there was a UFO cult run by a woman named Dorothy Martin and a couple named Charles and Lillian Laughead.  Martin claimed she was receiving telepathic communications from extraterrestrials, and attracted a group of people who were into her weird mix of UFOlogy and Christian End Times stuff.  Well, after running this group for a time, she claimed she'd received word that there was going to be a catastrophic and deadly flood, but that the faithful were going to be picked up by spacecrafts and rescued -- on December 21, 1954.

The 1950 McMinnville (Oregon) UFO [Image is in the Public Domain]

Festinger, Riecken, and Schacter and several other paid observers infiltrated the cult, pretending to be true believers, and reported that when the 21st came and went, and -- surprise! -- no devastating flood and no flying saucers appeared, her followers' beliefs in her abilities were actually strengthened.  She told them their faithfulness had persuaded God not to flood the place, so the failure of the prophecy was a point in her favor, not against.

The three psychologists came up with terms describing this apparent bass-ackwards response to what should have been a terrible blow to belief, terms which will be familiar to you all: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect.  Both refer to people's abilities to maintain their belief even in the face of evidence to the contrary -- and their tendency to double down when that edifice of faith is threatened.

Well, apparently that wasn't the actual way events played out.

A psychological researcher named Thomas Kelly has written a paper that basically debunks the entire study.  Kelly became suspicious when he found that subsequent studies were unable to replicate the one done by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (whom Kelly calls "FRS"):

Inspired by FRS, several other scholars would later observe other religious groups that had predicted apocalypses.  Generally, they failed to replicate the findings of FRS.  Shortly after the publication of "When Prophecy Fails," Hardyck and Braden (1962) investigated an apocalyptic sect of Pentecostals to see if the failed apocalypse would result in enduring conviction and proselytization, but it did not.  Balch, Farnsworth, and Wilkins (1983) investigated a Baha'i group that inaccurately predicted an apocalypse and found that the failed prediction undermined the size, conviction, and enthusiasm of the group.  Zygmunt (1970) reviewed the proselytization efforts of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group which has predicted the apocalypse multiple times, and found that failed prediction led to reduced proselytization.  Singelenberg (1989) also found that failed prophecies harmed proselytization efforts among the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Kelly got access to Leon Festinger's files, including reams of notes that were unpublished, and found that not only did the Martin/Laughead cult not come together with strengthened faith in the way he and his co-authors had described, within six months the entire thing had collapsed and disbanded.  In other words; the researchers seem to have lied about the facts of the case, not just their interpretation.  Here's what Kelly has to say:

The authors of "When Prophecy Fails" had a theory that when faced with the utter disconfirmation of their religious beliefs, believers would soldier on, double down, and ramp up the proselytization.  And the authors had ample resources to shape the cult’s behavior and beliefs.  Brother Henry [Riecken's alias while he was a cult member] steered Martin and the others at pivotal meetings.  The serendipitous, almost supernatural, arrival of Liz, Frank, and other paid observers buttressed the faith of the cultists.  The sheer quantity of research observers in the small group gave them substantial influence.  After the prophecy failed, Henry was able to prod Martin into writing the Christmas message and inspire belief in the supernatural by posing as the “earthly verifier,” an emissary of the "Space Brothers."

But even with all this influence, the study didn’t go as planned.  The group collapsed; belief died.  It did not persevere.  What did persevere was FRS’s determination to publish their work and Festinger’s determination to use it to launch the theory of cognitive dissonance.  Did any of Festinger, Riecken, or Schachter still believe at that point?  History is silent.

The full scope and variety of the misrepresentations and misconduct of the researchers needed the unsealed archives of Festinger to emerge; the full story could not be written until now.  But the reputation of "When Prophecy Fails" should not even have survived its first decade.

Now, Kelly's work is new enough that I'm fully expecting it to be challenged; Festinger et al.'s theory of cognitive dissonance is so much a part of modern psychological understanding that I doubt it'll be discarded without a fight.  But if even a fraction of what Kelly claims is vindicated, the FRS backfire effect study will have to be completely reconsidered -- just as we've had to reconsider a number of other famous psychological studies that have been partially or completely called into question, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the "Little Albert" Experiment, and the Milgram Experiment. 

My reason for being jubilant when I read this is not because I wish any kind of stain on the reputations of three famous psychological researchers.  It's that if the FRS study in fact didn't demonstrate a backfire effect -- if even being infiltrated by fake cult members who pretended to be enthusiastic true believers, and who encouraged the (real) members into keeping the faith, still didn't buoy up their damaged beliefs -- well, it means that humans can learn from experience, doesn't it?  That faced with evidence, even people in faith-based belief systems can change their minds.

And I, for one, find this tremendously encouraging.

It means, for example, that maybe -- just maybe -- there's a chance that the MAGA cult could be reached.  The recent release of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horrifying emails between Jeffrey Epstein and his cronies, in which Donald Trump's name figures prominently, may finally wake people up to the monstrous reality of who Trump is, and always has been.  (Even the few of these messages that have been made public are horrific enough to make my skin crawl.)  

The FRS study has always seemed to me to promote despondency; why argue against people when all it's going to do is make them more certain they're right?  But I had no reason to question their results.

Until now.

I'm sure there'll be more papers written on this topic, so I'll have to wait till the dust settles to find out what the final word is.  But until then -- keep arguing for what is right, what is decent and honest, and what is supported by the evidence.  Maybe it's not as futile as we'd been told.

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The persistence of memory

A paper published this week in the journal Nature: Scientific Reports provided some interesting insights into how our memories of our own past might work -- but also raised a couple of troubling questions in my mind.

It's called "Illusory Ownership of One's Younger Face Facilitates Access to Childhood Episodic Autobiographical Memories," and was the work of Utkarsh Gupta, Peter Bright, Alex Clarke, Waheeb Zafar, Pilar Recarte-Perez and Jane E. Aspell, of Anglia Ruskin University.  Here's their description of what they did:

Our autobiographical memories reflect our personal experiences at specific times in our lives.  All life events are experienced while we inhabit our body, raising the question of whether a representation of our bodily self is inherent in our memories.  Here we explored this possibility by investigating if the retrieval of childhood autobiographical memories would be influenced by a body illusion that gives participants the experience of ownership for a ‘child version’ of their own face.  Fifty neurologically healthy adults were tested in an online enfacement illusion study.  Feelings of ownership and agency for the face were greater during conditions with visuo-motor synchrony than asynchronous conditions.  Critically, participants who enfaced (embodied) their child-like face recollected more childhood episodic memory details than those who enfaced their adult face.  No effects on autobiographical semantic memory recollection were found.  This finding indicates that there is an interaction between the bodily self and autobiographical memory, showing that temporary changes to the representation and experience of the bodily self impacts access to memory.

Which is fascinating.  Given the sensation of inhabiting our own (younger) body, we seem to unlock stored memories we previously could not access.  It makes me wonder what's up there in our memory centers, you know?  Assuming your brain is physiologically normal and uninjured, do you really have a record of everything that's happened to you in there somewhere, just waiting for the right trigger to release it?

"Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories," said study senior author Jane Aspell, in an interview with Science Daily.  "These results are really exciting and suggest that further, more sophisticated body illusions could be used to unlock memories from different stages of our lives -- perhaps even from early infancy.  In the future it may even be possible to adapt the illusion to create interventions that might aid memory recall in people with memory impairments."

Here's the thing, though.

How do they know the memories these volunteers reported are real?

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Let me give you an example from my own childhood.

When I was about four, my parents and I moved from a house in South Charleston, West Virginia to one in nearby Saint Albans.  My dad worked at the Marine Corps Recruiting and Training Station at the time, and the move was basically to a nicer neighborhood.  We'd lived in a rental next door to a big house I remember as "the green house" -- it was a blocky rectangular thing, two story, painted light green, where a family with two older boys (at a guess, perhaps seven and nine) lived.

Well, on moving day, my parents were loading the last stuff in the car, and had told me to entertain myself for a half-hour or so while they were finishing up.  I wandered into the yard in front of the green house, and the two boys who lived there asked me if I wanted to play.  I said "sure," and we went inside, then upstairs -- where they thought it'd be funny to trap me, and convince me my parents were going to leave without me.

I looked down from the window, screaming and trying to alert my mother, but she didn't hear me.  I was terrified of being left behind (not, realistically, that this would ever have happened).  Eventually the two boys relented and let me go, and I rejoined my parents -- me still tearful and freaking out about my near miss, they wondering what the hell had upset me.

Here's the kicker, though:  I have no idea if this actually happened.

I asked my mother about it some years later, and she had no memory of it -- she didn't recall my disappearing, even for a short time, on the day we moved, nor returning upset and scared.  "Why would I have told you to run off and play when we were about to leave?" she asked, which I had to admit was a good question.  I have zero other memories of the two boys next door (other than that they existed), and to my knowledge I never went inside their house, nor was invited by them to play, on any other occasion.  I've always been prone to vivid dreams; I remember being somewhat older, perhaps eight or nine, and having flying dreams so realistic that upon awakening I was halfway convinced they'd really happened.  I might be recalling an unusually detailed (and terrifying) dream; or maybe there were two neighbor boys who thought it'd be funny to scare the living shit out of a gullible little kid.

The problem is, there's no way to tell which is the truth.

So I have no doubt that the Gupta et al. study triggered the release of something in the minds of the volunteers, but I think it's a stretch to conclude that what they accessed were real and accurate memories.  I've seen plenty of evidence -- both from scientific studies and the experiences of me and my friends -- indicating that our memories are plastic, malleable, easily warped, and inaccurate.  We all too readily conflate our recollections of what actually happened with (1) what we think happened, (2) what we were told happened, and (3) outright mental fabrications.  A famous -- if unsettling -- study from Portsmouth University in 2008 looked at people's memories of the 2005 terrorist bombing of a double-decker bus in London, and found that many people recalled intricate and vivid detail from CCTV footage of the explosion, and made statements like, "The bus had just stopped to let people off when two women and a man got on" and "He placed a bag by his side, the woman sat down and as the bus left, there was an explosion" and "There was a severed leg on the floor" and "The bus had stopped at a traffic light when there was a bright light, a loud bang and the top flew off."

The problem?  There is no CCTV footage of the explosion.  None.  Presented with that fact, people were astonished.  That couldn't be true, they said; they knew they'd seen it, they could still picture it, still recall how upset they'd been watching it.  One person, told that no video of the event existed, accused the researchers of lying.

So there you have it.  Another reason not to trust your own recollections of past events, and a caution not to get your hopes up about accessing them by visualizing yourself as a child.  Me, I'd just as soon not remember a lot of that stuff.  Even if I was never kidnapped by the neighbors when I was four, I didn't exactly have a happy childhood.  I'd just as soon remain in the present, thank you very much.

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Signal out of noise

A paper this week out of the University of Washington describes research suggesting that intelligence is positively correlated with the ability to discern what someone is saying in a noisy room.

This was a little distressing to me, because I am terrible at this particular skill.  When I'm in a bar or other loud, chaotic environment, I can often pick out a few words, but understanding entire sentences is tricky.  I also run out of steam really quickly -- I can focus for a while, but suddenly the whole thing descends into a wall of noise.

The evidence, though, seems strong.  "The relationship between cognitive ability and speech-perception performance transcended diagnostic categories," said Bonnie Lau, lead author on the paper.  "That finding was consistent across all three groups studied [an autistic group, a group who had fetal alcohol syndrome, and a neurotypical control group]."

So.  Yeah.  Not a favorable result for yours truly.  I mean, I get why it makes sense; focusing on one conversation when there are others going on is a complex task.  "You have to segregate the streams of speech," Lau explained.  "You have to figure out and selectively attend to the person that you're interested in, and part of that is suppressing the competing noise characteristics.  Then you have to comprehend from a linguistic standpoint, coding each phoneme, discerning syllables and words.  There are semantic and social skills, too -- we're smiling, we're nodding.  All these factors increase the cognitive load of communicating when it is noisy."

While I'm not seriously concerned that about the implications regarding my own intelligence, it does make me wonder about sensory synthesis and interpretation in general.  A related phenomenon I've noticed is that if there is a song playing while there's noise going on -- in a restaurant, or on earphones at the gym -- I often have no idea what the song is, can't understand a single word or pick up the beat or figure out the music, until something clues me in to what the song is.  Then, all of a sudden, I find I'm able to hear it clearly.

A while back, some neuroscientists at the University of California - Berkeley elucidated what's happening in the brain that causes this oddity in auditory perception, and it provides an interesting contrast to this week's study.  A paper in Nature: Communications in 2016, by Christopher R. Holdgraf, Wendy de Heer, Brian Pasley, Jochem Rieger, Nathan Crone, Jack J. Lin, Robert T. Knight, and Frédéric E. Theunissen, considered how the perception of garbled speech changes when subjects are told what's being said -- and found through a technique called spectrotemporal receptive field mapping that the brain is able to retune itself in less than a second.

The authors write:

Experience shapes our perception of the world on a moment-to-moment basis.  This robust perceptual effect of experience parallels a change in the neural representation of stimulus features, though the nature of this representation and its plasticity are not well-understood.  Spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF) mapping describes the neural response to acoustic features, and has been used to study contextual effects on auditory receptive fields in animal models.  We performed a STRF plasticity analysis on electrophysiological data from recordings obtained directly from the human auditory cortex. Here, we report rapid, automatic plasticity of the spectrotemporal response of recorded neural ensembles, driven by previous experience with acoustic and linguistic information, and with a neurophysiological effect in the sub-second range.  This plasticity reflects increased sensitivity to spectrotemporal features, enhancing the extraction of more speech-like features from a degraded stimulus and providing the physiological basis for the observed ‘perceptual enhancement’ in understanding speech.

What astonishes me about this is how quickly the brain is able to accomplish this -- although that is certainly matched by my own experience of suddenly being able to hear lyrics of a song once I recognize what's playing.  As James Anderson put it, writing about the research in ReliaWire, "The findings... confirm hypotheses that neurons in the auditory cortex that pick out aspects of sound associated with language, the components of pitch, amplitude and timing that distinguish words or smaller sound bits called phonemes, continually tune themselves to pull meaning out of a noisy environment."

A related phenomenon is visual priming, which occurs when people are presented with a seemingly meaningless pattern of dots and blotches, such as the following:

Once you're told that the image is a cow, it's easy enough to find -- and after that, impossible to unsee.

"Something is changing in the auditory cortex to emphasize anything that might be speech-like, and increasing the gain for those features, so that I actually hear that sound in the noise," said study co-author Frédéric Theunissen.  "It’s not like I am generating those words in my head. I really have the feeling of hearing the words in the noise with this pop-out phenomenon.  It is such a mystery."

Apparently, once the set of possibilities of what you're hearing (or seeing) is narrowed, your brain is much better at extracting meaning from noise.  "Your brain tries to get around the problem of too much information by making assumptions about the world," co-author Christopher Holdgraf said.  "It says, ‘I am going to restrict the many possible things I could pull out from an auditory stimulus so that I don’t have to do a lot of processing.’  By doing that, it is faster and expends less energy."

It makes me wonder about the University of Washington finding, though, if there might be an association between poor auditory discernment and attention-related disorders like ADHD.  My own experience is that I can focus on what's being said in a noisy environment, it's just exhausting.  Perhaps -- like with the song phenomenon, and things like visual priming -- chaotic brains like mine simply can't throw away extraneous information fast enough to retune.  Eventually, it just gives up, and the whole world turns into white noise.

In any case, there's another fascinating, and mind-boggling, piece of how our brains make sense of the world.  It's wonderful that evolution could shape such an amazingly adaptive device, although the survival advantage is obvious.  The faster you are at pulling a signal out of the noise, the more likely you are to make the right decisions about what it is that you're perceiving -- whether it's you talking to a friend in a crowded bar or a proto-hominid on the African savanna trying to figure out if that odd shape in the grass is a predator lying in wait.  

Even if it means that I personally would probably have been a lion's afternoon snack.

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Dark matters

A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful.  The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices."  We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.

What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this.  I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate.  I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?")  By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.

Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor.  I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.

The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there.  It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.

When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could.  This was that year's winner.  Pretty good, isn't it?  [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]

The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb.  Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences.  The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex.  The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives.  "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes.  "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted...  Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint.  This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives.  Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."

The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills.  One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello."  They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source.  More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe.  There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point.  (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room.  "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")

The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience."  The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences.  Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences.  Some of these episodes are guided, and others not.  The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.

Their responses are intriguing.  The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds.  I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:

For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear.  Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.

What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience?  I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment.  But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality.  We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.

Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary.  It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence.  I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").

I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation.  But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that.  The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.

I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

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The image and the reality

In its seven-year run, Star Trek: The Next Generation had some awe-inspiring and brilliantly creative moments.  "The Inner Light," "Remember Me," "Frames of Mind," "The Best of Both Worlds," "Family," "The Next Phase," "The Drumhead," "Darmok," "Tapestry," and "Time's Arrow" remain some of the best television I've ever seen in my life.

But like any show, it had its misses.  And in my opinion, they never whiffed quite so hard as they did with the episodes "Booby Trap" and "Galaxy's Child."

In "Booby Trap," Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is faced with trying to find a way to get the Enterprise out of a snare designed millennia ago by a long-gone species, and decides to consult Leah Brahms -- well, a holographic representation of Dr. Brahms, anyway -- the engineering genius who had been one of the principal designers of the ship.  Brahms knows the systems inside and out, and LaForge works with her avatar to devise a way to escape the trap.  He'd always idolized her, and now he finds himself falling for the holodeck facsimile he'd created.  He and Brahms figure out a way out of the booby trap of the episode's title, and in the end, they kiss as he ends the program and returns to the real world.

If that weren't cringe-y enough, Brahms returns (for real) in "Galaxy's Child," where she is conducting an inspection to analyze changes LaForge had made to her design (and of which she clearly disapproves).  LaForge acts as if he already knows her, when in reality they'd never met, and Brahms very quickly senses that something's off.  For LaForge's part, he's startled by how prickly she is, and more than a little alarmed when he realizes she's not only not interested in him romantically -- she's (happily) married.

Brahms does some digging and discovers that LaForge had created a holographic avatar of her, and then uncovers the unsettling fact that he and the facsimile have been romantically involved.  She is understandably furious.  But here's where the writers of the show took a hard swing, and missed completely; LaForge reacts not with contrition and shame, but with anger.  We're clearly meant to side with him -- it's no coincidence that Brahms is depicted as cold, distant, and hypercritical, while LaForge of course is a long-standing and beloved character.

And Brahms backs down.  In what is supposed to be a heartwarming moment, they set aside their differences and address the problem at hand (an alien creature that is draining the Enterprise's energy) and end the episode as friends.

The writers of the show often took a hard look at good characters who make mistakes or are put into situations where they have to fight against their own faults to make the right choices.  (Look at Ensign Ro Laren's entire story arc, for example.)  They could have had LaForge admit that what he'd done was creepy, unethical, and a horrible invasion of Dr. Brahms's privacy, but instead they chose to have the victim back off in order to give the recurring character a win.

The reason this comes up is because once again, Star Trek has proven prescient, but not by giving us what we desperately want from it -- faster-than-light travel, replicators, transporters, and tricorders.

What we're getting is a company selling us an opportunity to do what Geordi LaForge did to Leah Brahms.

A few months ago, I did a piece here at Skeptophilia about advertisements on Instagram trying to get me to sign up for an "AI boyfriend."  Needless to say -- well, I hope it's needless to say -- I'm not interested.  For one thing, my wife would object.  For another, those sorts of parasocial relationships (one-sided relationships with fictional characters) are, to put it mildly, unhealthy.  Okay, I can watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and be attracted to Buffy and Angel in equal measures (ah, the perils of being bisexual), but I'm in no sense "in love with" either of them.

But an ad I saw on Instagram yesterday goes beyond just generating a drop-dead gorgeous AI creation who will (their words) "always be there waiting for you" and "never say no."  Because this one said that if you want to make your online lover look like someone you know -- "an ex, a crush, a colleague" -- they're happy to oblige.

What this company -- "Dialogue by Pheon" -- is offering doesn't just cross the line into unacceptable, it sprints across it and goes about a thousand miles farther.  I'll go so far as to say that in "Booby Trap," what LaForge did was at least motivated by good intentions, even if in the end it went way too far.  Here, a company is explicitly advertising something that is intended for nothing more than sexual gratification, and saying they're just thrilled to violate someone else's privacy in order to do it.

What will it take for lawmakers to step in and pull back the reins on AI, to say, "this has gone far enough"?  There's already AI simulation of the voices of famous singers; two years ago, the wonderful YouTuber Rick Beato sounded the alarm over the creation of "new songs" by Kurt Cobain and John Lennon, which sounded eerily convincing (and the technology has only improved since then).  It brings up questions we've never had to consider.  Who owns the rights to your voice?  Who owns your appearance?  So far, as long as something is labeled accurately -- a track is called "AI Taylor Swift," and not misrepresented as the real thing -- the law hasn't wanted to touch the "creators" (if I can dignify them by that name).

Will the same apply if some guy takes your image and uses it to create an online AI boy/girlfriend who will "do anything and never say no"?

The whole thing is so skeevy it makes me feel like I need to go take another shower.

These companies are, to put it bluntly, predatory.  They have zero regard for the mental health of their customers; they are taking advantage of people's loneliness and disconnection to sell them something that in the end will only bring the problem into sharper focus.  And now, they're saying they'll happily victimize not only their customers, but random people the customers happen to know.  Provide us with a photograph and a nice chunk of money, they say, and we'll create an AI lover who looks like anyone you want.

Of course, we don't have a prayer of a chance of getting any action from the current regime here in the United States.  Trump's attitude toward AI is the more and the faster, the better.  They've basically deregulated the industry entirely, looking toward creating "global AI dominance," damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.  If some people get hurt along the way, well, that's a sacrifice they're willing to make.

Corporate capitalism über alles, as usual.

It's why I personally have taken a "no AI, never, no way, no how" approach.  Yes, I know it has promising applications.  Yes, I know many of its uses are interesting or entertaining.  But until we have a way to put up some guard rails, and to keep unscrupulous companies from taking advantage of people's isolation and unfulfilled sex drive to turn a quick buck, and to keep them from profiting off the hard work of actual creative human beings, the AI techbros can fuck right off.

No, farther than that.

I wish I could end on some kind of hopeful note.  The whole thing leaves me feeling sick.  And as the technology continues to improve -- which it's currently doing at an exponential rate -- the whole situation is only going to get worse.

And now I think I need to get off the computer and go do something real for a while.

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Island of the dolls

One of the very first topics I addressed here at Skeptophilia -- only a few months after I started, in fall of 2010 -- was the idea of the uncanny valley.

The term was coined by Japanese robotics engineer Masahiro Mori way back in 1970, in his book Bukimi No Tani (不気味の谷), the title of which roughly translates to it.  The idea, which you're probably familiar with, is that if you map out our emotional response to a face as a function of its proximity to a normal human face, you find a fascinating pattern.  Faces very different from our own -- animal faces, stuffed toys, and stylized faces (like the famous "smiley face"), for example -- usually elicit positive, or at least neutral, responses.  Normal human faces, of course, are usually viewed positively.

Where you run into trouble is when a face is kinda similar to a human face, but not similar enough.  This is why clowns frequently trigger fear rather than amusement.  You may recall that the animators of the 2004 movie The Polar Express ran headlong into this, when the animation of the characters, especially the Train Conductor (who was supposed to be a nice character), freaked kids out instead of charming them.  Roboticists have been trying like mad to create a humanoid robot whose face doesn't elicit people to recoil with horror, with (thus far) little success.

That dip in the middle, between very non-human faces and completely human ones, is what Mori called "the uncanny valley."

Why this happens is a matter of conjecture.  Some psychologists have speculated that the not-quite-human-enough faces that elicit the strongest negative reactions often have a flat affect and a mask-like quality, which might act as primal triggers warning us about people with severe mental disorders like psychosis.  But the human psyche is a complex place, and it may well be that the reasons for the near-universal terror sparked by characters like The Gangers in the Doctor Who episode "The Almost People" are multifaceted.

What's certain is this aversion to faces in the uncanny valley exists across cultures.  Take, for example, a place I found out about only yesterday -- Mexico's Isla de las Muñecas, the "Island of the Dolls."

The island is in Lake Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, and it was owned by a peculiar recluse named Don Julián Santana Barrera.  Some time in the 1940s, so the story goes, Barrera found the body of a girl who had drowned in the shallows of the lake (another version is that he saw her drowning and was unable to save her).  The day after she died, Barrera found a doll floating in the water, and he became convinced that it was the girl's spirit returning.  So he put the doll on display, and started looking through the washed up flotsam and jetsam for more.

He found more.  Then he started trading produce he'd raised with the locals for more dolls.  Ultimately it became an obsession, and in the next five decades he collected over a thousand of them (along with assorted parts).  The place became a site for pilgrims, who were convinced that the dolls housed the spirits of the dead.  Legends arose that visitors saw the dolls moving or opening their eyes -- and that some heard them whispering to each other.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amrith Raj, Dolls hung in Santana Barrera's chinampa in Xochimilco, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Barrera himself died in 2001 under (very) mysterious circumstances.  His nephew had come to help him -- at that point he was around eighty years old -- and the two were out fishing in the lake when the old man became convinced he heard mermaids calling to him.  The nephew rowed them both to shore and went to get assistance, but when he returned his uncle was face down in the water, drowned...

... at the same spot where he'd discovered the little girl's body, over fifty years earlier.

Since then, the island has been popular as a destination for dark tourism -- the attraction some people have for places associated with injury, death, or tragedy.  It was the filming location for the extremely creepy music video Lady Gaga released just a month ago, "The Dead Dance."

There's no doubt that dolls fall squarely into the uncanny valley for a lot of people.  Their still, unchanging expressions are right in that middle ground between being human and non-human.  (Explaining the success of horror flicks like Chucky and M3gan.)

And you can see why Mexico's Island of the Dolls has the draw it does.  You don't even need to believe in disembodied spirits of the dead to get the chills from it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Esparta Palma, Xochimilco Dolls' Island, CC BY 2.0]

What astonishes me, though, is that Barrera himself wanted to live there.  I mean, I'm a fairly staunch disbeliever in all things paranormal, and those things still strike me as scary as fuck.

If I ever visit Mexico, I might be persuaded to go to the island.  But no way in hell would I spend the night there.

Just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm not suggestible.  In fact, the case could be argued that I became a skeptic precisely because I'm so suggestible.  After all, the other option was running around making little whimpering noises all the time, which is kind of counterproductive.

In any case, I'll be curious to hear what my readers think.  Are you susceptible to the uncanny valley?  Or resistant enough that you'd stay overnight on Isla de las Muñecas?

Maybe bring along a clown, for good measure?

Me, I'm creeped out just thinking about it.

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Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question, despite being one myself and at the same time happily married to a wonderful woman.  The reason I didn't question it is that said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me.  You'd think, being bisexual, I'd have had twice the opportunities for romance, but the truth is I'm so completely oblivious that I wouldn't know it if someone of either gender was flirting with me unless they were holding up a sign saying "HEY.  STUPID.  I AM CURRENTLY FLIRTING WITH YOU."  And possibly not even then.

But despite my raising social awkwardness to the level of performance art, Carol was successful in her efforts.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Galadriel and Celeborn, Eowyn and Faramir, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Freakin' Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations.  I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress that looks like it's being held up by a combination of prayers and Superglue, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Thrustington and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic either, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard.  Between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us, male or female, are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

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The silent battle

Today, from the "Who Could Have Predicted This Besides Everybody?" department, we have: a study by psychologist David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College et al. that found that in the United States, the mental health of young people has shown enough of a decline that it has eliminated the "unhappiness hump" -- the former pattern that younger and older people were overall the happiest, with dissatisfaction ratings peaking in middle age.

Now, the lowest levels of happiness are in those between ages thirteen and twenty-five, and show a slow but steady increase with increasing age thereafter.

I don't know about you, but this came as no surprise to me.  I've often thought that I would not want to be a teenager today.  Some things have improved markedly -- opportunities for women and acceptance of minorities and LGBTQ+ people, for example -- but so many new factors have cropped up making life riskier and more difficult that it's hardly to be wondered at that young people are anxious.  

Let's start with the fact that the current regime (1) is doing its level best to strip rights from anyone who isn't a straight white Christian male, (2) shows little regard for protecting what's left of the environment, and (3) is in the process of wrecking the economy with the ongoing tariff craziness.  (About the latter, Trump and his cronies have taken the toddler-ish approach of "I'll just lie about it and everyone will believe me!" by declaring that the deficit is gone, jobs are surging, and the economy is booming.  And don't believe the cash register; the prices of groceries and gasoline are down across the nation.  Oh, and these are not the droids you're looking for.)

I mean, I'm retired, and I find it all depressing.  A college student today facing the current job market would have to be willfully blind not to be anxious about their future.

What gets me, though, is how much you still hear the "suck it up and deal" response from the adults.  To take just one example -- why should recent graduates be asking for student loan forgiveness?  After all, we paid our student loans when we were that age, right?

Yep, we did.  There's a reason for that.  Between 1978 and 1982, my tuition to the University of Louisiana, along with all my textbooks, came to a total of about a thousand dollars a semester.  Now, the average for tuition alone is around twelve thousand dollars a semester -- four times that if you go to a private school.  Housing prices have gone up drastically as well -- in 1980, the average house sale price was seventy-five thousand dollars; now it's four hundred thousand dollars.  The truth is that purchasing a house shortly after entering the job market was a realistic goal for someone in my generation, but for the current generation, it simply isn't.  In fact, owning a home in the foreseeable future is out of reach for the majority of today's college graduates.

It's no wonder there's a "looming mental health crisis" -- to quote Blanchflower et al. -- amongst today's young people.

This crisis is exacerbated by people who seem bound and determined to paint this entire generation as "lazy" or "entitled," when in fact they are reacting the way just about any of us would when faced with impossible odds.  Just yesterday I saw someone post on social media how infuriating it was that the emergency room was "clogged" with teenagers having emotional breakdowns now that the fall semester of college has started, and that they were sick of these needy kids expecting everyone to drop everything and minister to their whims.  The truth is grimmer than that, and I can say this with some authority, as a person who has struggled with crippling anxiety and depression my entire life.  Depressed people don't fake being mentally ill to get attention; we fake being okay to avoid it.  When you see someone actually having a crisis, it is almost always because they have spent hours or days or weeks trying to suppress it, and eventually simply couldn't any more.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, Depressed (4649749639), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Might there be people who fake an episode in order to get care they don't really need?  Sure.  It's called Munchausen syndrome.  But it's really uncommon.  And in any case, isn't it better to give unnecessary care to one person who is pretending to be ill than to deny care to a hundred who do need it because you've decided they're all malingerers?

Maybe try having a scrap of fucking compassion.

Most of us mentally ill people are struggling along, trying to find a way to cope with a world that seems increasingly engineered to drag us down, while relying on a mental health care system that is drastically inadequate -- understaffed, overworked, and in general spread far too thin for the need.  For myself, I manage most days.  Some days I don't.  On those days I lean hard into something a therapist told me -- "the biggest lie depression tells you is that the lows are permanent."

But as far as the way we treat others goes, that we can fix.  We can work toward changing our society to lower the stressors on the upcoming generation.  We can support our mental health care professionals, who are trying the best they can under extreme difficulties.  And -- most of all -- we can recall what a family friend told me when I was six years old.  I'd come home from school with my knickers in a twist over some perceived wrong by a classmate, and our wise friend blindsided me by saying, "Don't be so hard on your friend.  You should always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

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