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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Encounters with the imaginary

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a dear friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite.  (Do yourself a favor and check out her books -- she's written in several different genres, and the one thing that unites them all is that they're fantastic.)  It had to do with how we authors come up with characters -- and how often it feels like we're not inventing them, but discovering them, gradually getting to know some actual person we only recently met.  The result is that they can sometimes seem more real than the real people we encounter every day.

"In my early days of writing, my lead male character was a handsome but rather reclusive country-boy detective," K. D. told me.  "The kind who doesn't realize how good he looks in his jeans.  Anyway, whilst in the middle of bringing this book to life, I saw him in the store looking at shirts.  I was startled, seeing him so unexpectedly that way.  So, like any good delusional person would do, I walked toward him and started to ask, 'Hey, Cody.  What are you doing here?'  Thank God, I came to myself, woke up, or whatever, before I reached him and embarrassed myself into the next realm."

I've never had the experience of meeting someone who was strikingly similar to one of my characters, but I've certainly had them take the keyboard right out of my hands and write themselves a completely different part.  The two strangest examples of this both occurred in my Arc of the Oracles trilogy.  In the first book, In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard literally appeared out of thin air -- the main characters meet her while fleeing for their lives as law and order collapses around them, and she cheerfully tells them, "Well, hello!  I've been waiting for all of you!"

I had to go back and write an entire (chronologically earlier) section of the book to explain who the hell she was and how she'd known they were going to be there, because I honestly hadn't known she was even in the story.

In the third book, The Chains of Orion, the character of Marig Kastella was initially created to be the cautious, hesitant boyfriend of the cheerful, bold, and swashbuckling main character, the astronaut Kallman Dorn.  Then, halfway through, the story took a sharp left-hand turn when Marig decided to become the pivot point of the whole plot -- and ended up becoming one of my favorite characters I've ever... created?  Discovered?  Met?  I honestly don't know what word to use.

That feeling of being the recorder of real people and events, not the designer of fictional ones, can be awfully powerful.

"Another time," K. D. told me, "we had taken a road trip to North Carolina so I could do some research for a huge historical family saga I was writing.  (I was so immersed in the creation of that book that my then-husband was actually jealous of the main character -- I kid you not!)  As we went through Winston-Salem, we drove past a huge cemetery.  I said, 'Oh, let's stop there.  Maybe that's where the Raven boys are buried and I can find their graves.'  And then I remembered.. the Raven boys weren't buried there.  They weren't buried anywhere.  Good grief."

Turns out we're not alone in this.  A 2020 study carried out by some researchers at Durham University, that was the subject of a paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, and received a review in The Guardian, involved surveying authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh in 2014 and 2018.  The researchers asked a set of curious questions:

1. How do you experience your characters?
2. Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
3. Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
4. Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
5. Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
6. How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice?  Please tell us about this process.
7. Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
8. If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
9. In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around?  If so, please describe these experiences.  How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?

Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway.  But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters. 62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.

You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type, to scoff at this.  But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Martin Hricko, Ghosts (16821435), CC BY 3.0]

Here are some examples that came out of the study, and that line up with the exactly the sort of thing both K. D. and I have experienced:

• I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head.  I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
• Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write.  Of course, I turn and no one is there.
• They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me.  They belong to the characters.  They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
• I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen.  To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
• They do their own thing!  I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.

"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech...  Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions.  For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."

Which is kind of fascinating.  When I've done book signings, the single most common question revolves around where my characters and plots come from.  I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me."  They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important.  I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.

I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside.  Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.

But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful.  So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably intense and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.

And I swear, I didn't have any idea beforehand about Mary Hansard's backstory and what Marig Kastella would ultimately become.  Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.

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Facing facts

"I'm sorry, but I have no idea who you are."

I can't tell you how many times I've had to utter that sentence.  Regular readers of Skeptophilia know why; I have a peculiar disability called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness."  I have a nearly complete inability to recognize faces, even of people I've known for some time.

Well, that's not exactly true.  I recognize people differently than other people do.  I remember the people I know as lists of features.  I know my wife has curly brown hair and freckles and an infectious smile, but I honestly have no mental image of her.  I can't picture my own face, although -- like with my wife -- I could list some of my features.

That system doesn't have a high success rate, however, and a lot of the time I have no idea who the people around me are, especially in a place where there are few clues from context.  I have pretty serious social anxiety, and my condition makes it worse, having put me in the following actual situations:

• introducing myself twice to the same person at a party
• getting a big, enthusiastic hug and an "it's been so long!" from someone in our local gym, and never figuring out who I was talking to
• having two of my students switch seats and not realizing it for three weeks, until finally they 'fessed up
• going to see a movie, and not knowing until the credits rolled that the main characters were played by Kenneth Branagh, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, and Johnny Depp
• countless incidents of my fishing for clues ("so, how's your, um... spouse, parents, kids, pets, job..."), sometimes fruitlessly

My anxiety has made me really good at paying attention to, and recalling, other cues like voice, manner of dress, posture, walk, hair style, and so on.  But when one or more of those change -- such as with the student I had one year who cut her hair really short during the summer, and whom I didn't recognize when she showed up in one of my classes on the first day of school the following year -- it doesn't always work.

One up side to the whole thing is that I do get asked some funny questions.  One student asked me if when I looked at people, their faces were invisible.  Another asked me if when I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning, I don't know that's me.  (It's a pretty shrewd guess that it is me, since there's generally no one else in there at the time.)

But at least it's not as bad as the dumb questions that my former students who are identical triplets sometimes get.  One of them was once asked by a friend how she kept track of which triplet she was.

No, I'm not kidding.  Neither, apparently, was the person who asked the question.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Randallbritten, FaceMachine screenshots collage, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In any case, all of this comes up because of some research that came out in the journal Cortex that tried to parse what's happening (or what's not happening) in the brains of people like me.  Some level of prosopagnosia affects about one person in fifty; some of them lose their facial recognition ability because of a stroke or other damage to the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that seems to be a dedicated face-memory module.  Others, like me, were born this way.  Interestingly, a lot of people who have lifelong prosopagnosia take a while to figure it out; for years, I just thought I was unobservant, forgetful, or a little daft.  (All three of those might be true as well, of course.)  It was only after I had enough embarrassing incidents occur, and -- most importantly -- saw an eye-opening piece about face blindness by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, that I realized what was going on.

In any case, the paper in Cortex looked at trying to figure out why people who are face-blind often do just fine on visual perception tests, then fail utterly when it comes to remembering photographs of faces.  The researchers specifically tried to parse whether the difference was coming from an inability to connect context cues to the face you're seeing (e.g., looking at someone and thinking, "She's the woman who was behind the counter at the library last week") versus simple familiarity (the more nebulous and context-free feeling of "I've seen that person before").  They showed each test subject (some of whom weren't face-blind) a series of 120 faces, then a second series of 60 faces where some of them were new and some of them were in the previous series.  The researchers were not only looking for whether the subjects could correctly pick out the old faces, but how confident they were in their answers -- the surmise being that low confidence on correct answers was an indicator of relying on familiarity rather than context memory.

The prosopagnosics in the test group not only were bad at identifying which faces were old and which ones they'd seen before; but their confidence was really low, even on the ones they got right.  Normally-sighted people showed a great deal more certainty in their answers.  What occurs to me, though, is that knowing they're face-blind would skew the results, in that we prosopagnosics are always doubtful we're recalling correctly.  So these data could be a result of living with the condition, not some kind of underlying mechanism at work.  I almost never greet someone first, because even if I think I might know them, I'm never certain.  A lot of people think I'm aloof because of this, but the reality is that I honestly don't know which of the people I'm seeing are friends and which are total strangers.

One thing about the researchers' conclusion does ring true, however.  The subconscious "feeling of familiarity" is definitely involved.  My experience of face blindness isn't that I feel like I'm surrounded by strangers; it's more that everyone looks vaguely familiar.  The problem is, that feeling is no stronger when I see a close friend than when I see someone I've never met before, so the intensity of that sense -- what apparently most people rely on -- doesn't help me.

So that's the view of the world through the eyes of someone who more often than not doesn't know who he's looking at.  Fortunately for me, (1) at this point in my life I'm unembarrassed by my condition, and (2) most of the people in my little village know I'm face-blind and will say, "Hi, Gordon, it's Steve..." when they walk up, and spare me the awkwardness of fishing for clues.  (Nota bene: This only works if it actually is Steve.  Otherwise it would be even more awkward.)  But hopefully some good will come from this research, because face blindness is kind of a pain in the ass.

"Our results underscore that prosopagnosia is a far more complex disorder that is driven by more than deficits in visual perception," said study first author Anna Stumps, a researcher in the Boston Attention Learning Laboratory at VA Boston.  "This finding can help inform the design of new training approaches for people with face blindness."

Which would be really, really nice.

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The mother of all pranks

Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?

I'm guessing probably not.  At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable.  Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.

Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810.  She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door.  Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for."  No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.

But that was only the beginning.

At seven, the bakers started arriving.  One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake.  The bakers were followed by bootmakers.  After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob.  With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive...  Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."

As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts.  The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do.  In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.

At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants.  But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.

The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.

A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching.  His name was Theodore Edward Hook.  Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen.  He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.

He was also a wicked practical joker.

He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world.  Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27.  The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive.  A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter.  Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property.  The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."

Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends.  And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.

But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are.  (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.)  Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.

Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want.  So...

... he admitted it.

It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:

[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street?  I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.

Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836.  There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook.  And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done.  Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom." 

Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party.  Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.

I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this.  It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny.  I'd have been pissed.  And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.

I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door.  (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.)  But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience."  "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done.  (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)

Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged.  And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well.  Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life.  Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't.  For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out.  For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.

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