Giving weight to illusion

The idea that our sensory processing apparatus and our brains are unreliable has been something I've come back to again and again here at Skeptophilia.  "I saw it with my own eyes" is simply not enough evidence by which to make any kind of sound scientific judgment.

Not only are we likely to get things wrong just because the equipment is faulty, our prior ideas can predispose us to get things wrong in a particular way.  Think of it as a sort of built-in confirmation bias; our brains are set up in such a fashion that when we've already decided what's going to happen, it's much more likely that's what we'll perceive.

This latter problem was demonstrated in an elegant, if disturbing, fashion in a paper released last week in Science called "Pavlovian Conditioning–Induced Hallucinations Result From Overweighting of Perceptual Priors," by Albert R. Powers, Christoph Mathys, and Philip R. Corlett, of the Yale School of Medicine, the International School for Advanced Studies (Trieste, Italy), and the University of Zurich, respectively.  Their research springboarded from previous studies wherein individuals who had been trained to associate a tone with an image were more likely to continue "hearing" the tone when shown the image with no accompanying tone than were members of a control group.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What Corlett's team did was to divide participants into four groups: normal, healthy individuals; self-described psychics; individuals with psychosis who did not report hearing voices; and individuals with schizophrenia who reported hearing voices.  The researchers trained all test subjects to associate a checkerboard image with a one second long, one kilohertz tone.  They not only recorded data on which participants continued to "hear" an illusory tone when shown the checkerboard in silence, they also used a protocol (how hard they pushed the button when they heard the tone, whether real or imagined) to gauge their confidence in what they were experiencing, and they looked at neuronal activity in the brain using an fMRI machine.

The results were intriguing, to say the least.  Both the schizophrenics and the self-described psychics were five times as likely to report hearing a tone when none existed than either the control group of healthy individuals or the psychotic individuals who did not hear voices.  Not only that, the schizophrenics and the psychics were 28% more confident in their perceptions when they did hear a tone that wasn't there than were the other two groups when they made a similar mistake.

Further, the schizophrenics and psychics showed abnormal neuronal activity in two regions of the brain; the parts of the cerebrum involved in creating our internal representation of reality showed strikingly different firing patterns, and the cerebellum -- the part of the brain involved in planning and coordinating our motor responses to stimuli -- showed much lower than normal neuronal activity.

"The findings confirm that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses," said Albert Powers, one of the paper's authors.  Which is about as succinct a cautionary statement about trusting our judgments as I can imagine.

While the researchers specifically tested the likelihood of experiencing auditory hallucinations, I find myself wondering if this study might not have wider applications.  How do our prior perceptions bias us in general?  I know I have frequently been baffled, especially in these fractious times, how two people can see the same event and come to strikingly opposite conclusions about it.  At times, I have found myself asking, "Are we even talking about the same thing, here?"  But if our preconceived notions about the world can bias us strongly enough to hear sounds that aren't there, why should any other perception be immune to the same effect?

This possibility drives me to a disturbing conclusion.  How do you convince people that what they're perceiving is not real, if that conclusion is contrary to what their senses and their brains are telling them?

I think the key, here, is always to keep focused on the statement, "... but I might be wrong."  A lot of our faulty judgments are caused not only by our coming to the wrong conclusion, but our stubborn certainty that we are, in fact, right.  A willingness to revise our beliefs -- failing that, at least to consider the possibility that our beliefs are incorrect -- is absolutely critical.

Otherwise, we're at the mercy of sensory apparatus that are easily fooled, and a brain that bases what it perceives as much on what it already thought to be true as on the actual data it's presented with.

Which seems to me to be awfully shaky ground.

Irrationality, insanity, and the teachings of J. Z. Knight

One of the problems I face in selecting stories to highlight in Skeptophilia is that it is often difficult to tell the difference between a crazy idea that merits ridicule, and claims coming from a person who is mentally ill, and therefore deserves sympathy (and help).

Put another way, when does espousing an essentially irrational worldview cross the line into an actual psychosis?  There are millions of people who subscribe to belief systems that are profoundly irrational, and yet the people themselves are otherwise sane (although how a sane person could adopt an insane model for how the universe works is itself a question worth asking).  But there are clearly times where you've gone beyond that, and crossed into more pathetic territory.

As an example of the latter, consider the ravings of YouTuber Dave Johnson, who contends that the Civil War, World War II, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq never happened.  All of them were "media events" with manufactured battles and casualties, designed by political leaders to achieve various goals.  I'm not sure I can really describe the content of the videos -- and I'm also not sure I can, in good conscience, recommend that you watch them -- but he seems to be enamored of symbolism and numerology (he calls the attack on Fort Sumter "a 9/11-style attack on a pentagon") and then just denies everything else without stating any evidence.  "They went on to tell you that over 600,000 people died in (the Civil) War," he says.  "Untrue.  There's zero evidence of any battlefield footage of any death that I can find."

Well, the absence of "footage" may be because the Civil War happened before the invention of motion pictures.  But even forgiving that as a slip of the tongue, is he really discounting all of the photography by Mathew Brady?

Aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, by Mathew Brady

I'm sure he'd call them all modern fakes.  He seems to have a profoundly paranoid worldview, which (by the way) includes believing that the Moon is a hologram.

The whole question comes up because of a much more public figure than Dave Johnson -- J. Z. Knight, better known as "Ramtha."  Knight has run her "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" since 1988, wherein she and her followers share the teachings of "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old being from "Lemuria" who claims to be the "enlightened one."  Knight "channels" Ramtha, and then offers his pronouncements to the masses.

Up until recently, the whole thing has seemed to me to be an enormous scam -- a way to bilk the gullible out of their hard-earned money.  But just in the last couple of years, Knight/Ramtha has left behind her bland, "find-the-god-within" message, and has apparently gone off the deep end.

According to a story this week at AlterNet, Knight is no longer promoting "enlightenment" in Ramtha's voice; she is going off on drunken homophobic and racist rants.  Video and audio recordings of Knight that have been made covertly and then smuggled out of her compound in Yelm, Washington have revealed that the cult has moved into decidedly scarier territory of late.  The article states:

During the 16 or so hours... Knight will disparage Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, and Jews. 

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she says as members of the audience snicker. There are also titters when she declares Mexicans “breed like rabbits” and are “poison,” that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.

Add to this the fact that this ritual involves the drinking of huge amounts of alcohol -- they're called "wine ceremonies," and audience members are supposed to take a drink of wine every time Knight does -- and this begins to take on some of the characteristics of a meeting of the Aryan Nations instead of some quasi-religious ceremony.

And, of course, this is fuel to the fire to the neo-Nazis.  Knight/Ramtha is quoted at length on the race hate forum Stormfront, for example.  The two cults, different as they appear at first, both espouse a lot of the same ideology -- survivalism, an "elect" who will be protected when civilization falls, and a sacred message that needs to get out to the people -- at least the right people.

But she also likes to take pot shots at the Christians, and one of the recordings that has come to light begins with, "Fuck Jehovah!" and goes on to state that Jesus is "just another alien" who is on equal footing with Ramtha, and who came to the Earth to teach the same things that Ramtha did, but failed when power went to his head.

Knight, for her part, refuses to issue a retraction for any of her drunken screeds, claiming that all of the ugliness on the recordings is just a matter of Ramtha's words "being taken out of context."  She also accuses two ex-followers, Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, of spearheading a smear campaign started because of a love triangle involving Coverdale, Knight, and Knight's significant other.

But back to our original question; is Knight still, on some level, rational, or has she simply become psychotic?  Certainly her message now clearly qualifies the Ramtha School of Enlightenment as a hate group; but I'm more curious about Knight herself.  Before, she has just been classified as a religious version of P. T. Barnum, a huckster, suckering in the gullible and relieving them of their cash in exchange for a more-or-less harmless message.  Now?  She shows every evidence of insane paranoia.  So personally, she's more to be pitied than censured.

The difference, though, between a J. Z. Knight and a Dave Johnson -- the war-denier we started this post with -- is their relative reach and influence.  Johnson's YouTube videos, when I watched them, had on the order of a thousand views each.  Knight's message has reached millions -- her followers include some famous names like Salma Hayek, Linda Evans, and Mike Farrell.  Her New Age nonsense wrapped up as an educational video on quantum physics, What the Bleep Do We Know?, grossed ten million dollars and was in movie theaters for a year.  Knight herself lives in a 12,800 square foot French-style-chateau next to her school, can earn up to $200,000 for every speaking engagement, and has a net worth estimated in the tens of millions.

Which means that regardless of the cause of her crazy rantings, the damage she can do is very real.  Her home town of Yelm is full of her followers -- non-Ramtha-ites call them "Ramsters" -- and the Ramtha symbol appears on many businesses in town, telling RSE members that it's okay to do business there.  Local churches have started anti-RSE campaigns.  Ordinary citizens, caught in the middle, are scared.

For good reason.  Whatever Knight is now, her teachings are now no longer merely New Age pablum, but ugly, racist, homophobic invective.  And you have to wonder when she'll cross another line -- into saying something that induces the authorities to intervene.

Considering her followers, we could have another Waco on our hands.