Remembrance of things past

Almost all of us implicitly trust our own memories.

Experiment after experiment, however, has shown that this trust is misplaced.  Even if you leave out people with obvious memory deficits -- victims of dementia, for example -- the rest of us give far too much credence to our brain's version of the past.  In truth, what we remember is a conglomerate of what actually did happen, what we were told happened, what we imagine happened based upon the emotions associated with the event, and pure (if inadvertent) fabrication.  And the scariest part is that absent hard evidence (a video, for example), there's no way to tell which parts are what.

It all feels true.

If you don't believe this, consider what happened to cognitive researcher Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California - Irvine, whose experiments establishing the unreliability of memory are described in neuroscientist David Eagleman's wonderful book The Brain: The Story of You:

We're all susceptible to this memory manipulation -- even Loftus herself.  As it turned out, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool.  Years later, a conversation with a relative brought out an extraordinary fact: that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool.  That news came as a shock to her; she hadn't known that, and in fact didn't believe it.  But, she describes, "I went home from that birthday and I started to think: maybe I did.  I started to think about other things that I did remember -- like when the firemen came, they gave me oxygen.  Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset I found the body?"  Soon, she could visualize her mother in the swimming pool.

But then, her relative called to say he had made a mistake.  It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body.  It had been Elizabeth's aunt.  And that's how Loftus had the experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt.

So it's not like false memories seem vague or tentative.  They're so vivid you can't tell them from real ones.

Which brings us to the strange story of an arcade video game called "Polybius."

In the early 1980s, a rumor began to circulate that there was an arcade game that combined some very frightening effects.  Its visuals and sounds were dark, surreal, and suggestive.  Children who played the game sometimes had seizures or hallucinations, and afterwards experienced periods of amnesia and night terrors.  Worse, there was something about it that was strangely addictive.  People who played it more than two or three times were likely to become obsessed by it, and keep coming back over and over.  Some, they said, finally could think of nothing else and went incurably mad.  Some committed suicide.

Some simply... vanished.

The FBI launched an investigation, removing Polybius from arcades wherever they could find it.  The "Men in Black" got involved, and there were reports of mysterious strangers showing up and demanding that arcade owners provide lists of the names (or at least initials) of high scorers in the game.  Those unfortunates were rounded up for psychological testing -- and some of them never returned, either.

There are webpages and subreddits devoted to people's memories of Polybius, their experiences of playing it, and scary things that happened subsequently.  There's just one problem with all this, and you've guessed it:

Polybius never existed.  Despite many, many people searching, there has never been a single Polybius cabinet found, nor even a photograph from the time period showing one.  Oh, sure, we have mock-ups people made long after the fact:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DocAtRS, Polybius Arcade 1 cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But hard evidence of the real deal?  Zero.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

So what happened here?

Part of it, of course, was a deliberate hoax; an "urban legend."  Part of it was confabulation of memory with a real event, when an arcade in Portland, Oregon removed a game that had triggered a couple of kids to have a seizure.  There was also an incident in 1981 where the FBI raided arcades that had converted game stations into illegal gambling machines.  There was a 1980 New York Times article citing research (later largely called into question) that playing violent video games predisposes kids to commit violence themselves.  And in 1982, there was a widely-reported incident that a teenager had died while playing the game Berzerk in a Calumet City, Illinois arcade -- the story was true, but his heart failure was caused by a physical defect, and had nothing to do with playing the game.

Put all that together, and there are still people now -- forty-some-odd years later -- who are certain they remember Polybius, and what it was like to play it.

It's another example of the "Mandela Effect," isn't it?  This phenomenon got its name from certain people's memories that Nelson Mandela died in jail -- when in fact, the reality is that he survived, eventually became president of South Africa, and died peacefully in his home in Johannesburg in 2013.  Other examples are that the "Berenstain Bears" -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as Be Nice To Your Siblings Even When You Feel Like Punching The Shit Out Of Them and Your Parents Are Always Right About Everything and Pay Attention In School Or Else You Are Bad -- were originally the Berenstein Bears (with an "e," not an "a"), that the Fruit of the Loom logo originally had a cornucopia (not just a bunch of fruit), and (I shit you not) that Sri Lanka and New Zealand "should be" in different places.

Almost no one who experiences the Mandela Effect, though, laughs it off and says, "Wow, memory sure is unreliable, isn't it?"  Those memories feel completely real, just as real as memories of stuff you know occurred, that you have incontrovertible hard evidence for.  The idea that you could be so certain of something that never happened is profoundly disconcerting, to the extent that people have looked for some explanation, any explanation, for how their memories ended up with information that is demonstrably false.  Some have even cited the "Many-Worlds" Model of quantum mechanics, and posited that there really is a timeline where Mandela died in prison, the cartoon bears were the "Berenstein Bears," Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia in its logo, and Sri Lanka and New Zealand were somewhere other than where they now are.  It's just that we've side-slipped into a parallel universe, bringing along our memories of the one where we started -- where all those things were dramatically different.

That's how certain people are that their memories are flawless.  They'd rather believe that the entire universe bifurcated than that they're simply remembering wrong. 

How many times have you been in an argument with a friend, relative, or significant other, and one of you has said, "I know what happened!  I was there!", often with a self-righteous tone that how dare anyone question that they might be recalling things incorrectly?  Well, the truth is that none of us are remembering things correctly; what remains in our mind is a partial record, colored by emotions and second-hand contamination and imagination, blended so well there's no way to tease apart the accurate parts from the inaccurate.  What our memories for sure are not is a factual, blow-by-blow account, a mental video of the past that misses nothing and mistakes nothing.

I know this is kind of a terrifying thing.  Our memories are a huge part of our sense of self; if you want a brilliant (fictional) example of the chaos that happens when our memories become unmoored from reality, watch the fantastic movie Memento, in which the main character (played to perfection by Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a cognitive disorder where he can't form any new short-term memories.  To compensate for this, he takes Polaroid photographs of stuff he thinks is important, and if it's really important he tattoos it onto his skin.  But then the problem is, how does he know the contents of the photos and tattoos are true?  He has no touchstone for what truth about the past actually is.

Although Pearce's character has an extreme form of this problem, in reality, all of us have the same issue.  Those neural firings in the memory centers of our brain are all we have left of the past -- that, and certain fragmentary records, objects, and writings.  

So, how accurate is our view of the past?

No way to tell.  Better than zero, but certainly far less than one hundred percent.

And there's not even any need for a cursed arcade game to screw around with your perception.  We're built like this -- like it or not.

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The attraction of the terrifying

The advent of the internet gave a whole new life to the phenomenon of urban legends.  When I was a kid (back in the good ol' Ancient Babylonian Times) those strange and often scary tales -- like the famous story of the choking Doberman -- were transmitted word-of-mouth and in-person, limiting the speed and scope of their spread.

Now that the world is connected electronically, these bizarre stories can spread like a wildfire.

This has given rise to "creepypasta" -- scary, allegedly true, first-person accounts that spread across the 'web.  (If you're curious, the name comes from "creepy" + "copypasta" -- the latter being a slang term for the practice of copying blocks of text between different social media platforms.)  Some have become pretty famous, and have inspired books and movies; in fact, I've riffed on two creepypasta in my novels, the legend of the Black-Eyed Children (in the Boundary Solution trilogy, beginning with Lines of Sight), and the terrifying tale of Slender Man (in Signal to Noise).

So obviously I have nothing against a good scary story, but a line is crossed when you add, "... and it really happened."  In fact, the topic comes up because of an interesting article by Tom Faber that appeared last week in Ars Technica looking at a specific subcategory of creepypasta -- stories that involve the supposedly supernatural (and terrifying) effects of certain video games.

Not being a gamer myself, I hadn't heard about most of these, but there's no doubt they're pretty scary.  Take, for example, the tale that grew around the Pokémon game "Lavender Town," which has an admittedly eerie soundtrack (you can hear a recording of it on the link provided).  Supposedly, the music contained "high-pitched sonic irregularities" that induced an altered mental state so severe that after playing the game, dozens of children in Japan committed suicide by climbing up on their roofs and throwing themselves off.

Needless to say -- or actually, evidently it does need to be said -- that never happened.  There is no evidence to be had online, from official documents, or in newspapers or television news that gives an iota of credence to it.  Even so, lots of people swear it's all real.  Sometimes these stories become oddly recursive; a game-inspired, supposedly true creepypasta called "Ben Drowned," about an evil spirit trapped in the game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, became so widespread that a new game -- The Haunted Cartridge -- was published based on it.

So a made-up scary story about a video game that people claimed was real inspired another video game.

Delving through these layers can be tricky sometimes, but what strikes me is how easily people accept that these tales are true.  For a lot of people -- and I reluctantly include myself in this category -- there's a part of us that wants that stuff to be real.  There's something oddly compelling about being frightened, even though if you think about it rationally (which I hope everyone does), there's really nothing at all attractive about a world where ghosts and monsters and zombies exist and video games can make a noise inducing you to kill yourself.

It's like the people, apparently numerous, who think that the H. P. Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos is substantially true.  (I couldn't resist playing with that idea, too, giving rise to my short story "She Sells Seashells" -- which you can read for free at the link -- and I encourage you to do so, because all modesty aside, it's cool and creepy.)  But the question remains about why would you want Cthulhu et al. to exist.  Those mofos are terrifying.  Even the people who worship the Elder Gods in Lovecraft's stories always seem to end up getting eaten or dismembered or converted into Eldritch Slime, so there appears to be no feature of these beings that has any positive aspects for humanity.  Okay, I live in a pretty placid part of the world, where I frequently wish something would happen to liven things up, but even I don't want Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the crew to show up in my back yard.

Despite all this, I still feel the attraction, and I'm at a loss to explain why.  I remember watching scary television and movies as a kid, and not just being entertained but on some level wishing it was real, even though I was well aware of how much more terrifying it would be if it were.  One example that stands out in my memory is the episode of Lost in Space called "Ghost in Space," wherein an invisible creature has arisen from a bog, and Dr. Smith becomes convinced he can communicate with it via Ouija Board.  Okay, watching it now, the whole thing is abjectly ridiculous (although I am still impressed with how they made the footprints of the creature appear in the sand without anything visible there to make them).  But other than being scared, I remember my main reaction was that I would love for something like that to be real.  Because of that, it's still one of the episodes I remember the most fondly, despite how generally incoherent the story is.

So (speaking of incoherent), I'm not even entirely certain what point I'm trying to make, here, other than (1) life would be a lot simpler if people would stop making shit up and claiming it's true, and (2) even people who are diehard skeptics can sometimes have a wide irrational streak.  It's fascinating how attracted we are to things that when you consider them, would be absolutely horrible if they're real.

Yet as the poster in Fox Mulder's office said, "I Want to Believe."

Anyhow, I should wind this up.  Not, of course, because there's anything interesting that I need to deal with.  When the most engaging thing in your immediate vicinity is watching the cows in the field across the road, it's perhaps not surprising that I sometimes feel like a good haunting or invasion by aliens would break up the monotony.

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Author Michael Pollan became famous for two books in the early 2000s, The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which looked at the complex relationships between humans and the various species that we have domesticated over the past few millennia.

More recently, Pollan has become interested in one particular facet of this relationship -- our use of psychotropic substances, most of which come from plants, to alter our moods and perceptions.  In How to Change Your Mind, he considered the promise of psychedelic drugs (such as ketamine and psilocybin) to treat medication-resistant depression; in this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week, This is Your Mind on Plants, he looks at another aspect, which is our strange attitude toward three different plant-produced chemicals: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

Pollan writes about the long history of our use of these three chemicals, the plants that produce them (poppies, tea and coffee, and the peyote cactus, respectively), and -- most interestingly -- the disparate attitudes of the law toward them.  Why, for example, is a brew containing caffeine available for sale with no restrictions, but a brew containing opium a federal crime?  (I know the physiological effects differ; but the answer is more complex than that, and has a fascinating and convoluted history.)

Pollan's lucid, engaging writing style places a lens on this long relationship, and considers not only its backstory but how our attitudes have little to do with the reality of what the use of the plants do.  It's another chapter in his ongoing study of our relationship to what we put in our bodies -- and how those things change how we think, act, and feel.

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