Quack

When I saw a headline over at Science News that contained the phrase "Ancient Demon Ducks," I knew I had found my topic for the day.

The article turned out to be about some recent research into a group of birds called dromornithids, which lived in Australia for about twenty million years, only becoming extinct about forty thousand years ago (thus overlapping the earliest ancestors of the Indigenous Australians by a short period).  Besides being referred to as "the demon ducks of doom" (I'm not making that up), these birds are also called mihirungs, from the Djab Wurrung words mihirung paringmal, meaning "giant bird."

Giant they certainly were.  Stirton's thunderbird (Dromornis stirtoni) reached three meters tall and could weigh over five hundred kilograms.  This puts it in second place to the much more recent Madagascar elephant bird (Aepyornis spp.), which could reach two hundred kilograms heavier than that, and still existed only a thousand years ago.

A reconstruction of Dromornis stirtoni [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.de), Dromornis BW, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I realize this doesn't look much like any duck you've ever seen, but apparently genetic analysis of fossils has established that the dromornids are most closely related to modern waterfowl.  Once again showing that appearance is not a very good indicator of genetic relationships.

The current research finds that the mihirungs may have been done in by a trait in common with several other large bird species -- slow growth rate.  The mihirungs, along with the elephant birds, the dodo, and the great auk, seem to have reached maturity slowly, in the case of mihirungs perhaps as long as fifteen years.  Time to maturity is inversely proportional to minimum viable population, the smallest number of individuals that (if conditions remain stable) could potentially stay in equilibrium or even increase, because if something starts killing them off, the population can only recover if the remaining individuals can reach sexual maturity fast enough to reproduce and replace the ones that have died.  The remaining large bird species -- ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, for example -- are all much faster to reach reproductive maturity, and have many more offspring at a time.  The slow-growing, slow-reproducing mihirungs just couldn't deal with a spike in the death rate.

And what caused that spike seems to be the same thing that did in the elephant birds, dodos, and great auks; overhunting by humans.  Eggshells of mihirungs have been found that show signs of having been cooked, and there is Indigenous art from the earliest human settlers of Australia that appear to show mihirungs amongst other animals that were targets of hunting.  So sad to say, but the weird "demon ducks of doom" were probably themselves doomed by the arrival of humans.

You have to wonder what the world would look like if humans had never come on the scene.  It's not only weird big species like the dromornids that might still be around; right where I live we'd almost certainly have passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), once the most common bird in eastern North America, hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century; and the pretty little Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), slaughtered because of their habit of eating fruit crops and declared extinct in 1939.

What's gone's gone, of course, and we should be putting our time and effort into conserving what we still have; but I can't help but wish we'd been more careful all along.  Well over 99% of all the species that have ever lived have become extinct for one reason or another, so in the long haul, extinction is unavoidable; to paraphrase Fight Club, on a long enough time scale, the survival rate of species in general is zero.  Still, it's amazing to think of what once was -- including the five-hundred-kilogram demon ducks of Australia.

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When the volcano blows

The human-inhabited part of the world dodged a serious bullet in January of 2022, when the colossal Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption took place.

Unless you're a geology buff, you might not even remember that it happened, which is kind of astonishing when you consider it.  The undersea eruption created an upward surge of water that was ninety meters tall, twelve kilometers wide, and the wave it generated displaced a volume of 6.6 cubic kilometers.  The tsunami started out nine times as high as the one that devastated Japan in 2011.

After that, a steam explosion -- caused when cold seawater rushed into the collapsed magma chamber after the eruption -- generated an atmospheric pressure wave, producing a second (and faster-moving) set of tsunamis.

The whole thing is hard to talk about without lapsing into superlatives.

The Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai eruption [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

The fact that this enormous eruption only caused five deaths and ninety million dollars in damage -- compared with the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which killed twenty thousand and caused over two hundred billion dollars in damage -- is due to its remote location in the Tonga Archipelago.  Had it occurred closer to heavily-inhabited coastal locations, it could have been catastrophic.

This analysis of the Tonga eruption came out right around the same time as a study out of the University of Cambridge looking at how woefully unprepared we are for a large eruption in a populated area.

"Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years. That's a roll of the dice," said study co-author Lara Mani.  "Such gigantic eruptions have caused abrupt climate change and collapse of civilizations in the distant past...  Hundreds of millions of dollars are pumped into asteroid threats every year, yet there is a severe lack of global financing and coordination for volcano preparedness.  This urgently needs to change.  We are completely underestimating the risk to our societies that volcanoes pose."

You might be wondering which are currently considered by volcanologists to be the most potentially dangerous volcanoes in the world.  Generally, these top the list:

• Mount Vesuvius/the Campi Flegrei system in Italy, which destroyed Pompeii in 79 C. E. and threatens the modern city of Naples
• Mount Rainier, southeast of the city of Seattle, Washington
• Novarupta Volcano in Alaska, which could produce climate-changing ash eruptions
• Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which has a history of violent eruptions -- and over twenty million people live less than a hundred kilometers from its summit
• Mount Saint Helens -- famous for its 1980 eruption, this volcano has been rebuilding since then and still poses a significant threat
• Mount Agung and Mount Merapi in Indonesia, part of the same volcanic arc that includes Krakatoa
• Mount Fuji in Japan -- scarily close to Tokyo, one of the most densely populated cities in the world

The whole thing is kind of overwhelming to thing about, especially given the question of what we could do about it if we knew a massive eruption was imminent.  Consider the failure of the United States government to act effectively prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 -- and there we had several days to do something, during which meteorologists correctly predicted the massive strengthening that would occur prior to landfall, and knew pretty accurately when and where it would occur.  With a volcanic eruption, generally geologists know one is coming at some point, but the ability to predict how big and exactly when is still speculative at best.

Imagine, for example, the reaction of the three-million-odd residents of Naples and its environs if the scientists said, "You need to evacuate the area, because there's going to be an eruption of some magnitude or another, some time in the next six months."

So the problems inherent in dealing with this threat are obvious, but (says the Mani et al. study), that's no reason to close our eyes to it, or refusing to consider possible solutions that may seem to be outside the box.  "Directly affecting volcanic behavior may seem inconceivable, but so did the deflection of asteroids until the formation of the NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office in 2016," Mani said.  "The risks of a massive eruption that devastates global society is significant.  The current underinvestment in responding to this risk is simply reckless."

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No butts about it

The early Cambrian Period was known for having some weird-looking animals, but even by Cambrian standards, Saccorhytus coronarius was pretty bizarre.

The name is a Greek and Latin composite that means, more or less, "wrinkled bag with a crown," and as disparaging as it sounds I have to admit it's pretty accurate.  The reconstruction of it from various fossils makes it look like a design for a new Pokémon that was rejected on the basis of being too outlandish:

One thing you'll notice about it is that it has no anus.  This, by itself, isn't as odd as it sounds; whole phyla of animals, notably Cnidaria (which includes jellyfish and sea anemones) and Platyhelminthes (flatworms) only have one opening in their digestive tract, meaning once they finish digesting their dinner, they spit the undigested bits out of their mouths.  This lack of a nether orifice has made poor Saccorhytus the butt of many jokes, and in fact I was going to title this post "Assless chaps" but was informed that the more prudish members of my readership might take that the wrong way.

Be that as it may, the spikes combined with its other weird features made it hard to classify.  The first Saccorhytus fossils seemed to have additional holes near the mouth, which initially were thought to be openings for gills but later turned out to be  places where spines had broken off during fossilization.  This has altered our understanding of where it fits on the animal family tree; initially, the supposed gill slits suggested it might be related to deuterostomes (including starfish, sea urchins, sand dollars, and vertebrates).  The fact that this was an artifact of fossilization, coupled with some new research, has placed it instead amongst the Ecdysozoa.  Ecdysozoa is Greek for "animals that get undressed" (speaking of undignified scientific names) because of their ability to shed and regrow their exoskeletons, and includes the familiar phyla Arthropoda, Nematoda, and Tardigrada, as well as less-well-known groups like Priapulida ("penis worms"), which takes "undignified names" to the next level.

Here's the current best-supported arrangement for known animal groups, with the Saccorhytus's branch shown in red:

So that's today's news from the No Ifs, Ands, or Butts department.  (Sorry, I'll stop with the middle-school humor.  Probably.)  Saccorhytus isn't a close relative of ours, but more allied to insects and roundworms.  Still, the lack of a hind end means it's not exactly a comfortable fit in that group either.  Of course, "if you haven’t got an anus," said study lead author Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol, "you’re not going to be very comfortable anywhere."

Okay, look, that one wasn't my fault.  The scientist himself said it.

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Ghost radio

I got an email yesterday with two links and a message.  The message said:

Wondering what you think of this.  I'm not convinced but I think it's interesting.  This guy says he's made a device that can allow two-way communication with the dead.  The messages he picks up do seem to be answering specific questions and comments he's making.  Not just random words or phrases. 

Watch the guy's video and see what you think.  I'm keeping an open mind about it, but I'm curious what you think. 

Sincerely,

T. K.

The links he provided were to YouTube videos made by a guy named Steve Huff, selling software that is called "The Impossible Box."  He claims that this software is manipulable by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who apparently surround us.  The first link plays audio recordings of messages that Huff has received using the software; in the second, he explains to us how he thinks it works.

Here are a few of the messages he received:

• I am the portal
• Let there be light
• The light will surround you, Mr. Huff
• Blessed art thou
• Olee's at your side
• The devil's gonna profit from you

And so forth and so on.  The software is available for download for $49.95 (and can be purchased here).

So I watched both videos.  Predictably, like the person who sent me the links, I'm unconvinced.

The way it works, which he does get to on the second video (about halfway through), is that the software scans internet radio, and pulls out words and phrases that it then plays for you.  Allegedly, this software only turns on when the ghosts have something to say.  "There is no continuous scan of audio," Huff tells us.  "The scan only starts when the spirits want to speak."

When it comes to explaining how the programmer created code that can specifically be manipulated by the dead, he's a little cagier.  The Impossible Box contains "software with all kinds of tech," he says, giving no other real details presumably to protect his proprietary interest, but also preventing any kind of critical analysis of what's really going on in there.

The real problem here, though, is the same one that plagues attempts to demonstrate that rock musicians have engaged in backmasking -- hiding demonic messages in songs, so that when you play them backwards you hear voices saying things like "Here's to my sweet Satan."  (That one is from one of the most famous claims of backmasking -- in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven.")  As Michael Shermer points out in his TED talk "Why People Believe Weird Things," the message only becomes clear when someone tells you what the demons are saying via a caption -- just as Huff does in his video.  Before we're primed by being told what the message is, it more or less sounds like gibberish.  "You can't miss it," Shermer says, "when I tell you what's there."

The other thing that is troubling is the question of why ghosts have to have source audio in order to speak.  If they can manipulate software, you'd think they'd be able to do the same thing without having to rely on picking out words from internet radio.  He tried making a "spirit box" that used white noise instead of scanning radio, Huff says, and it didn't work.  "Spirits have a hard time forming words out of white noise as a source audio," he tells us.  "They need audio with human words to really be able to leave you sentences "

Which I find awfully convenient.  We're given garbled phrases, made up from words pulled from internet radio, and we get to decide what it is we're hearing, and then assign meaning to it.  While it's possible that we're talking with ghosts, what's more likely is that we're seeing some kind of audio version of the ideomotor effect, where our own subconscious decisions and expectations of meaning are creating a message where there really is none.

Now, let me conclude with saying something I've said before; I'm not saying that the afterlife is impossible, nor that spirits (should such exist) might not try to communicate with the living.  All I'm saying is that the evidence I've thus far seen is unconvincing, and I find the perfectly natural explanations for what is going on in The Impossible Box (and other spirit communication devices) sufficient to account for any ghostly messages Huff and others have received.  If anyone does decide to shell out the fifty bucks for the software, however, I'd be really interested to hear what your experience is with it -- and especially, if you got information from Great-Aunt Marjorie that you couldn't have otherwise got, and not just vague messages like "The light will surround you."

Until then, however, I'm afraid that I'm still in the "dubious" camp.

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Anatomy of a verbal slap

A few weeks ago, a buddy and I were out for a walk on one of the local woodland trails.  It's a popular trail with bikers, runners, and hikers, running about fifteen kilometers down to Cass Park in the city of Ithaca.  To set the scene -- it's a well-maintained, broad path, and where we were was one of the widest parts of the trail, maybe three or four meters across or so, level and flat, with no obstructions of any kind, and a mown grassy shoulder on either side.

We were walking along chatting, and I heard a noise behind us.  I turned, and two runners were approaching, so we got off the trail to let them by.  Because of where we were, it was fastest to get out of the way if he stepped off to the left and I stepped off to the right; which we did, giving the two runners the entire path to themselves.  They didn't even have to slow down their pace.  But as they passed, one of them half-turned and snapped out some words to us, which I didn't catch.

I said, "I'm sorry, what?"

She gave a harsh sigh, turned around, and snarled, "It's rude to split the trail!  Learn some etiquette!"  And without waiting for a response, she and her friend took off at a run again.

I was speechless, for several reasons.  First of all, I've been a runner for forty years, and I've never heard anyone talk about "splitting the trail."  I didn't even know that was a thing.  As far as I've ever heard, unless there's a race going on, there's no particular etiquette about sharing a trail except for "get out of the way as quickly as you can and let the faster person pass."  The trail in question is heavily used, especially on nice days, and most everyone has no problem dealing with minor slowdowns and very infrequent traffic jams when several people end up at the same place at the same time.

But the gaffe that my friend and I committed -- which, allow me to reiterate, hadn't even required the two runners to slow down -- was apparently serious enough that we were accused of being "rude" and "lacking in etiquette."

What's oddest about all of this is my reaction to it.  You'd think I'd have gone through all the rational responses I just outlined, and would have immediately dismissed what she said as completely unreasonable.  Less charitable but perhaps still justifiable would have been laughing and saying, "What an asshole!" and forthwith forgetting about the incident entirely.  But in fact, it kind of ruined my morning.  I know I can be a bit of a golden retriever at times -- I have a tendency to want to be everyone's friend, sometimes at the expense of standing my ground even when I should -- but this seemed to go beyond even my usual desire not to ruffle feathers.

This ten-second interaction with a woman I had never seen before and haven't seen since left me feeling like I'd been slapped in the face.

It turns out I'm not alone.  We all react that way -- in fact, in some new research by a team led by Marijn Struiksma of Utrecht University, we find out that the response is so strong that it still occurs even when the insult is carried out under completely contrived, artificial circumstances.

What Struiksma and her team did was to hook up 79 volunteers to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which measures scalp conductance (and thus is a measure of the electrical activity of the brain).  They were then presented with various written statements, some of which used the participant's name and some of which used a different name.  Some were insults (e.g. "Linda is a horrible person"), some were positive (e.g. "Linda is an impressive person"), and some were neutral but factually correct (e.g. "Linda is Dutch").  And what the researchers found is that the volunteers had a strong emotional reaction to the personally-directed insults -- even knowing ahead of time that it was just an experiment, and those statements were not the honest opinion of any real person.

"Our study shows that in a psycholinguistic laboratory experiment without real interaction between speakers, insults deliver lexical ‘mini slaps in the face,’ such that the strongly negative evaluative words involved that a participant reads, automatically grab attention during lexical retrieval, regardless of how often that retrieval occurs," Struiksma said.  "Understanding what an insulting expression does to people as it unfolds, and why, is of considerable importance to psycholinguists interested in how language moves people, but also to others who wish to understand the details of social behavior."

If a contrived "insult," delivered in writing to a person who knew it was just part of a psychology experiment, can create a measurable neurological reaction, how much more are we affected by nasty comments in real-life situations -- even passing ones from total strangers, like the woman who accused me of being rude on the trail because I didn't get out of her way in the fashion she required?  It all brings home how important it is simply to be kind to each other.  Yeah, maybe I should grow a thicker skin; I'll admit that I can be pretty hyper-sensitive sometimes.  But honestly, what does it cost anyone to start from the assumption that most of us are doing the best we can?  You never really lose anything by cutting people some slack.

I'll end with a quote from the Twelfth Doctor from Doctor Who.  Twelve is not my favorite incarnation of the Doctor, but man, Peter Capaldi can deliver a monologue like no one else.  And this one -- about how even in extreme situations, the most important thing is the simplest of all -- seems like a good place to conclude this post.

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Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do.  Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often.  The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it God or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf.  The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why they would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, about all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

It's why I was so puzzled by the link a loyal reader sent me yesterday to an article in The Epoch Times called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles, Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which God meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the sixteenth century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First God (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... what was causing all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a flying rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the bad guys.

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the God-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about God's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

Vertue sat down on a large stone, and stared off into the distance.  "I believe that I am mad," he said presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to." 

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a single reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

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Perception and suggestion

One topic that has come up over and over again here at Skeptophilia is the rather unsettling idea that the high opinion most of us have of our perceptions and memories is entirely unjustified.  Every time we're tempted to say "I saw it with my own eyes" or "of course it happened that way, I remember it," it should be a red flag reminding us of how inaccurate our brains actually are.

Now, to be fair, they work well enough.  It'd be a pretty significant evolutionary disadvantage if our sensory processing organs and memory storage were as likely to be wrong as right.  But a system that is built to work along the lines of "meh, it's good enough to get by, at least by comparison to everyone else" -- and let's face it, that's kind of how evolution works -- is inevitably going to miss a lot.  "Our experience of reality," said neuroscientist David Eagleman, "is constrained by our biology."  He talks about the umwelt -- the world as experienced by a particular organism -- and points out that each species picks up a different tiny slice of all the potential sensory inputs that are out there, and effectively misses everything else.

It also means that even of the inputs in our particular umwelt, the brain is going to make an executive decision regarding which bits are important to pay attention to.  People with normal hearing (for example) are being bombarded constantly by background sounds, which for most of us most of the time, we ignore as irrelevant.  In my intro to neuroscience classes, I used to point this out by asking students how many of them were aware (prior to my asking the question) of the sound of the fan running in the heater.  Afterward, of course, they were; beforehand, the sound waves were striking their ears and triggering nerve signals to the brain just like any other noise, but the brain was basically saying "that's not important."   (Once it's pointed out, of course, you can't not hear it; one of my students came into my room four days later, scowled at me, and said, "I'm still hearing the heater.  Thanks a lot.")

The point here is that we are about as far away from precision reality-recording equipment as you can get.  What we perceive and recall is a small fraction of what's actually out there, and is remembered only incompletely and inaccurately.

The Doors of Perception by Alan Levine [Image licensed under the Creative Commons cogdogblog, Doors of Perception (15354754466), CC BY 2.0]

Worst of all, what we do perceive and recall is also modified by what we think we should be perceiving and recalling.  This point was underscored by some cool new research done by a team led by Hernán Aniló at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, which showed that all it takes is a simple (false) suggestion of what we're seeing to foul up our perception completely.

The experiment was simple and elegant.  Subjects were shown a screen with an image of a hundred dots colored either blue or yellow.  Some of the screens had exactly fifty of each; others were sixty/forty (one way or the other).  The volunteers were then asked to estimate the proportions of the colors on a sequence of different screens, and to give an assessment of how confident they were in their guess.

The twist is that half of the group was given a "hint" -- a statement that in some of the screens, one of the colors was twice as frequent as the other.  (Which, of course, is never true.)  And this "hint" caused the subjects not only to mis-estimate the color frequencies, but to be more confident in their wrong guesses, especially in volunteers for whom a post-test showed a high inclination toward social suggestibility.

As easily-understood as the experiment is, it has some profound implications.  "Information is circulating with unprecedented speed, and it even finds its way into our social feeds against our will sometimes," Aniló said.  "It’s becoming increasingly difficult to observe events without having to go through some level of information on those events beforehand (e.g. buying a shirt, but not before reading its reviews online).  What we are looking at in our research here is how much the information you receive is going to contribute to the construction of your perceptual reality, and fundamentally, what are the individual psychological features that condition the impact that that information will have in shaping what you see and think, whether you like it or not.  Of course, we are not talking about enormous effects that can completely distort the world around you (e.g., no amount of false/imprecise information can make you misperceive a small bird as a 3-ton truck), but what our study shows is that, provided you are permeable enough to social influence (which we all are, the key here being how much), then false information can slightly shift your perception in whatever direction the information points."

What this means, of course, is that we have to be constantly aware of our built-in capacity for being fooled.  And although we clearly vary in that capacity, we shouldn't fall for believing "I'm seeing reality, it's everyone else who is wrong."  The truth is, we're all prone to inaccurate perception and recall, and all capable of having the power of suggestion alter what we see.  "Perception is a complex construction, and information is never an innocent bystander in this process," Anlló said.  "Always be informed, but make sure that your sources are of high quality, and trustworthy.  Importantly, when I say high-quality I do not mean a source that you may trust because of emotional reasons or social links, but rather by the accuracy of the information they provide and the soundness of the evidence.  Indeed, our experiment shows that your level of suggestibility to your social environment (how much you dress like your friends, or feel influenced by their taste in music) will also predict your permeability to perceptual changes triggered by false information.  This, much like many other cognitive biases, is part of the human experience, and essentially nothing to worry about.  Being susceptible to your social environment is actually a great thing that makes us humans thrive as a species, we just need to be aware of it and try our best to limit our exposure to bad information."

The most alarming thing of all, of course, is that the people who run today's news media are well aware of this capacity, and use it to reinforce the perception by their consumers that only they are providing accurate information.  "Listen to us," they tell us, "because everyone else is lying to you."  The truth is, there is no unbiased media; given that their profits are driven by telling viewers the bit of the news that supports what they think the viewers already want to believe, they have exactly zero incentive to provide anything like balance.  The only cure is to stay as aware as we can of our own capacity for being fooled, and to stick as close to the actual facts as possible (and, conversely, as far away as possible from the talking heads and spin-meisters who dominate the nightly news on pretty much whichever channel you choose).

If our perceptions of something as simple and concrete as the number of colored dots on a screen can be strongly influenced by a quick and inaccurate "hint," how much easier is it to alter our perception of the world with respect to complex and emotionally-laden issues -- especially when there's a powerful profit motive on the part of the people giving us the hints?

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