The Believing Brain - Presented by Dr Michael Shermer

good evening everyone my name's Robert st. I'm the Dean of the Faculty of science here at the University of Melbourne and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all here to tonight this evenings lecture before introducing dr. Shermer I'd like to acknowledge that we're under II people as the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting here tonight and pay respects to their elders both past and present I'm truly delighted to be here to introduce dr. Michael Shermer to you dr. Sherman will be well known to many of you I expect most of you through his work as one of the world's leading science writers science historians and of course skeptics dr. Sherman recetas Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Pepperdine University Master of Arts and experimental psychology from California State University and PhD in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University for 20 years he taught psychology evolution and the history of science and he maintains his I going to make links through an adjunct professorship at Claremont Graduate University and he was just telling me about some other academic activities and very exciting academic activities that he's initiated very recently dr. Sherman plays a hugely important role as perhaps the world's highest profile skeptic he's the founding publisher of skeptic magazine the executive director of the skeptic society and the host of the skeptics distinguished lecture series at Cal Tech he's also a monthly call columnist for Scientific American the author of a number of best-selling books and the co-producer and host of the television series exploring the unknown the celebrated evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said of Michael as head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of Reason he is an important figure in American public life I'd like to extend that and comment that he's an important figure in public life in general we're very fortunate to have dr. Schumer with us tonight so please welcome him to the hi everyone around nice group thanks for coming out I really appreciate that I'm here for the think Inc conference that was yesterday and and then I'm in Sydney tomorrow and and with you tonight I got in a nice bike ride thanks to my host this morning four hours down your coast and back up and I was I was really feeling like I was 25 again because it turns out we had a tailwind all the way down and so then when we came back I felt a lot older anyway so and I've got to visit your Science Museum in the Melbourne Museum it's a new display if you've not been there this is probably the best science museum I've ever seen and I've pretty much visited most of them around the world it's really great it's fantastic all these interactive displays great fossils and really cool stuff so definitely go see that so I'm the publisher of this magazine skeptic magazine is the quarterly publication of the skeptic Society we're a 501 C 3 non-profit science education organization devoted to testing claims of the paranormal pseudoscience fringe groups and cults and claims of all kinds between good science junk science bad science voodoo science pathological science non science and plain old nonsense and unless you've been abducted by aliens on men on Mars for the last few decades you know there's a lot of it out there nonsense that is some people call us debunkers but let's face it there's a lot of bunk that needs debunking and that's part of our job and so each issue by the way if you join you can go to skeptic comm and become a member of the skeptic Society you get an actual membership you can get yourself a little gold pin that says skeptic well it's like one angstroms thickness of gold but it's gold uh nonetheless and and you'll get a subscription of the magazine you also get the the decoder ring that tells you what the the davinci code means nothing it's a novel when that book was popular we got a lot of calls a lot of media interviews on that I just kept saying he just made it up people do that they just make stuff up and sometimes they stamp nonfiction on the cover and then that's what really messes things up I'll never forget being on film our show with Whitley Strieber he's Strieber he's the guy that wrote that book communion the first of the popular alien abduction books the one that put the alien head on the cover that started the meme of this is what aliens look like you know with the big bulbous head and the almond-shaped eyes and the emaciated body and all that stuff and we were in the green room together I said you know what do you do for a living when you know you're not talking about writing about alien abductions he says well I'm a science fiction fantasy horror writer oh well oh okay I mean it's pretty much like the end of the story right anyway so every issue is uh it has a particular theme to it like we did one on the future of intelligence or people getting smarter or dumber well I'm from Los Angeles so you can imagine I have an opinion about this myself but it turns out people are getting smarter this is called the Flynn effect discovered by James Flynn the psychologist who studies IQ IQ scores have been going up three points every ten years for almost a century now and and now it's quite sure why Flynn himself thinks it's probably a sort of a collective cultural improvement in abstract reasoning because it's the abstract reasoning portions of the IQ tests that have been going up not the not the portions where you learn something but your ability to reason you know like manipulating figures in space things like that and so that may have something to do with the spread of science education I think because science teaches you to think abstractly and so that's a good thing I think we're making progress there we did went on artificial intelligence when will computers achieve human-level intelligence and we concluded that we're five years away and always will be really this is a hard hard problem to solve because we don't even know what consciousness is we don't really know how how it is we're able to do what we're able to do I mean you probably saw the big story there's a big big thing in America when the IBM computer Watson won jeopardy this game shows super popular game show in which there's three contestants that have to answer these really difficult tricky linguistic type questions double meanings of words things like that and so this computer is pretty amazing and he beat Ken Ken Jennings Ken Jenn the greatest jeopardy champion of all time they won 76 consecutive episodes of Jeopardy no one's ever come close to this and Watson beat him do you think Watson knows that he won do you think what he got there at the end he won yes oh I beat Ken Jett no I mean he doesn't he just is a computer answering questions ability to manipulate language and now they're using Watson for medical diagnoses as an a to doctors to physicians for diagnosis so but that's still a far cry from really being human right we did went on a 9/11 conspiracy theories was 9/11 a conspiracy well yes actually it was 19 members of al-qaeda plotting to fly planes into buildings without telling us ahead of time constitutes a conspiracy but that's not what the 9/11 truthers think they think it was an inside job by the Bush administration orchestrated the whole thing planted all those bombs at just the right floors where the planes were going to hit ahead of time they knew and orchestrated it flying these planes with remote-control devices and so on until where anyway we line them up you know here's the claim here's the answer here's the claim here's the answer because that's what we do but in short you know how we know that the Bush administration did not orchestrate 9/11 because it worked and that goes over really well in America actually especially liberal audiences so this is the original Charles Ponzi of the eponymous Ponzi schemes so we did an issue on why people are gullible for financial scams any kind of scams but in particular this is an affinity scam anybody that's a member of your tribe who is offering something you drop your trust guard down I mean you you sort of become more trusty without the usual skepticism because somebody in your own tribe certainly wouldn't cheat you something like that turns out that my guy who wrote this story lost half his life savings to Bernie Madoff and he's an expert in cons so that tells you anybody can succumb to these we've got quite a few issues on climate change are you a global warming skeptic or are you skeptical of the global warming skeptics which would make you a believer so this is a this is kind of a knotty problem in language what do you mean by skepticism well we mean thoughtful inquiry we mean scientific inquiry we mean science is skeptical because most claims are not true so we start with the assumption that whatever it is you believe is probably not true until you proved otherwise to us that it is the burden of proof is on the claimant not on the skeptics to disprove your claim and and so at some point you get to whether is a consensus that this is probably true and this is probably not true and so on and that's kind of how science works and so we then are faced with what about the people that don't come around to the evidence and and this is one of the one of these hot-button issues like creationism and evolution intelligent design and evolution or climate change and so on so but even so do you believe in global warming this is not even a good question this is like say do you believe in evolution what do you believe in gravity well yeah I hope so I mean it just is it's not something you believe in it's very different than say like do you believe in civil liberties do you believe in you know free speech you know these are different kind of beliefs than is the earth getting warmer either it is or it is and in principle we should have the data to tell us you know generally for most observers go yeah really it's kidney warmer and whether it's human cause or not should at least in principle be able to be determined with more data and that's a little bit different than say political or economic ideologies and so and then finally none of that really matters because the world's going to end in 2012 so actually the world was supposed to end May 21st but it didn't but it turns out it wasn't really the end it was Judgment Day and so you have between May 21st and October 21st to you know get your stuff together and come around to the right side and so we'll see when October 21st comes we'll still be around and and after 2012 comes 2013 anyway so I thought I'd just walk you through some of the the principles of skepticism oh by the way we do have our own dog the skeptical dog this is what we're facing up against and if you think people believe weird things in Australia you should come to LA here's a conversation overheard on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills for the this is the need of Science education mom I really like that you what's it mean uh whoa like from a cow uh-huh duh actually all wool comes from a cow does cashmere come from a cow - uh-huh the boy coward the girl cow if there's any place that could really use a county fair its la the boy cow oh oh you mean the one with the with the tusks the LA County Fair Pioneer simpler funner those tusks will get you every time so in science we're looking for natural explanations for natural phenomenon and we always want to ask the what's more likely question did aliens traverse the vast distances of interstellar space and land in Farmer Bob's field and pucker Brush Kansas and make a crop circle that says skeptic calm to promote our web page or did somebody with Photoshop make a slide for me another way to say this before we say something is out of this world is first make sure that it's not in this world again what's more likely that aliens traverse the vast distances of interstellar space and landed in Sacramento California to help the Governator in his job of saving my great state of California which he didn't or does the world weekly news just make stuff up well we have no evidence of aliens landing anywhere we have lots of evidence of tabloid newspapers making stuff up so that's I call that the Humes principle that is Humes axiom David Hume asked that what's more likely question that miracles happen there's a suspension of natural law or that people misinterpret exaggerated or even make stuff up and he answered that question in his great book on great chapter on miracles I mean let's look at that our aliens coming to Earth or UFOs their spacecraft here is a photograph of a UFO from my house in Pasadena California that's downtown LA here and there's the UFO that's the bush on my front yard if that UFO looks like a view of Cub captains because that's what it was there's lots of ways to fake UFOs we did this for a TV show my daughter took this picture I'm off on the side doing frisbee tosses with hubcaps that's one way to do it you have to do it with a cityscape from up on you know a hilltop or something you can have the cityscape in the background it's very dramatic you can also take a big pane of glass and put double-sided tape on the back of pennies and coin coins and line them up in you know different configurations of the UFOs hovering over your city it's pretty cool and you can take them to the UFO groups they get very excited about this anyway it's just sort of messing with their head it's not to say that all UFO photographs are faked only that it's easy to fool people into thinking that they are most likely there are other things in Southern California they're most likely experimental aircraft from over on the other side of the hill and the havi desert where there is a military base there or further up in north of Las Vegas where area 51 is which is a top-secret military test base for a testing experimental aircraft so but and the b-2 bomber flies over my house every once a year on January 1st at 8:05 a.m. just before the rose parade begins it flies over from Edwards Air Force Base and swoops down across Colorado Boulevard makes two runs and it goes right over my house and it is really spooky looking I mean it is this black triangular shaped thing it has that special paint that reflects no light it looks like a hole in the sky and it makes no sound when it's coming at you it's pretty loud when it after it goes by but you know if you didn't know about that it's been Declassified we've all seen them but you know if it was 20 years ago I didn't know about it I'm out in the desert and it's dark or dusk you can't quite make out what's going on and then you think you see something and then you tell your friends and you know it was big really big you know like a thousand meters across flying it 750 miles an hour - made a sharp right turn how do you know it was a thousand meters across it's dark there's nothing around it you know so people just make up these measurements and then the measurements get exaggerated and pretty soon you've got yourself a genuine UFO story right that probably most likely has a prosaic explanation but even if it doesn't the anomalies that are left unexplained do not constitute positive evidence in favor of your theory they just are unexplained things and that's okay in science to say I don't know these are three words that almost none of us like to say I don't know but it's okay to say that right we don't know lots of things so like in the case of the apologist and me the only difference between us is about 5% that is the serious guys will say yeah yeah I know the b-2 bomber the experimental aircraft the weather balloon the advertising place yes yes swamp gas and so on but what about the other 5% that don't have natural explanations what about those and I say well what about them we don't have to do anything with them just let them sit there they're just anomalies all theories and science have anomalies we can't explain with the mainstream theory you don't throw out the whole mainstream theory because of the few anomalies you just let them sit there or more importantly you assign them to graduate students to give them something to do so they can get their thesis done right that's that's what anomalies are for is for pushing the envelope of uncertainty but for many people they concoct an entire worldview this is what the whole nine eleven truth thing is about how do you explain that this weird little noise happened at 10:04 and some firemen reported that it sounded like an explosion I don't know I wasn't there you know maybe it was glass popping out maybe it was one of those things that fell out of the window that fell you know 500 feet I don't know but we don't we don't have to concoct an entire theory around that this is how to deal with anomalies okay so I want to believe you want to believe we all believe all sorts of things in fact it's almost impossible not to form beliefs this is from the iconic poster from x-files so my new book is about this subject the thesis of which is that we form our beliefs for a whole variety of emotional psychological social and cultural reasons and after we form our beliefs then we justify them with reasons after the fact and everybody does this and smart educated people are really good at doing this but not for good reasons they have the beliefs already just like the rest of us is that they're better at gathering data to support them the way it works is that our brains our belief engines that is we connect the dots between a and B a appears connected to B and this is called association learning nothing new here this is you know 50 years old 60 years old goes back to skinner actually even older than that goes back to Pavlov of you know you take the dog you put them in there you ring the bell give them some food these salivates you ring the bell again some food he salivates you ring the bell he salivates he's associated a with B and that's called classical conditioning and they learn it fairly quick or you put the rat in the box and and he's very motivated to eat because you haven't fed them since yesterday's experiment it's what you do with animals in the lab the case of people you can't really do that so you give them a choice these are your students between doing a deadly boring term paper or coming in and participating in a fun experiment so much of psychological science is based on 18 to 20 year olds in college which i think is problematic that's a whole other area for skepticism that I'm tend to write about someday let's run it on you know 50 year olds in our downtown with jobs and see if you get the same effect anyway so every time the rat gets near the bar he's because they're moving around they become more active when they're hungry and every time he gets near the bar you press a little button and the little food comes down the tube there comes down the tube into the little hopper and he hears it and he runs over there and eats it next time you make him go a little bit closer before you hit the switch and closer still and then maybe wait till he touches it and you close the switch and then at some point he bumps it hard enough he closes the switch himself it makes a little clicking sound and then he realizes if I press the bar the pellet comes down and that's called shaping takes about 20 minutes to do that with a rat so there there either way they're associating a with B and their brains actually change there's a like-new interneural connections that it grow and the more they do it the neural pathway gets reinforced and so on this is how this is how this research used to be done when I was in graduate school believe it or not that was a high tech computer back that's the wiring there is like the the how we programmed it this is the this is a Texas Instrument programmable calculator that was cutting-edge I type my thesis on electric IBM Selectric typewriter by the way these if you don't recognize them these are called pencils and that's paper those are data sheets yeah that's one of my pigeons we were we were operant ly training them to peck these keys and then once they figured out pecking the keys gets them rewards then they then you change the reward structure to see if they picked the left key more than the right key to give them twice as much reinforcement on the left key will they press it twice as many times not quite you know the matching law testing the matching law and all that stuff well we discovered it what Skinner discovered decades before that is that if you randomly reinforce them that is you put them on a variable random variable interval schedule of reinforcement whatever they were doing just before they got rewarded they repeat that and that might be like turning clockwise or counter clockwise once or twice or touching the wall with their wing or whatever and then they'll just repeat that behavior because they think that's what will get me the reward because it happened last time and that's called superstitious behavior or magical thinking now I know their brains are small but if you go to Las Vegas Nevada you'll see this principle at work in human pigeons it's very powerful I call it pattern isset II the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise so the question is the is the pattern real or not and so when we make those decisions about whether the patterns are real or not we make two kinds of errors a type 1 error false positive is believing the pattern is real when it isn't you think a is connected to B but well it's not or type 2 error or false negative is not believing a pattern is real when it is you you missed it now here's our thought experiment for the evening imagine you are a hominid on the plains of Africa three and a half million years ago your name is Lucy thank you Americans don't always get that Lucey you mean the TV show no no the little hominid australopithecine discovered by Donald Johanson and like in the Gary Larson cartoon with the Strehlow pithy scenes at the cave party and the guys going you're not the Lucy anyways guys will say anything to get their genes into the next generation just remember that you've heard it from a guy anyway so your ahmud on the plains of africa three and half million years ago you hear a rustle in the grass is it a dangerous predator or is it just the wind well if you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind you've made a type 1 error false positive you thought it was connected to B and it's not that's a relatively low-cost error to make you see animals doing this all the time on the fur fin and feather shows on the various television networks that broadcast these things they just become more skittish and cautious and they move around the noise on the other hand if you believe the rustle in the grass is just the wind and it turns out it's a dangerous predator your lunch congratulations you've just been given a Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool before reproducing thank you very much and we are the descendants of those who are most likely to make more type 1 errors than type 2 errors why because of the cost analysis it's just a it's just a behavioral cost-benefit analysis that is they'll occur whenever the cost of making a type 1 error this is the only formula of the night the cost to make a type 1 error is less than the cost of making a type 2 error now when is that the problem here is that assessing the difference between type 1 and 2 errors is highly problematic especially in this second life-and-death situation so the default position is just assumed that all patterns are real assume all Russell's in the grass or dangerous predators and not the wind now why can't we get it right why can't we just wait and collect more data because that will also get you lunch because predators don't wait around while you collect more data to decide if they're predators or not and so the default rule of thumb by the brain is pretty much everything you see in here is probably true and whether it is or not really doesn't matter because you haven't made the other kind of error which can be too costly thus it is we tend to believe most the things we hear now we have good brain scan research on this showing which areas of the brain light up when you understand something to be true or where you agree it's true these are just statements you're reading inside a brain scanner and you're pushing a for yes B for note or whatever and you can see which areas of the brain are lining up these are usually dopaminergic areas areas of the brain related to dopamine which is related to any kind of learning positive reinforcement anything that feels good dopamine dopamine dopamine is our favorite drug in your brain for learning something for positive reinforcement and so on it turns out just agreeing with the statement is being true get gives you a little burst of dopamine well there's more blood in the brain going to those dopamine areas that shows up on the brain scan anyway that's the technical way of saying it the fMRI brain scans are not measuring neural activity they're measuring blood flow going there just so you know that there's a little room for skepticism there it's not quite the new phrenology I like the research but we should be cautious about that when you see those beautiful pictures and the popular science magazine here's your brain there's the guide module there's the money module that it that's the MIT of a ruse it's not any one person's brain it's a statistical average of all the subjects that were in the experiment because everybody's heads are slightly different sized and they move around a little bit and you have to have to work all that out and then you add artificial color for where the binary digits show there was more blood moving into that area anyway all that is just another way of saying it's just a form of collecting more data to show those those changes in the brain okay so let's look at some examples of pattern is City finding meaningful patterns and random noise there's a rock formation that looks like a horse a horse is a horse is a horse of course unless it's a frog conflicting data confuses this how about this what does this look like that's a cow where the cashmere comes from right if you didn't see the cow there he is or she sorry but once I've given you the prime pops back in right how about here sure you see the Dalmatian dog of those you did there it is and once I've given you the cognitive psychologists call this priming I'm priming the brain telling you this is what you're supposed to see and when I go back to it it should pop out easier right how about here Saturn sure you see Saturn how about here what do you see what do you see nothing that's right there's nothing here very good if you think you saw something by the way see me afterwards because this is a signal for brain damage not just good so I'll talk about pattern necessity superstition and control there's different factors of variables that go into making some of us more or less likely to see patterns that are not real if the environment you are in is uncertain makes you anxious you feel out of control you are more likely to see illusory patterns as real my favorite example from the American sport of baseball is Wade Boggs here one of the greatest hitters of all time who was so superstitious when he was batting he had all sorts of rituals surrounding chicken he had to eat chicken before every game he became so proficient at cooking chicken he even wrote a book cookbook about it called foul tips foul tip anyway but only when they're batting are these athletes superstitious when they're fielding they're not fielder's are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time they almost never fail batters on the other hand fail seven out of ten times if you if you can be a Hall of Fame all-time great and and still fail seven out of ten times right so it's a very uncertain event so it makes you feel anxious and less in control and therefore more superstitious we know that pattern disease occur more on the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere Peter Berger ran an experiment and through one of these brain type experiments in which more meaningful patterns were perceived in the right hemisphere via the left visual field then in the left hemisphere via the right visual field so I'll come back to that in moment Carl Sagan made this prescient observation in his Pulitzer prize-winning book if you haven't read it's a great book the Dragons of even there is no doubt that right hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the left hemisphere but it may also detect patterns where none exists skeptical and critical thinking is not a hallmark of the right hemisphere so although this is a little over exaggerated perhaps by half on the division of labor in your head we can roughly speaking say you have two brains in your head that do different things the old brain is very modular I tend to agree with the modularity theorists in evolutionary psychology that our brains our organs that evolved to solve problems in our ancestral environment and solving problems usually has to do with very specific things not just one big global intelligence so though maybe there is something like gee anyway that's that's a different debate but roughly speaking holistic thought and tuition creativity art music happened more in the right hemisphere than in the left hemisphere where we have more science and math and language and logic and so on again it's a slight exaggeration but not by much and so I'll come back to that here with the right-brain left-brain thing another experiment Peter Berger and his colleague Christine Moore subjected subjects to a dopamine or dopamine through Al dope l-dopa is a drug given to Parkinson's patients and increases the amount of dopamine in their brains it seems to quell the tremors a little bit before they this experiment they gave the subjects of paper pencil tests just like 40 items do you believe in ESP do you think astrology works do you think Bigfoots real do you think UFOs represent alien crafts from other planets and so on and so on the whole retinue of stuff that we skeptics are skeptical of right and so some people score like low I'm a one or two and others are very high like a 9 or a 10 so you can kind of get a group of subjects that are more skeptical and a group that are more believers you give them all dopamine turns out that they all then tend to see illusory patterns as real screen faces real jumbled words as normal in other words dopamine increases the amount of a pattern isset II in the brain but the effect was stronger with skeptics than believers which kind of seems counterintuitive until you think about it for a second if you're already way up here on the belief scale you think everything is real then giving you more dopamine there's not much room to go well I already believe it's real so but if you're like me and you're way down here you pretty skeptical of most of these things there's plenty of room to go and it makes you more like if that's my explanation now I've talked I've spoken about pattern issah T in sort of a humorous way like isn't it funny how we see these things that aren't real that's not necessarily the case I mean finding patterns in the world is what creativity is all about unfortunately it's also closely related to madness and it's a signal-to-noise ratio problem that is you want to be able to find enough of the pit you want to have a mind open enough to recognize new patterns as real musical genres beautiful new art discoveries in science that lead the Nobel Prizes these are important new patterns that no one else is seen that's a good thing but you don't want to have a brain so open-minded that you think everything is real and your brains fall out right so that's the rub so my example I use in the book of two famous scientists on the on the left there is a richard fineman who won the Nobel Prize in quantum physics for his work and quantum electrodynamics in his invention or discovery or whatever you want to call it of the Fineman diagrams these fireman diagrams are attempts to visually describe how subatomic particles interact which is normally done with these massive long mathematical equations and these diagrams show how you know the in these particle accelerators in the in the subatomic particles interact and they do these things and and so forth and these diagrams are so effective for doing this kind of physics that they are still used today half a century after Fineman created them in fact this particular one here on this picture is on his van one of hymens graduate students painted Fineman diagrams on his 1976 cargo Dodge cargo van and it's still around I we have the van I've orchestrated salvaging it I found it in a gas station parked in near Pasadena weeds growing up into the wheels like oh my god don't you know this is fineman's van these are Fineman diagrams and anyway so it's now parked in in South Pasadena in a garage so if anybody comes to LA and you want to see fineman's band I'll take you to show it's pretty cool as the story goes he was driving up you know on Colorado Boulevard there where the Rose Parade is and somebody has stop sign rolled down the window said hey how come you have Fineman diagrams on your van he said because I'm fine Minh which I thought would be pretty cool too to be able to say by contrast on the right is John Nash who also won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his discovery of game theory that is his employment of game theory to discover how different strategies are used by different contestants in a game and so you can try to outwit your your opponent by changing strategies and so on but then your opponent changes their strategy to meet your strategy and at some point they reach what's called a Nash equilibrium where neither one of them has anything to gain by changing strategies and so there's a certain stability this turns out to describe like corporations competing in an industry where certain prices end up looks like collusion to monopoly fear fearing government agents but in fact it's not really intentional collusion you know all universities charge pretty much the same since we're here and but but most this happens in most industries mutual assured destruction is a cold war strategy works pretty well as long as you know the other guy also doesn't want to die I'm not so sure about the mutual assured destruction in the modern world where there's certain groups of people who are who don't mind die they're looking forward to it 72 virgins yeah maybe this is not a good calculating thing okay I know it's more subtle than that we okay but you may recall when when John Nash was you know played by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind he was he also saw patterns that were not real right that government secret government agents and and secret jobs he was working for for the government and conspiracies and cabal's and and not in the movie but in the book you know talking to extraterrestrial and aliens that were talking to him and giving him instructions and so on he's schizophrenic so on the one hand it's it you can win a Nobel Prize if you see new patterns that no one else has seen on the other hand maybe you see too many patterns that are just not real and you're crazy okay so this is not just a frivolous thing there's actual a good database on this by Nancy Andreasen at University of Iowa she brings creative artists and musicians scientists and so on into her lab and scans or brains has them do their thing that they're doing and and it and then takes a life history of them and it turns out they are statistically significantly more likely to either have manic depression or schizophrenia themselves or have it in their immediate family either their own children or their siblings or their parents so they're out that does seem to be some relationship between being a little nutty a little crazy a little you know I see new creative things all over the place and and that wins you all sorts of accolades from your peers of in your field or you end up diagnosed as mad anyway so it turns out that what you're thinking about also influences the kinds of patterns you see and so if like in this example because we're all now sensitive to the environmental movement and to save the whales and save the dolphins you all see dolphins in this picture right see there's a dolphin there there's a dolphin that there's a little dolphin there here's a dolphin that's a dolphin tail there guys sometimes ad agencies take advantage of the idea that we see patterns that we think are one thing and it turns out there come something completely different these are via una sandals carefully airbrush sandals I say I must say and cropped and so on conflicting data also plays into patterns we already have in our memories of what we think we're seeing when of course you see the lamp there in the room now this picture is a nice illusion because it works as long as you only look here and below but if you look here and above then you get conflicting data ok so the patterns are formed models in our memories are created out of these patterns new data comes in we do a match to see if there's a match there or not so if I rotate it then you can see how it's done just a staged photograph the impossible create illusion also tricks our brain because we have patterns of the way angles are formed we have neurons and your visual cortex that only fire when you see this angle and others that only fire when you see this angle and others that only fire when something moves this direction and others and only fire and something moves this direction and so on and so on you have a virtual infinite number of possibilities in your environment to see that can be patterned into your visual cortex but but we have nothing like that in our experience so that's how it tricks the brain now you may say oh sure more that's in 2d it's easy to trick the brain into D well here's the impossible create illusion in 3d by my friend Jerry Andrus the late Jerry Andrus who specialized in creating magic tricks and illusions based on two-dimensional illusions can you see how it's done here's the reveal so the photographer is way off to the side and the boards appear to overlap and so on but even knowing how it's done it's still very powerful because the model of how curves and angles happen are already there in your brain here's a new illusion that was discovered last year by McGill University neuroscientists there's a contest every year for the best of the year which is pretty cool you can find it online the illusionist turns out the Leaning Tower pieces it's not leaning that was an aleut nut just kidding the illusion is that one of these appears to be leaning more than the other one they're the same photograph just side by side and of course the one on the right appears to be leaning far more now why is that they think it has in by the way just to prove to you that that's the case you can you can look at that angle and that angle you can see that their same their explanation is that when you stand and you look at buildings they they normally appear to be converging there's a convergence point but that doesn't happen here in fact they appear to be diverging and so it throws off our brain I don't agree with that I think it's that you're comparing this angle to that angle not this angle to that angle and so that angle is much wider than that angle and so it appears on your visual cortex as something really screwy going on you can see that in this photograph where you compare this angle that this one not this angle that that one and so that throws us off you know I'm just sort of going through multiple examples of pattern issah T's and then how illusions teach us something about how the brain works another one of these is how we tend to see faces everywhere here you only need three data points to create a face the illusion of a face this is probably Photoshop but it's cool anyway and here is another illusion well you of course immediately recognized it as the American president but then if you look at it for a second it's like wait one of them is a little off which one of them appears a little weird the left one on the right one yeah okay so I'll take that left one and rotate it says now on the right so what's happening here is you have two neural pathways in the temporal lobes just above your ears dedicated to facial recognition let's just call it our facial recognition software and so the first type does a quick scan of a face it's a face oh it's a face of somebody I know I recognize right and then the slower neural pathway scans the details eyes the mouth the nose ears and so on and so then those things come into conflict faces are easy to find faces are important to us in evolution so we've evolved networks that are dedicated to facial recognition it's how we assess other people whether we like them or not whether we know them or not whether we trust them or not by the way the deja vu experience is explained I think by this this phenomenon where you have a pattern in your brain of the way the world is structured and you get some new data that's pretty close to that and it feels like a match right so it's like oh there's only so many variations in town designs and so you go somewhere new you've never been and you have like this deja vu experience like wow this is so weird I think there's like a gas station when I turn right here and there's a restaurant on the left sure enough there it is well pretty much all towns have a gas station a restaurant that corn silo or whatever and so you get something like a clothes mattress you think you see somebody you know like I've seen you so are you did we meet that kind of thing what you're doing is you're collecting more data your your your your facial recognition software is scanning and scanning look at the eyes the mouth and so on is that a match for that pattern I already have in my memory or is it not that's what's going on there so of course we see something again just a couple of data points this is shot in 1976 by the Viking NASA's Viking mission that landed on Mars before it landed it took pictures all of Mars and so the UFO just got very excited about this look the Martians have built these gigantic faces to signal to us here we are and they wrote letters to NASA saying oh please go take a close-up of the Martian face you know so finally in 2000 they did there it is it's the face on Mars it's a little light a sorry about the lights but if you squint you can get the face to pop back out there's you know there's the eyes the nose the mouth by squinting you're reducing the the granularity of the data from fine grain to coarse grain and so it becomes sort of a crude face again and then your facial recognition software kicks in and and you're off and running there's other faces all over the place here's the happy face on Mars right and this is a beautiful one I just discovered somebody sent me in Canada it's just a near Calgary Canada it's an Indian head that it's a valley it's about a 10 mile wide valley that's a road going up into it here anyway it's pretty cool you can find it on Google and just if you google like Indian Head illusion or something like that you'll find it somebody just sent me this one last week it's pretty cool it's on a garage door just tree shadow of a face pretty striking my favorite of all time is the nun bun discovered by a Tennessee Baker in 1996 laminated that bun and charged people five bucks a head to come see it until they got a cease and desist letter from other Teresa's lawyers charity Li goes so far damn it here's our lady of the Chicago underpass it's just a water stain but you know the deeply religious people and some not so religious people Satan loves you came to pay tribute to it some people song this bonfire Pope John Paul the second another one of my favorites is the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich which sold on eBay to a Las Vegas casino for twenty eight thousand five hundred dollars only in America yeah a cheese sandwich if which somebody even took a bite out of I mean it's just come on but it's a striking face now you can't hardly miss it I have no idea what the Virgin Mary looks like and I'm pretty sure no one else does either but there's sort of an iconography in Western religious paintings of what the Virgin Mary is supposed to look like to me you know it looks a little bit more like Madonna perhaps Jane Russell and that sort of 1950 starlet look here's the Virgin Mary on the side of a building in Clearwater Florida this was a bank building purchased by a Minnesota evangelical church which which Randy the amazing Randy Richard Dawkins and I went to visit a couple years ago on a Good Friday so there were quite a few people there with their crutches and wheelchairs to be healed by the mirror miraculous building they had erected this gigantic crucifix there anyway so we walked around the back of the building and it turns out that sir turns out that Clearwater Florida isn't now the water isn't very clear it's kind of mineralized you can see it in the grass so wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree you get this kind of staining on the windows in fact I found one on the back side of the building that was they started to wipe off because I guess you can only have one miracle per building but there you can see the sprinkler head and the the palm tree was there they cut it down so you could see it better I guess so again back to Humes question what's more likely to be true you know is it really a miracle of Mary or is a miracle Marge well I'm not Catholic but I am a Simpsons fan so that's what I saw it looks like Marge Simpson okay let's go back to our thought experiment how many on the plains of Africa three half million years ago hear a rustle in the grass is it a dangerous predator or just the wind what's the difference between the wind and a dangerous predator the wind is an inanimate force a dangerous predator is an intentional agent it intends to eat me and that probably can't be good so this is what Dan Dennett calls the intentional stance we we take a stand and we assume that there's intention out there I'm more interested in the agent part than the intention part and I call this agent isset II the tendency to infuse patterns we find with meaning intention and agency often invisible beings from the top down I think this is the basis of solo spirits ghosts gods demons angels aliens intelligent designers government conspiracies and all manner of invisible agents with power intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives I think agent isset II is the basis of animism polytheism monotheism even in the belief in aliens you know if you look at the literature of science fiction or even the SETI scientists who talk about what the aliens will be like even even thoughtful people like Carl Sagan writing about the you know they're always more technologically advanced scientifically in that morally superior to us coming from on high to rescue us from global warming or nuclear war in the case of you recognize the conic scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 or the remake last year with Keanu Reeves and instead of nuclear war it was global warming right these are always reflecting our own neuroses about life right so and and so but again it's sort of that they're up there they will rescue us they will come come to us from on high or intelligent designers the intelligent designer has always thought to be this you know just like us but smarter and able to genetically engineer life and that sort of thing from on high coming down to stir the particles to create things right or even conspiracy theories I think are in a way granting a missions and omnipotence to humans to be able to like run the world like the Illuminati is one of the popular ones that there's 12 guys in London you know calling the shots running the world and so on this sort of thing and they're there ever-elusive although I must say I had a scare watching this HBO film too big to fail about the American financial meltdown and how the Fed Chairman and the head of the Treasury you know Bernanke and his whole crew called in the like the top 10 CEOs of the major banks you know the Bank of America Citibank and Goldman Sachs and so on and it and they had that meeting in September at September 18th of 2008 and said we're not leaving this room till we solve this problem because on Monday there is no economy I thought oh my god it's 12 guys in a room run into the world I mean do they really have that kind of power whoa scared me a little bit be a little skeptical anyway conspiracies do happen they're a little bit of a different species of belief than other things that I study because they happen Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy they were supposed to kill not only Lincoln but the Vice President Johnson's Secretary of State Stewart Secretary of War Stanton and so on they were all lined up to be killed and we knew about it within hours normally that's what happens you find out who the other assassins are the gates of JFK I'm a lone assassin guy although there's still people chasing this one down I got an email yesterday from two days ago from somebody about the you don't believe the Warren Commission do you is like not the Warren Commission I just got done with the 9/11 guys let's go back to Kennedy right but if you ever do get a chance to go to America and if you ever do end up in Dallas on any given day any of the year any time of day there are the conspiracy theorists are there and for a five buck tip they'll take you around and show you where the shooters were like on the grassy knoll behind the wooden fence or my favorite one in the manhole and I was like they popped up hey I'm shot him I went back down like a video game so like the anyway I don't want to talk about the 911 guys they tend to follow me around in my lecture so I don't all right now what's that brain let's go back to the brain talk about what's the basis of age ethnicity okay first of all I has to do with dualism we're natural-born duelists almost everybody tends to think there are two things in the universe corporeal and incorporeal brain and mind body and soul two substances right and that's why we get the humor and enjoy movies like Tom Hanks in big where he changes ages or 13 going on 30 where Jennifer Garner changes ages or Freaky Friday where Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan switch bodies think about for the we understand oh yeah they switch BOTS wait what's switching what's doing the switching well there's whole well but what's that well it's like the personality you know ah the mother is now in the high school talking about boys and the teenagers now in the boardroom and confused hilarity follows typical American humor movie okay but we get the humor because we we buy into the premise that we have some kind of mind or soul that could be transferred transplanted if you think about it though for a second the a brain transplant is the one transplant where you want to be the donor not the recipient all right because that's where you are you are in your brain I'm a monas there's just brain there's no mind mine is just another these fuzzy words that people use to describe something they don't understand it's just a word to use what the describe what the brain is doing and you know I'm right because when the brain dies the mind goes with it senility Alzheimer's dementia as the neurons die cell by cell the memory fades the person's personality becomes smaller everything they do become smaller their handwriting gets smaller their steps get smaller they walk slowly they hunched over a little bit more their memory gets smaller their personality their it used to be vibrant gets smaller everything gets as the neurons die the mine is gone no brain no mind therefore there's just brain now my friend Deepak Chopra disagrees with me he says no no the mind is out there somewhere else in the quantum foam whatever where is it when aunt millie's brain dies from Alzheimer's where does her brain her mind go when the brain is where does it go he said the matrix a matrix I said when we debated last year where is that I mean I can get it at Netflix I know but and I love the movie but that's a movie they just made it up you know these are Hollywood screen right they just made it there is no matrix right okay so well I think but we're we naturally think that there is such a thing as our soul or personality now it's not impossible that this could happen this is a scythe sort of a science fiction scenario that we may not be too far away this is what Ray Kurzweil and the singularity folks think could happen given enough computing power you could somehow download all your memories all those neural network sequences of patterns that constitutes all your memories and so on put it in a giant supercomputer that can be reconstructed in a virtual reality and there you are you're resurrected in a giant computer somewhere this is like the AI stuff we're five years away and always will well Kurzweil thinks we're there in 2030 and my other futurist friends tell me forget that it's twenty one thirty or 20 to 30 or 25 hunt we're a long ways from anything like that but in principle you see what they're trying to do there's a pattern that can be placed onto some platform that's a little more durable than the electric meat of our brains it's just meat protein electric meat that's all it is it doesn't last but for a few decades and that's it so it'd be nice if we can put it on silicon or something that lasts you know maybe a few hundred years or if it's running on Microsoft software a few months anyway so you know we are living in the digital Dark Ages right the digital Dark Ages can you run any of the programs you had back in the 90s on your current computer no can you can you upload those photographs and all those videos you took with those little video cartridges that you don't have the camera for anymore no but you can pick up a book that's 500 years old and read it okay anyway second point on the agent is the theory of mind theory mind is the ability to mind read not the psychic stuff I mean to put yourself in somebody else's shoes to take their stance what's it like to be you will you get this joke or not so I think about okay if I was sitting in the audience and I was you would I understand okay so I'm just mind-reading this is all human relationships or mind-reading this is what the Golden Rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you well what how would I know that well I put myself in your shoes is anything okay would I be upset about yes I would okay I better not do it or maybe I'll do it anyway but but you know that that that they're thinking like this right so this is the old you know I knew that she said that he thought that he was going to that I knew that he this is that theory of mind we can do it maybe some other species not sure this is the red dot test of self-awareness that is if you put a red dot on your forehead and you look in the mirror you'll go oh that's weird and you'll wipe it off if you put it on a chimps forehead they'll look at it and flick at it like to do that you have to look in the mirror go that's me so I'm self aware and there's nothing wrong with me I'm going to fix it right so but if you put your dog in front of the mirror put a red dot there just like whatever they don't even know that's so probably chimps and gorillas all the great apes some of the primates may be mostly just the great apes that apparently dolphins can do this what they have flippers so they can't you know you can't do the red dot but if you put them put them in front of a mirror they get very excited and they look inside their mouth which is interesting like well I've never seen that before and and the male's look at their genitals which i think is just very revealing about their intelligence and ours Wow look at that anyway you can put subjects in these brain scanners you can give them these little tests that they do this show that they're self-aware and aware that others are aware you know so it's like you show them a picture of somebody you know or you love that you're in a relationship with and you inflict pain on this other person or you actually have like a video showing them this and the areas of the brain that light up or the areas that would light up if you were feeling the pain this is literally I'll feel your pain Clinton I mean this there's something to this and and so we're able to project Adam Smith wrote about this his first book before the Wealth of Nations was a Theory of Moral Sentiments the argued that the basis of all morality and civil society is our ability to project into it and anticipate what somebody else feels this is theory of mind and you can and these are the brain areas that light up when you do that and then finally the temporal lobes I've mentioned these several times back in the early 60s when they first began doing these this research of poking around inside brains it's a really it's a really curious way to get data you actually take subjects that are epileptics that are about to get open brain surgery for some reason or for other reasons but you get them to sign a waiver that says is it okay if we wake you up while you're having your brain surgery and then poke around in there with electrodes and ask you questions and amazingly they go yeah okay sure and so this is how neuroscientists met the brain you just poke around with electrodes you turn them on and it causes the neurons to fire and then the and reports what they're feeling at that moment and so you can do that by poking around in these different areas particularly the temporal lobes and people will report these out-of-body experiences near-death experiences deja vu experiences the presence or sense of presence of others angelic voices if you go deeper through the temporal lobes into the limbic system where the amygdala is and the whole emotional software of our brain you can produce these feelings of intense meaningfulness depersonalization connection with God of the cosmos we can study near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences in this context again these are these kind of unsolved mysteries that people come to us with how do you skeptic scientists explain out-of-body experience this isn't this evidence of the afterlife and so on well you can replicate these in laboratories for example this fellow Major General James whinnery of the United States Air Force discovered what he called g-force loss of consciousness or gee luck in which his pilot's it accelerated at a high rate till they black out as part of their training you know to G's 3 G's 4 G's 5 G's 9 G's 10 G's boot you're out all's it is is just squishing the blood toward the center of your body and so the cortex begins to shut down as the cortex shuts down for some reason it causes this sort of going through the tunnel the white light at the end of the tunnel that the whole out of body floating kind of experience that people have you can do it through that same experiment I talked about with poking around this was an experiment done in 2003 reported in nature I'd have been science of a Swiss woman who had epilepsy poked around right there in the temporal lobe the red dot there and they created right there in the room I'm floating out of my body and you just crank the electricity up a little bit whoa I'm way up by the ceiling down bring him back to okay I'm back down on she's just lying there right oh my right arm my left arm my left leg my right leg and so on just by poking around right so it's just brain no mind just brain so again what's more likely on these experience that they have a natural explanation or not like in the alien abduction phenomenon does it represent human alien contact or human psychology well we know for example with sleep paralysis this is our explanation for this like with Henry thew sillies the nightmare several centuries ago the English referred to nighttime sensations of chest pressure from witches or other supernatural beings as mayor from anglo-saxon Marin to crush so a nightmare was the crusher who comes in the night now the narratives of today sound very similar but they didn't call them demons incubi or succubi today we call them aliens but it's the same phenomenon a certain percentage of the population as they're falling asleep or as or waking up have these sort of unusual experiences sometimes they wake up in the middle of a dream but they're not really awake they're still in the dream but they think they're awake and they feel paralyzed like they can't move and they feel chest pressure like there's something sit now if you live 500 years ago in a demon haunted world you would have you know a little incubi succubi a little demon there today it's the alien so the culture tells us what to call our unusual psychological experiences and so to that extent I'd say there's no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal there's just a natural the normal and all the stuff we can't explain yet but that's what we're doing we're trying to explain it naturally through these kinds of understanding of the brain and how it works now I had a daily abduction experience so those of you that have read my books or columns will already be familiar with this story but in 1983 I was abducted by aliens on the side of the road in Nebraska on a lonely rural Highway in Nebraska of course that's always where it happens right they never land out like at the White House you know aliens are here and so I was traveling down this lonely rural Highway this big craft with bright lights comes up over my left shoulder and stops me on the side of the road and scoops me and puts me into the Speight well they tried to abduct me in the spacecraft and I resisted and I knew they array that the aliens actually looked like humans but I could tell that they were aliens because they had stiff little fingers and that was the clue because and so that's the explanation when I was a child there was a popular television sci-fi show called the invaders in which aliens were taking over Earthlings and somehow they could traverse the Vestas this is of interstellar space and clone people look just like them they couldn't solve the ligament problem in their little fingers since no okay but when you're you know eight doesn't matter and so at that moment on the side of the road I just had this experience which was caused by sleep deprivation in my case this was part of the Race Across America this Transcontinental bike race that goes Elian in New York and that me and three other guys created in 1982 and in 1983 I tried to see if I could go the entire 3,000 miles without any sleep at all ten days without sleep the record was 11 days so I think it I can do it anyway I couldn't do it um and I had some great hallucinations of being abducted by these people that look just like my support crewmembers everybody in the race has a van that follows them with bright lights and so on so I'm often accused by alien abductees of say how do you know that you weren't really abducted and they planted a false memory of this because I have it on film okay so mr. technician this is a little low on volume so crank it up so this is me talking about having this weird experience the next night when I got to the Mississippi River and the film crew from television show that was covering the race filmed me talking about it so I there we go I can crank it up a little bit it was midnight six and a half hours after LAN Haldeman's crossing when Michael Shermer reached the Mississippi what Diana and I hadn't known when we spoke of a close race earlier was that Shermer was slowing down as he told Erik hiding there on the bridge he was wasted pretty mentally alert that's how I got to get some sleep tonight that's a very very strange thing happened to me last we like cyclonic type experience but yeah thank you my crew was aliens from another planet trying to capture me so how's ridiculous but that's what I thought as you can tell that was a long time ago I also went up to Laurentian University to visit Michael Persinger in his lab person group this fellow here puts this God helmet he calls it the God helmet it's a motorcycle helmet on your head bombard your temporal lobes with these electromagnetic field so it's a little it's a sort of a cheaper less invasive way of stimulating your temporal lobes so I'm going to end with that I thought that that's the fate of the paranormal again there's no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural it's just the normal natural and the stuff we can't explain yet we have to get past using these fuzzy words that don't explain anything when cosmologists talk about dark energy and dark matter those aren't explanations they don't mean them as explanations they're just linguistic placeholders to call it something until we figure out what it actually is and that's all the paranormal is supernatural it's just they're just words were used as okay there's something weird spooky here now let's try to figure it out so the paranormalist ends it there the scientist begins the exploration there it's like what it if it turns out Deepak is right and you know the consciousness is out there in some quantum state or something like that and we discovered it that would no longer be ESP or anything like that it would just be part of physics in part of neuroscience or which is what I think is the case is that it that isn't the case and we'll just quit talking about it because it won't be interesting anymore and so and so that's what science does the expanding sphere of knowledge pushes out into the unknown and although as the sphere expands it comes into contact with more and more unknown that's true so it seems like the more we know the more we know how much we don't know but on the other hand remember the ratio of surface area to volume as the volume gets bigger the ratio from volume to surface area decreases so it is good to know more even though we seemingly encounter more unknown we are relatively speaking learning ever more and that's why science is the best tool we have for understanding how the world works thank you

Channel: Science at Melbourne

Views: 118,637

Rating: 4.6799998 out of 5

Keywords: brain, the believing brain, michael shermer, university of melbourne

Id: R6ijdDtOLLo

Length: 68min 46sec (4126 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2011