The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

Recovered memory syndrome was a massive failure on the part of the mental health profession. The ideas, which were extraordinary, were never empirically demonstrated. Further, basic questions were insufficiently asked: Is there any empirical evidence to support the incredible events emerging from therapy, for example? Is it possible that the recovered memories are an artifact of therapy and are not real?

People generally do not repress memories of extreme trauma (the existence of rare exceptions remains controversial). Further, as Elizabeth Loftus pointed out, memories are constructed and malleable things. Also, independent investigations by the FBI, other law enforcement agencies, and scholars never found any evidence of the satanic ritual abuse, murders, and other atrocities emerging in recovered memory sessions. The events simply never happened.

The fact that a controversial idea was put into practice so widely, despite the risks to patients and their families, indicates a systemic lack of self-regulation within the mental health profession.

Even when you aren’t sitting on a jury, it’s important to remember the true nature of memory. Whenever you find yourself saying, “I clearly remember…” stop! No, you don’t. You have a constructed memory that is likely fused, contaminated, confabulated, personalized, and distorted. And each time you recall that memory you reconstruct it, changing it further.

When it comes to memory, be skeptical and humble. Unless the memory is of a trip to Pompeii, and then, of course, your brothers are wrong.

3.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Fallibility of Perception

Section: Neuropsychologic...

See also: I...

We’re a bit freaked out by really good optical illusions because they force us to directly confront a reality we tend to ignore as we go through our daily lives: What we think we see is not objective; it is a process of our brains, and that process can be fooled.

Perception Is Constructed

Essentially, if your visual association cortex thinks you are looking at an elephant, it communicates back to the primary visual cortex and says, “Hey, make that look even more like an elephant.” It changes what you actually see, not just how you interpret it. This all happens automatically, outside of your awareness.

4.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Pareidolia

Section: Neuropsychologic...

Pareidolia refers to the process of perceiving an image in random noise, such as seeing a face in the craters and maria of the moon.

apophenia,

There is a known neurological reason for this affinity for human faces: A dedicated part of the visual association cortex, the fusiform face area (FFA), specializes in recognizing and remembering them. Damage to the right FFA—from a stroke, for example—may cause a condition known as prosopagnosia, which is an inability to recognize faces.

Details that don’t fit the pattern are deemphasized. Those that are important to the pattern are made more prominent. Missing details are filled in. Your brain connects the dots. It’s amazing how few details are needed to suggest a face, and even an emotional expression, to our pattern-seeking brains. Even as little as a couple dots for eyes and some kind of line for a mouth is enough for our brains to see Elvis or the Pope.

5.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Hyperactive Agency Detection

Section: Neuropsychological Humility See al...

Hyperactive agency detection is the tendency to interpret events as if they were the deliberate intent of a conscious agent rather than the product of ...

Psychologists and neuroscientists in recent years have demonstrated that our brains are wired to distinguish things in our environment that are alive from those that are not alive. But being “alive” (from a psychological point of view) is not about biology, it’s about agency—something that can act in the world, that has its own will and can cause things to happen.

We imbue agents with an essence—a unique living force—even as infants. Objects are just generic things and are totally interchangeable, while agents have their own unique essence.

This likely provided an evolutionary advantage—it’s better to assume the rustling in the bushes is not the wind but a hungry lion. So perhaps we are descended from hominids who were more paranoid than others and had hyperactive agency detection, because such primates were less likely to be eaten by predators.

Studies have demonstrated that HADD is more likely to be triggered when a stimulus is ambiguous. Therefore it tends to be our default assumption—an object is an agent until we are sure it’s just an object. Also, our HADD becomes more active in situations where we have less control (which contributes to superstitious beliefs).

6.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Hypnagogia

Hypnagogia is a neurological phenomenon in which the dreaming and waking states are fused, producing unusual experiences often mistaken for paranormal ones.

One moment you’re fast asleep, the next you’re awoken by a sound or a feeling or even a smell that doesn’t seem right. Now that you’re awake, you find yourself incapable of moving. You can’t lift your arms or turn your head. You feel there is something in the room, a nefarious presence, likely unfriendly and certainly uninvited. You gasp for a deep breath but it feels like something is pressing on your chest, inhibiting your ability to take that breath to call out for help. No matter how hard you try, you can’t make a sound. You feel prone and vulnerable, at the mercy of whatever might be causing your powerlessness.

Hypnagogia is a neurological phenomenon that can occur when a person is waking up (hypnopompic) or going to sleep (hypnagogic).

Internal vs. External Experience

7.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Ideomotor Effect

The ideomotor effect is an involuntary subconscious subtle muscle movement driven by expectation, which creates the illusion that the movement is due to an external force.

Under a variety of circumstances, our muscles will behave unconsciously in accordance with an implanted expectation. What makes this simple fact so important is that we are not aware that we ourselves are the source of the resulting action. This lack of any sense of volition is common in many everyday actions.

METACOGNITION

8.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the inability to evaluate one’s own competency, leading to a general tendency to overestimate one’s abilities.

Dunning summarized the effect: “Incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are.”

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is not just a curiosity of psychology, it touches on a critical aspect of the default mode of human thought and a major flaw in our thinking. It also applies to everyone—we are all at various places on that curve with respect to different areas of knowledge. You may be an expert in some things and competent in others, but you will be toward the bottom of the curve in some areas.

That’s why the world is full of incompetent, deluded people—we all are these people.

If you assume that you know relatively less than you think you do and that there is more knowledge than you are aware of, you will usually be correct.

9.

Skeptics’ Guide Entry: Motivated Reasoning

Motivated reasoning is the biased process we use to defend a position, ideology, or belief that we hold with emotional investment.