Notice anything odd?

I’ve written before about how our brains are extremely efficient pattern recognition machines, particularly when it comes to images which we encounter every day like human faces.

Studies have shown that even newborn babies are comforted even by a few dots and a line arranged in an appropriate facial pattern and our recognition abilities only increase as we get older.

It’s this ability that leads us to spot the man in the moon, faces on Mars or visions in toast.  We have a schema image of what we expect a face to look like and have a tendency to map what we see onto that template which often makes it difficult to see anything else if reality isn’t actually quite what we expect.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the photo.  Spotted what’s wrong yet?

It’s actually an example of what’s become known as the Thatcher effect.  This was an example of how we can be fooled by images with misleading cues which was discovered by Peter Thompson, a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of York.  It’s known as the Thatcher effect as the photograph he used to demonstrate it was a picture of Margaret Thatcher.

Ok, time’s up.  Perhaps if I flipped the photo above and showed it the right way up?

Eep!

No, that’s not just me on a bad day (and I’m ignoring any comments from people who know me who just think that’s a normal picture).

It seems that we’re really bad at spotting facial elements which don’t meet our template.  We don’t generally run into people with upside-down mouths and eyes in real life, so they don’t fit our schema and we don’t interpret what we see correctly.

Interestingly,  people who have Prosopagnosia, a lack of the ability to recognise faces, aren’t effected by this illusion, suggesting that they’re not processing faces against a template in the same way.  There’s some other nice examples of the effect on the internet, as well as this more subtle version [warning the last link contains adult language].

The Young Charles Darwin

Picture the bearded figure from the standard paintings.  He begins to study the Galapagos tortoises, perhaps noticing that some varieties have a saddle-like shape to their shells, whereas others on different islands don’t.  Alternatively of course, he just decides that it would be good fun to sneak up on them and have a ride:

The inhabitants believe that these animals are absolutely deaf; certainly they do not overhear a person walking close behind them. I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then, upon giving a few raps on the hinder part of the shell, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.

The general approach seemed to be to eat most of the potential specimens, to the extent that ’staying out of Charles Darwin’s way’ was probably a pretty good survival strategy.  Take the armadillo for instance:

we were obliged to be content with a frugal meal on an armadillo which we had shot by the way. The flesh of this animal has, indeed, an agreeable taste, resembling fowl, but is very fat

Or the puma

I was suddenly struck with horror at thinking that I was eating one of the favourite dishes of the country, namely, a half-formed calf, long before its proper time of birth. It turned out to be Puma; the meat is very white, and remarkably like veal in taste

The tortoises didn’t get away with just being ridden either:

While staying in this upper region, we lived entirely upon tortoise-meat. The breastplate roasted (as the Gauchos do carne con cuero), with the flesh attached to it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is very indifferent.

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking that he stuck to merely eating animals unimportant to his records, I refer you to the Lesser Rhea

When at the Rio Negro, in Northern Patagonia, I repeatedly heard the Gauchos talking of a very rare bird which they called Avestruz Petise.

He found one eventually, after eating most of it:

The bird was cooked and eaten before my memory returned. Fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved.

Preserved for his sandwiches in the morning presumably.

Darwin's Notebook

What isn’t mentioned is the pre-edited title of his most famous work was ‘The Origin of Species and 1001 Ways to Cook Them‘, or ‘Our tasty ancestors, an evolutionary journey into yummyness‘ .

Cooking tips aside, it’s an interesting exhibit, although the placement of the live iguana as an example of animals which didn’t live on the Galapagos, seemed a bit unnecessary.  I’ll let the Horned Frog slide though (I like frogs).

It covers the famous voyage of the Beagle, examples from his notebooks, including the first sketch of the familiar tree structure of animal classification.  It then shows a reproduction of his study, complete with wheeled chair to save getting up and various animal skeletons to show similarities in bone structure and development.  It finishes with a brief look at some of the controversies which surrounded his theory which, ironically, seems to be more challenged these days than it was at the time!

Give it a look, but remember to take some lunch with you, you might come out feeling peckish and I think they’d object if you tried to eat the iguana.

Hear anything, or just random gurgling?

The audio in the clip above seems to crop up in a number of children’s toys.

It’s used in the Fisher Price Real Loving Mommy Cuddle and Coo doll for example and in the Baby Pals game on the Nintendo DS.

Now, what if I told you that apparently these toys are being used to promote Islamic fundamentalism and Satanism (yes, two religious beliefs for the price of one)  Confused?

Listen to the sample again,  only this time listen out for the phrases; Satan is King and Islam is the light.

Did you hear them this time?  Personally, I’m struggling to hear Satan is king, but I can sort of hear Islam is the light at a bit of a stretch, now that I’m listening for it.  It’s that last clause that’s important, now that I’m listening for it.

The human brain is a pattern matching machine, particularly when it comes to things like language.  You’ve probably seen TV reports for example where people with strong accents are interviewed and presented with subtitles in case what they say is difficult to understand.  With the subtitles you can understand them easily and might well wonder why they bothered with them, but next time it happens try covering them up.  Suddenly what you could understand before is a lot harder to make out.

The phrases above were both spotted in different toys by the same US woman, Rachel Jones.  Now, who knows what triggered her hearing the phrase the first time, but once primed for it she could easily pick it up again and tell others, priming them to hear it too.  Hearing phrases in random static isn’t a new phenomenon, it even has a psychological term to describe it, Auditory pareidolia.  The same phenomenon leads some people to hear the voices of spirits in random static, or satanic messages in rock music.

Unlike backmasking where phrases are intentionally added, these are all just misfires of the pattern recognition abilities of the brain trying to make sense of sounds where none exists.  Provide a context for that sense and the urge to interpret it becomes even stronger but the phrases still aren’t really there, you just think they are.

Alternatively a secret cabal of Satanists and Islamists have put aside their differences, infiltrated the highest levels of the toy and game industry and are breeding a league of subliminally controlled child drones to do their evil bidding.  I’ll let you decide which is more likely.

Incidentally, I’d be interested in hearing in the comments whether or not you heard the phrases in the gurgling before or after you read what you were supposed to hear (or even heard anything else!)

Audio: © Mattel

Monster eye

I showed in passing in my last post a quote from Douglas Adams:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Now, he was talking about the the perverse nature of religious belief to demonstrate that he felt it was unnecessary.  Religion isn’t the only source of beliefs however, particularly for children and there are far better books to get them from than the Bible.

I’m referring of course to fairy tales, those windows into a more magical world where the wild things are, the denizens of the dark cupboards, mysterious castles and long forgotten kingdoms who teach us that there are monsters out there in the world.  In our current society we seem to be losing the need for monsters.  We shelter our children from the frightening and the upsetting, censor their stories and hamstrung their villains into comical figures, easy for heroes to vanquish and then allow to escape, shaking their fist at the hero as if they had just taken the last biscuit from the packet rather than destroy their entire life’s plans.

Would Disney’s Cinderella have been a better story if the evil sisters had chopped off their toes to fit into her shoes and had their eyes pecked out?  What about the evil queen in Snow White?  Should she have danced in red-hot iron shoes until she died?  Possibly, it certainly would have shown the results of their wickedness in an easy to understand form.  What of Little Red Riding Hood?  In the original story both Red Riding Hood and Grandmother are devoured by the wolf, who gets off scot free.  A scary ending, but gets the point of the story across far better than relying on a woodcutter always being there to rescue you.

Our time as children is when we learn how to behave in the world and we do them no favours by sheltering them from its nastier side.  In fact, they are generally much more resilient than you’d expect.  Neil Gaiman, an author who doesn’t shelter us from the frightening, found that adults generally find his book, Coraline, creepier than kids do.  [Neil incidentally has just been awarded the Newbery medal in the US for The Graveyard Book which is gloriously full of monsters.  Perhaps this is a turning point?]

These stories teach us that it is ok to be scared and brave when you face those fears and do something anyway.  That there are times when you win and times when you don’t and without the latter, the former wouldn’t exist.  For without monsters there is no cost to defeat and, without cost, there are no challenges, and without challenges, no thrill in victory or sadness in failure, just the grey depths of uniformity.

To end on another quote, this time from G.K. Chesterton:

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

Photo: © TCMHitchhiker Creative Commons License

Ok, that’s completely made up, but how many of you just tried it?

What I actually wanted to talk about today was free will, and how much of the time we spend just blindly following cues and justifying it afterwards.  As animals we are all apparently very easy to manipulate, particularly when we’re not really concentrating.   Ok, the opening paragraph to this blog was just a silly trick, but marketing professionals, politicians, salesmen and certainly magicians are adept at making us behave the way they want us to behave, no matter how much in control we might think we are at the time.

It is important to remember that our survival instincts have grown up from evolutionary routes, where making the wrong decision at a critical moment could well have devastating consequences.  We often don’t have enough time to evaluate all the options available to us, so we fall back on rules of thumb, short cut behaviours which have proven to be successful in the past and so we rely on to help us in the future.  Of course, as soon as you have a short cut behaviour, then you have something which can be manipulated.

As an example of this Ellen Langer conducted a series of experiments to test the potential rule ‘asking for favours will be more successful if you provide a reason’.  In her experiments she attempted to jump the line at the photocopier by asking if she could push in front and asked for permission in a variety of different ways.  She found that how the request was phrased had a radical effect on the responses she got.

If she asked “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine?” only 60% of people would let her jump the queue.  Phrasing the same request differently, “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” allowed her to jump the queue in 94% of cases.

What is really interesting however was her third attempt.

Asking “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine because I need to make some copies?” was still successful in 93% of cases, even though she didn’t provide a real reason!  It seems that the rule is sound and can be triggered simply by the appropriate phrasing, irrespective of the actual content.

Now that particular example doesn’t demonstrate why you might follow instructions like the one in this first paragraph, but I would speculate that it has something to do with the authority suggested by a claimed university study, along with a desire to gain an independent affirmation of your own intelligence.  The power of the former was demonstrated in the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram.

His most famous experiment consisted of a pair of subjects, one of whom was apparently connected to a machine which dispensed electric shocks.  The other subject was then instructed by a supervisor, dressed appropriately in a white scientists jacket, that the experiment was looking at how memory changed in different circumstances, and asked them to teach the first subject a set of word pairs.  When the subject got a pair wrong, the second subject was instructed to administer a series of electric shocks.  These shocks increased in voltage for every further incorrect answer.

Of course, in actuality there were no actual shocks administered and the first subject was an actor, but what was telling was how far people were prepared to continue administrating the supposed shocks just because they were told to by an authority figure.  Even when the supposed failing subject began banging on the wall and screaming in pain, many participants continued the experiment.  Most expressed discomfort about the effects to the supervisor, but seemed to require his approval before they would stop, demonstrating the power of the effect.  This would also suggest a need to maintain consistency with previous actions as another manipulating force, but this post is already long enough so I’ll save that for another time!

Now send this post to a friend and see if they put their thumbs in their ears.

In the past, in was relatively hard to get into a position to publish any form of information to the masses, so anything that you read had at least a reasonable chance of being true, barring the biases of the reporter.  However, as this post demonstrates, it’s now very easy to present information to the world giving us generally far too much to process and removing the sort of peer review that you would get from published books in the past.

Tim Burners-Lee has recognised that this could be an issue and believes that we need a mechanism for rating the reliability of pages, but this relies on having a reasonably authoritive source to make those judgements and keep them up to date.  To some extent peer-review can help here, but correct information from one source can easily be overwhelmed by more interesting sounding false information from another.

The problem gets worse when it’s not just people like me skimming pages and not researching them properly, it’s the mainstream media.  Major newspapers in the UK have reported that Ronnie Hazlehurst wrote the song ‘Reach‘ by S-Club 7 before he died, a ‘fact’ cribbed from Wikipedia but not actually true.  More recently, a David Anderson, a reporter for the Daily Mirror, reported from Nicosia that fans of the local football team “are known as the ‘Zany Ones’ and wear hats made from shoes.“, another Wikipedia gem which five minutes of research on the ground would have revealed as false.

Now, neither of these pieces of information are particularly noteworthy in themselves, but when you continually read the same pieces of misinformation, such as the ones I mentioned yesterday for example, presented both on the internet and in the mainstream media, then it gets to be a problem.  We can no longer rely that any facts presented to us have been sensibly researched as we might have done in the past.

That doesn’t mean that we all need to become authorities on everything, just that we need to be wary of information presented to us and think about how likely it is to be true.  Do some background research of your own, visit sites like snopes.com and see if they mention the fact you are interested in (but don’t necessarily assume that they are right either!).  Ask someone who knows about the subject if you can find someone, but don’t just blindly accept things as true, no matter what the source (including me!).

Be a sceptical consumer of information and you stand a better chance of working out what’s actually going on, and you might actually learn something new as well.

Ok, only some of those facts are true (his middle name is Hussein and he was born on Krypton) but the others are just some of scurrilous rumours currently doing the rounds on the Internet. This process has got so bad that his campaign team have setup a website to try and combat the misinformation. However, is this the best thing to do?

Several studies have shown that even after seeing a piece of information discredited or contradicted, people still form judgments based on the original information. In fact, by contradicting the claim, you may just be giving it a wider airing.

Here in the UK, we’ve seen exactly this effect occurring with the debate over the combined MMR inoculation.  This is a combined injection designed to inoculate against measles, mumps and rubella in children.

In February 1998 a British doctor, Dr Andrew Wakefield, then a reader in experimental gastroenterology at London’s Royal Free Hospital, suggested that the MMR vaccine might be linked to an increased risk of autism and bowel disorders in a study in the Lancet.  This led to many parents refusing to give their children the jab, resulting in an increased risk of a measles, mumps or rubella epidemic.

In the following month a panel of experts from the British Medical Council denied this claim, saying that there was no evidence of any link and the study was further denied by a Finnish study the following month.  Numerous other studies followed which also found no evidence to back up parent’s fears, the Lancet  regretted running the study and Doctor Wakefield was eventually investigated for professional misconduct.

However, inoculation levels have still yet to return to normal with only 49% of children in London having had the jab by their fifth birthday.

The dangers from outbreaks of these diseases is clearly higher than any potential autism risk, which has been fairly clearly rebuffed, but people are clearly not judging on the current evidence, sticking instead to the doubts placed by the original sensationalist claim.

Apparently 12% of voters still think Obama is a Muslim and a quarter don’t know because “they’ve heard different things about him”, so contradicting that claim isn’t working completely either, but I think we have at least established that he wasn’t born in a manger.