Chapter Review: Core Skeptic Concepts, Memory and Perception Fallibility

“In the last two decades, while we’ve been fighting for science and reason, it seems like the stakes have only gotten higher. My own profession -- medicine -- has been thoroughly infiltrated by the pseudoscience of so-called “alternative” medicine. The very process of science is under attack. There are entire movements dedicated to denying and opposing the hard-won fruits of scientific discovery. And now it seems that truth and facts themselves are easily tossed aside as an inconvenience. .... “scientific” skeptics are not philosophical skeptics, professing that no knowledge is possible. We are also not cynics .... We are not contrarians who reflexively oppose all mainstream opinions. The term “skeptic” has also been hijacked by deniers who want to be viewed as genuine skeptics (asking the hard and uncomfortable questions) but are really just pursuing an agenda of denial for ideological reasons.”
--Steven Novella, The Skeptic’s Guide the the Universe

This is a review of the Introduction and Chapters 1-3 of Steven Novella’s 2108 book, The Skeptic’s Guide the the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake. Novella is a clinical neurologist (Yale University) and a well-known skeptic and pseudoscience critic. Several discussions that Novella posted on his blog, NeuroLogica blog, are the source of several discussions here, at least in part. His book is easy to read. It is intended to be a handbook that serves as “one giant inoculation against bad science, deception, and faulty thinking.” Novella is concerned about pseudoscience. He argues “good clean science blends imperceptibly into blatantly absurd pseudoscience,” making it easy for people to see truth and reality in the false and fantasy.

Chapter 1: Scientific Skepticism - Core Concepts

Chapter 1 describes the core concepts that scientific skepticism is based on. These ideas help skeptics parse reality from false, fake, fraudulent and fubar. The first concept, respect for knowledge and truth, is so fundamental and undeniable some may think it pointless to even mention it. The idea may be fundamental, but in both politics and science respect is almost universally claimed, but often not actually practiced to a large extent. The body of evidence showing flawed respect for knowledge and truth from cognitive and social science is large and now reasonably considered mainstream expert consensus belief.

Skeptics rely on another concept, science vs. pseudoscience, to help keep a focus on one of the main tasks Novella asserts for skeptics: “Skeptics are the first, and often the last, line of defense against incursions by pseudoscience.” He argues that the skeptic mindset is not common in academia.  Not only do skeptics need to know the science, they also need to understand how science goes wrong, leading people to form and defend false beliefs, even in the face of contrary evidence or logic.

One can imagine that many academic scientists would take exception to Novella’s argument that skepticism is not academia’s strong suit. Despite those complaints, Novella's argument has substance things in view of the replication crisis (scientists often cannot reproduce their results) and the weakness of the common statistical measure of what is “real” (p or probability measure; p ≤ 0.05 is considered more or less real[1]) and how the unconscious p-hacking bias often reaches that threshold, even when it is not true reality.

Novella describes several other core concepts, one of which, neurological humility, is quite important. This concept focuses on maintaining self-awareness of how easily we deceive ourselves: “Being a functional skeptic requires knowledge of the various ways in which we deceive ourselves, the limits and flaws of human perception and memory, the inherent biases and fallacies in cognition, and the methods that can mitigate all these flaws and biases.”

Chapter 2: Memory Fallibility

Memory drift: Decades of research has shown that memory is not a photographic or computer-like recall process. Memory formation and recall is a dynamic, distortion-inducing mental process. Memories are reconstructed each time they are recalled. Inherent biases and beliefs slowly change memories on each recollection. Vivid childhood memories from decades before are usually significantly or mostly false, sometimes completely false.

Novella writes:

“We don't have squishy camcorders in our skulls. Memories are constructed from imperfect perceptions filtered through our beliefs and biases, and then over time they morph and merge. Our memories serve more to support our beliefs than to inform them. In a way, they are an evolving story we tell ourselves.”

In other words, memories are flawed from the time we create them. Once created, they change over time to make them more consistent with our beliefs. One common error-producing process is fusion of details from different memories into a single memory. Another common error-producing process is confabulation, a process that Novella describes as just making stuff up. Our brains confabulate to make memories consistent and continuous, with gaps filled in with made-up events. We sometimes invent details of an event to emphasize its emotional significance.[2]

Memory implanting: On top of memory drift, memories can easily be implanted in our minds. That is the reason that witnesses in court cases are not supposed to talk to each other before testifying. when people discuss an event together, they generally change each other's recollection of the event. And, it is worse than that. Research shows that people simply imagining an event sometimes leads them to create a false memory that the event was real. Fortune tellers, clever lawyers, marketers and political propagandists can implant false memories into most people, including parties and witnesses testifying in trials, to help them get what they want. This happens all the time.

Novella writes:

“A 2015 study by Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter found that many adults can be convinced they committed an nonexistent crime after just three hours of interrogation by police. She reports: ‘Our findings show that false memories of committing crime can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories.’ ....  Memories can be distorted by suggestion. Merely suggesting a detail to someone while they are recalling a memory may cause them to incorporate that detail into their memory. If, for example, they saw a hooded figure and couldn’t discern the figure’s gender, an interviewer referring to the person as ‘her’ could be enough for the memory to change to one of a hooded woman.” 

Another important aspect of memory is that there is no correlation between our level of confidence about a memory is and its actual accuracy. We tend to have high confidence that our memory of significant events is accurate, e.g., the Challenger shuttle explosion, but research evidence shows no correlation. Novella comments: “We tend to think that vividness and confidence predict accuracy, but they don't. The clear lesson here is that we all need to be humble when it comes to accuracy of our own memories.”

Chapter 3: Fallibility of Perception

Perception is an ongoing iterative process in near real-time. It is a complex process that is highly filtered by the brain. It is not a passive process like a camera simply recording incoming light. The process is open to illusions and misinterpretations. The relationship between the real world and what we perceive is imperfect.

A first part of the brain (1) interprets sensory inputs, e.g., from the eye, then (2) that processed information is sent to a second part which interprets it, and then (3) sends the processed information back to the first part, which then (4) adjusts what is perceived it better fit the interpretation and (5) sends the adjusted information back to the second part for further processing and adjustment. The process operates constantly under two brain-created illusions. The first is that perceptions are literally accurate and real, and the second being a belief it is all happening in real time. The reality of perceptions is limited to the serious limits on both our senses and our brain’s ability to process it in time.

Out of body experiences are illusions that can be created. Certain drugs can do this and so can certain kinds of brain seizures, Virtual reality goggles can also create out of body experiences.

“First, we feel like we are in our bodies because our brains compare what we see and what we feel. We literally see ourselves in our own body, and we feel the parts of our body, and when those things synch up, our brain constructs the sensation of being in our body. This construction can be disrupted, which results in an out-of-body sensation. .... The lesson here is that even the most basic components of your existence are actively constructed by your brain. each component can be disrupted and erased. How does all this affect critical thinking? Well, just as with memory, be wary of saying, ‘I know what I saw.’ Hmm ... no you don't.”

Footnotes:
1. The p-value for a scientific test of a hypothesis is the probability of obtaining the observed results of a test, assuming that the hypothesis being tested is correct. It is the probability of the observed results or event fits with the tested hypothesis. A p-value of 0.0382 means there is a 3.82% chance the observed results could be random or have happened by chance. There is more confidence that a test result is real when the  p-value is lower, for example less than 0.01 (a 1% chance the observed results could be random). There is growing criticism in the scientific community that 0.05 is not stringent enough for results to be considered reliable and instead, p-values less than 0.01 or even 0.001 should generally apply.

2. Novella cites the instance of Hillary Clinton claiming to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996. Videos of the event showed there was no sniper fire or any other danger. The event was actually uneventful. Her recollection of the event was simply false, or she was lying. Her brain could have confabulated sniper fire to accord with her understanding of the very real danger of being in Bosnia (details described here by fact checkers) at the time of her visit. It is thus possible that Clinton herself did not know why she said what she said years later about the event. The fact checkers did not take the possibility of memory confabulation into account and accorded Clinton’s statements about the trip Four Pinocchios, which is defined as ‘whoppers’.