Reality Monitoring Is Fallible

Reality-monitoring area of the brain

Research on an area of the brain that monitors the difference between external reality and sensations and feelings that arise internally suggests that physical differences may correlate with different sizes of the controlling area. The reality-monitoring area in people who do not experience auditory hallucinations appears to be larger than in people who do. An article comments:

Many mentally well people hear voices (or “auditory verbal hallucinations”) – in fact, around 6-7 per cent of adults in the general population report having had such experiences at some point in their lives.

The researchers scanned all their participants’ brains, specifically looking at the length of a brain structure involved in “reality monitoring” or telling the difference between internally and externally generated experiences.

Garrison and her colleagues wanted to test the idea that a problem with reality monitoring contributes to the voice-hearing experience in patients with schizophrenia, but not in healthy people who hear voices. To test this account, they used the scans to measure the length of a brain structure called the paracingulate sulcus (PCS) – this is the most frontal area of the medial prefrontal cortex and previous research has suggested that it is involved in reality monitoring. For instance, people for whom the PCS is completely absent (up to a quarter of the general population by some estimates) tend to struggle with reality monitoring tasks.

As they predicted, the researchers found that their patient volunteers had a shorter PCS than the healthy non-voice-hearing controls, and a shorter PCS than the voice-hearing healthy controls.[1] In contrast, there was no (statistically significant) difference in the length of the PCS between the voice-hearing healthy controls and the controls who did not have hallucinations.

Garrison’s team believe this result is consistent with there being two routes to auditory hallucinations (see image, below). For healthy people who hear voices, the researchers believe the origin is in hyper-activation of sensory parts of the brain involved in processing auditory information. For patients with schizophrenia, by contrast, they believe there is a sensory component combined with a problem with reality monitoring.

What isn't know is how differences in brain morphology affects people differently in everyday life without regard to hallucination. This line of research is in early early stages. The researchers write in the original paper: “Although our framework is admittedly simple, it might provide a useful basis to assist the understanding of hallucinations across clinical and nonclinical groups, and areas for future focus have been discussed above. The source monitoring framework suggests that decisions are made as to the source of a percept through comparison of its contextual, semantic, perceptual, or cognitive features with characteristic traces relating to internal or external sources.” It is thus not clear how important differences in reality monitoring is for clinically healthy people in various aspects of life.

Footnote:
1. “Also, it’s worth noting that, among the healthy voice-hearers in this study, the length of the PCS was intermediary between the patients and non-voice-hearing controls. It’s possible, the researchers admitted, that the reason the difference in PCS length between the two healthy groups was found to be statistically non-significant may have been due to a lack of statistical power. They said that replication of this study with larger samples could clarify this issue, adding that ‘…further research is [also] needed to to assess the extent to which the present results generalise to other nonclinical populations with hallucinations who may have different etiology and phenomenology of hallucinatory experience.’ ”

B&B orig: 6/24/19

Increasing Intolerance Among Americans

A Public Religion Research Institute poll shows increasing intolerance among Americans toward minority groups. PRRI writes:

Three in ten (30%) Americans say they think it should be permissible for a small business owner in their state to refuse to provide services to gay or lesbian people if doing so violates their religious beliefs, while two-thirds (67%) say they should not be allowed to do so.

Support for religiously based service refusals have increased across virtually every demographic group since 2014, when only 16% of Americans said small businesses should be allowed to refuse service to gay or lesbian customers because of religious beliefs, and 80% said they should not.

Opinions on this issue, however, differ by gender, age, and race. More than one-third (34%) of men, compared to 26% of women, say businesses should be allowed to refuse services to gay or lesbian people. This is an increase from 2014, when only 19% of men and 14% of women agreed that businesses should be permitted to refuse to serve gays and lesbians on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Seniors ages 65 and older (39%) are more likely than young Americans ages 18-29 (26%) to favor religiously based service refusals targeting gays and lesbians. Every age group has increased support since 2014, when only 17% of seniors and only 12% of young Americans supported allowing businesses to refuse to serve gay or lesbian people on religious grounds. One-third (33%) of white Americans, compared to nearly one-fourth (24%) of nonwhite Americans, agreed. White Americans have nearly doubled their support since 2014 (16%).

While there are no differences on this issue by educational attainment, similar increases in support for refusing service to gays and lesbians on religious grounds occurred across the board during the last two years, from those with a high school diploma or less (17% to 28%), some college (15% to 29%), and college graduates (17% to 32%).

Republicans are divided on whether small businesses should be allowed to refuse gay or lesbian people (47% favor, 48% oppose). This number has more than doubled from 2014, when only 21% of Republicans said these types of religiously based service refusals should be allowed.

If this data is basically accurate, this reflects another aspect of an increasing social sickness that afflicts America. How people see this will vary.

One question is whether the burden on religion is more than trivial. Exactly how much of an imposition on a person's religious belief is it to serve a disapproved of minority? Many or most religious people will probably assert the burden is major and intolerable. What does Christianity teach about this, if anything? Does Christian God condone this?

Another question is whether secular businesses can refuse service to religious people because it violates their moral opposition to the poisonous influence of religion on society, including intolerance of minority groups.

The glue that used to hold America together continues to weaken. If it gives way, the outcome could be very bad for America. America's enemies are no doubt very happy to see developments like this. They will use this to enhance our divisions to nudge America further into social discord. The hope is to eventually bring the US to its knees.

B&B orig: 6/26/19

Liberalism vs. Republicanism

Sugary cereal, free speech & wealth inequality: This came to my attention from a discussion that PD posted on his channel Books & Ideas. In the 12-minute video, political theorist Michael Sandel discusses the moral framework that Liberalism and Civic Republicanism operate within. Civic Republicanism dates at least back to Aristotle.

In his discussion, PD describes what Liberalism and Civic Republicanism are:

While Liberalism emphasizes the freedom of each individual and group to pursue those ends it deems satisfactory as long as they don't violate the harm principle, Civic Republicanism holds that citizenship requires certain virtues or skills in thinking and talking about politics, such that we are not apolitical agents but active participants interested in ongoing discussion of what constitutes the public good. Thus when the Supreme Court, for example, declares that forced sterilization is or is not in the public interest, (or the right to choose whether or not to abort), the Civic Republican idea is that there will likely be a relatively coherent societal understanding of the issue, and often enough of something like an agreement on what is right, wrong, good or bad in such cases. This follows on the assumption that a knowledgeable and active citizenry is more likely to come to meaningful agreements.

B&B orig: 6/26/19

A Descent into the Alt-Right and a Miracle Recovery

A voracious souless darkness sucks minds in

An anonymous essay written by a mother and her 13-year old son, pseudonym Sam, describes how one person, Sam, was sucked into the propaganda cesspit called the alt-right. Sam was able to recover his sanity after a brief, pure chance encounter with an anti-alt-right protester at an alt-right rally.

Washingtonian magazine published the essay on May 5 and followed it up a week later with some comments from the mother about the essay and public reaction to it.

Not surprisingly, some of the alt-right denies the essay is real. They consider it fabricated propaganda. That's now the standard tactic for most alt-right nationalists and racists, pro-Trump populists (probably about 98%) and most republicans (probably about 90%) when faced with facts, information and/or reasoning they dislike and cannot handle.

The descent into the propaganda cesspit: According to the essay, the son was a decent, normal kid until one day at school (8th grade) the kid was falsely accused of sexually harassing a girl: “One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.

If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.”

That and other traumas the school inflicted, e.g., “the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay”, triggered Sam's descent. He found the alt-right at Reddit, 4chan and YouTube. The darkness mindlessly but happily sucked the traumatized boy in. Sam commented: “I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. I was one of them. I was participating in a conversation. They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you [Sam's mother], not my teachers, no one….They treated me like a rational human being, and they never laughed at me.”

Propaganda power: The essay comments: “I began to see how white supremacists have been benefiting from what the writer Carole Cadwalladr has called the ‘circular knowledge economy’—how search algorithms feed an internet so ravenous for content that facts are optional. But worse, I discovered how expertly extremists have leveraged the web to prey on young people who are depressed. Search for the term ‘depression’ on YouTube, and the professional-looking white supremacists lecturing on self-empowerment might have you nodding in agreement, too.”

A chance encounter and recovery: As Sam and his mom were leaving the alt-right's ‘Mother of All Rallies’ on the mall in Washington DC, they were walking past a counterprotestor:

Toward the end of our walk down the Mall, I spotted a middle-aged man wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed NO TRUMP. NO KKK. NO FASCIST USA. He stood alone on the grass, holding a small poster that featured a picture of a smiling Heather Heyer, the demonstrator murdered in Charlottesville. He’d magic-markered the words A TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT and c-ville under her photo, above a hand-drawn heart. I asked if I could take his picture, but it was hard to choke out the words because I started crying.

I called Sam over and told him, in front of the man, that standing up for your beliefs among such a large, unfriendly crowd is the definition of courage. Sam seemed to understand. I could tell by the way he shook hands with the man—slowly and deliberately, as if they were each transferring something to the other.

As we walked to the Metro, I thanked Sam for convincing me to go to the rally so I could be reminded what real bravery looks like. “I never would have believed someone could have the guts to stand alone like that, here of all places,” I told him. “I’m so glad I saw it for myself.”

“That’s what you always tell me to do,” Sam said.

In the months that followed, Sam very gradually began to act like the kid he had been before he was falsely accused of sexual harassment. He texted more with classmates than with online strangers, and every few weekends I drove him to sleepovers with other kids. I noticed that when his new group of friends said goodbye to each other, even the boys hugged.

Thankfully, Sam moved on. By the fall of tenth grade, he seemed at peace for the first time since he’d stepped off the bus almost two years earlier, face puffy from crying, to inform me he’d broken the law.

That’s why my fears came roaring back when Sam and I heard on the radio one day that another Mother of All Rallies was taking place on the Mall that very weekend—and Sam asked if we could go. Together.

My breath caught. He must have seen my face change.

“As counterprotesters?” he asked, eyes gleaming.

A mind crawls out of the darkness

B&B orig: 7/1/19

The Illusory Truth Effect is a Universal Bias

Trump's Bottomless Pinocchio lies with number of times he repeated the lies in public

The illusory truth effect is a well-known cognitive bias that at political propagandists and most PR organizations and marketers heavily rely on to make their points to convince people. The effect is elicited by simply repeating a lie. Over time, some people will start believing the lie is truth. Experts believe that fluency with a lie tends to create a sense of familiarity which people can misinterpret as a mental signal that the lie is truth.

A paper by European and American researchers asked if the bias applies roughly among all people with different cognitive styles. Experiments designed to measure how prone different cognitive styles are to the illusory truth effect. The researchers relied groups of people who have (i) high cognitive ability or intelligence, (ii) a high need for cognitive closure, i.e., a strong desire to avoid ambiguity, and a cognitive style of (iii) thinking a rapid and intuitive manner, or (iv) a slower and more analytic approach. The paper is now undergoing peer-review and has not yet published. The researchers conducted a series of seven experiments using a total of about 2,200 participants. Study participants would read a mix of true and false trivia statements or fake and real political headlines. In most of the studies, the participants would then complete various cognitive tests and surveys, and finally they would re-read and judge as true or false the earlier trivia statements, as well as new ones scattered among them.

The Research Digest of the British Psychological Society summarizes the results:

The researchers found the illusory truth effect across all seven studies: participants were more likely to rate trivia statements and headlines as true/real if they’d seen them previously. Crucially, the strength of this effect did not vary according to the participants’ cognitive ability or style, or need for closure. A couple of studies found some small significant associations, but these disappeared when the researchers integrated all the data.

These results suggest that we are all predisposed to believe repeated information regardless of our own particular cognitive profile. And while that might make us all susceptible to advertising and the fabrications of dishonest politicians, the researchers have a more optimistic take. “These novel findings are in line with the assertion that processing fluency is not a judgmental bias and flaw in the individual, but rather a cue to truth that is universal and epistemologically justified in most contexts”, they write. In other words, it’s not that there’s a foolish subgroup of people who are more vulnerable to the “illusory truth” effect, but rather it’s an advantageous and universal bias that’s arisen because most of the time fluency actually is a reliable signal of truth. For example, a statement that is often repeated may tend to be endorsed by more people, which could be a useful cue to its truth.

No big deal or profoundly immoral?: This effect presumably arose during evolution to help people distinguish truth from lies. In the past, politicians, ideologues, propagandists and marketers understood and exploited this trait based on experience. Knowledge of this usually helpful, human cognitive trait and how to exploit it is at least millennia old.

Given that ancient lineage, today one can assess use of the illusory truth effect in politics differently. Some people see it as normal and inescapable and thus consider it to be ‘no big deal’ or something ‘to be expected’. On the other hand, since people who exploit the illusory truth effect know what they are doing, one can see that as profoundly immoral.

Among US Presidents, Trump appears to be unique. He repeats lies so many times that those high-repetition lies were given their own label, Bottomless Pinocchios, by one fact checking group. Those lies have to be repeated at least 20 times to qualify. So far, no other politician has been ‘awarded’ their own Bottomless Pinocchio. President Trump does not know many things. But one thing he does know is how to play on illusory truth effect with no shame or moral qualm whatever. He is thus unique in that regard too.

B&B orig: 7/1/19

The global threat of false information

The April 2017 issue of Scientific American reports on the impact of false information, conspiracy theories and online echo chambers that generate and perpetuate misinformation. For context, the article mentioned a 2013 World Economic Forum study of echo chambers and false information. That study concluded that the viral spread of false information was a dangerous social trend on a footing equal to the spread of terrorism.

Tens of thousands of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users were analyzed to study the spread of conspiracy theories. The lead researcher writes “Thanks to these studies, we know that humans are not, as has long been assumed, rational. Presented with unfiltered information, people will appropriate that which conforms to their own thinking. This effect, known as confirmation bias, fuels the spread of demonstrably false arguments . . . . And unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to break this cycle.”

The author overstates the case a bit. What the researchers found (again) in their recent study was documented years ago by social and cognitive scientists who study politics. They uniformly see the fundamentally irrational, heavily biased basis of politics and it's grounding in false information, bogus logic, personal morals and self-identity. The irrationality flows directly from the limited cognitive capacity of the human mind to deal with complex societies and technologies. Social complexity and technology have outstripped human cognitive capacity and that could constitute the seeds of human self-destruction.

Many people are uneasy with the complexity. For better or worse, the human mind is a superb machine that unconsciously makes coherence from complexity, even where there's no rational basis for objective coherence. Simply put, the human mind has vast unconscious power to self-deceive by creating false realities and applying flawed common sense to the false realities it thinks it sees. That is a cognitive “user illusion”, a phenomenon that was documented decades ago based mostly on data from the 1950s through the 1970s (see prior discussion on the user illusion.)

The author goes on to observe that attempts to correct false information usually failed and actually reinforced the false beliefs. “It suggested that confirmation bias plays an important role in the spread of misinformation. . . . despite optimistic talk about “collective intelligence” and the wisdom of crowds, the web has in fact driven the creation of the echo chamber. . . . Conspiracy thinking, on the other hand, arises when people find themselves unable to determine simple causes for complex, adverse circumstances.” In other words, the web is fostering collective ignorance as much or more than it fosters collective intelligence or crowd wisdom.

Honest attempts to communicate rationally tend to fail. “Any attempt at reasoned discussion usually degenerates into a fight between extremists, which ends in polarization.” It also ends in no one changing their minds or what they see as facts or how they apply their common sense to the facts they think they see. We've all seen the fight and polarization scenario many, many times.

The 2016 elections and Russia: If one accepts the degree of threat that misinformation represents to civil society, it is reasonable to take, for example, Russian interference in US elections as a very serious, direct attack on American democracy. It also provides an objective basis to conclude that, for example, the constant stream of lies and misinformation about Hillary Clinton did in fact affect people's votes, e.g., to vote for president Trump or to not vote at all.

Right now, conservatives and republicans argue strenuously that although Russian lies and misinformation were applied to favor Trump's candidacy, but that affected no votes. There's no logic or objective basis to believe that Russian interference was 100% ineffective at accomplishing exactly what it was designed to do. That belief is an example of confirmation bias by the conservative mind. That is an example of how quickly, unconsciously and powerfully personal biases and morals distort fact and logic in politics.

A core reason for the existence of this channel is to try to explain some of the cognitive and social biology that drives human irrationality about politics. If people do not come to understand their own biological humanity (cognitive and social biology) to some extent, they remain significantly more vulnerable to people out to manipulate them for their own ends. The internet is the perfect ecosystem to breed and propagate dark free speech to the detriment of human civilization and maybe even to human existence itself.

B&B orig: 3/25/17