Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast. I know what
Speaker 1: I saw? How many times have you heard that before?
Speaker 1: In this special edition of Monster Talk, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a look at the tools we used to recall
Speaker 1: everything from encounters with ghosts, monsters, or aliens recalling what
Speaker 1: you had for breakfast three days ago. We all use
Speaker 1: the same tools, perception and memory, but we're all being
Speaker 1: constantly told that our perception and memory are fantastic. Yet
Speaker 1: it simply isn't.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: None of us are video recorders and none of us
Speaker 1: are unbiased reporters. What follows is a compilation of interviews
Speaker 1: with memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus and perception researcher Richard Wiseman.
Speaker 1: Listen and you'll learn how perilous and frail are the
Speaker 1: tools and materials that we use to build our fortresses
Speaker 1: of certitude. This is a Monster Talk special Seeing is
Speaker 1: believing monsterutal.
Speaker 3: When I think about some of the things that people
Speaker 3: believe that I know aren't really true based on the
Speaker 3: science and the scientific literature that is the body of
Speaker 3: the field of memory. I know that many people believe
Speaker 3: that memory works like a videotape recorder, and you record
Speaker 3: it and play it back. That's not true. Many people
Speaker 3: think that the cross racial identification situation, where you have
Speaker 3: a stranger of one race trying to identify a person
Speaker 3: of another race whom they've only seen briefly, we know
Speaker 3: from the science people make more mistakes, but not everybody
Speaker 3: who's judging eyewitness testimony understands that, and that may be
Speaker 3: one of the reasons why we have so many mistaken
Speaker 3: identifications that are cross racial. Many people believe that if
Speaker 3: somebody says I'm absolutely sure, that they're almost certainly right,
Speaker 3: but in fact, confidence is not a particularly great predictor
Speaker 3: of accurate. So those are just a few examples.
Speaker 4: I guess when it comes to perception, this myth, which
Speaker 4: I'm in certain where it's grown up, this myth that
Speaker 4: our heads like film cameras or video cameras and we're
Speaker 4: perceiving pretty much all of the world all of the time,
Speaker 4: and then we're somehow storing that in our heads. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's just complete madness. It would just require the brain
Speaker 4: the size.
Speaker 2: Of a planet in order to be able to do that.
Speaker 2: It just doesn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 4: And so if visual illusions tell us anything, is that
Speaker 4: we cut corners all of the time, which is a
Speaker 4: perfectly sensible thing to do. We make assumptions about what's
Speaker 4: important in the world, and we focus our attention on
Speaker 4: those events and don't look at the surroundings. When it
Speaker 4: comes to memory, we remember what we think was important
Speaker 4: and we let the uninformation drop away very rapidly.
Speaker 2: And most of the time those mechanisms serve us very well. Indeed,
Speaker 2: they allow us to be as brilliant as we actually are.
Speaker 4: Some of the time, under very special circumstances and obsic
Speaker 4: illusions one of us ccumstances, and magic tructure another, we
Speaker 4: get it very badly wrong. So what those things show
Speaker 4: us is that our brain is not like a video recorder.
Speaker 4: In fact, we're taking shortcuts all the time.
Speaker 3: So many people believe that many memory, especially memory for
Speaker 3: a traumatic event, works like a videotape recorder, that you
Speaker 3: see this horrific event and it's imprinted in the mind,
Speaker 3: and you'll hear people say things like, you know, I
Speaker 3: was so scared, I'll never forget that phase as long
Speaker 3: as I live. But in fact, memory for these frightening
Speaker 3: experiences can often be impaired inaccurate, especially especially in a
Speaker 3: lot of the little details.
Speaker 4: I think all sorts of experiments demonstrate a fallibility of vision.
Speaker 4: I mean, basically, any opt collusion does that. More recently,
Speaker 4: you've seen experiments into what's called change blindness, which is
Speaker 4: where you show people some kind of fairly complex scene
Speaker 4: and they watch it, and what they don't realize is that,
Speaker 4: you know, the clothing that people are wearing in that
Speaker 4: scenees changing, maybe the actors to be changing, and people
Speaker 4: simply aren't noticing those sorts of things. And so a
Speaker 4: while ago I made the color change in cart Trick,
Speaker 4: when ninety five percent of the visual feeld changes throughout
Speaker 4: the film strip, and now people just don't notice that.
Speaker 4: So those sorts of studies, which have only really been
Speaker 4: happening in the last maybe five ten years or so,
Speaker 4: are really starting to show us just how much of
Speaker 4: our world is acts constructed by our brains rather than
Speaker 4: us kind of looking very actively at what's going on
Speaker 4: around us.
Speaker 3: When witnesses testify in a courtroom before a jury or
Speaker 3: a judge, they can be very influential. Eyewitness testimony, as
Speaker 3: a matter of fact, is the major cause of wrongful conviction.
Speaker 3: To what happens is eyewitnesses are testifying, people are believing
Speaker 3: them because they're sincere and they believe in what they're saying.
Speaker 3: But even when they're completely inaccurate, and somebody innocent is
Speaker 3: being accused of a crime and ultimately convicted. It's because
Speaker 3: eyewitness testimony is so persuasive, especially when it's delivered with
Speaker 3: a lot of confidence and a lot of detail and
Speaker 3: even emotion.
Speaker 2: Beliefs affect our vision and our memory massively.
Speaker 4: So really, what we're doing is focusing on what we
Speaker 4: believe to be important, and that's a very.
Speaker 2: Sensible way forward.
Speaker 4: The problem is that some of the times what we
Speaker 4: think is important is actually not particularly important. So if
Speaker 4: you take a magic tricks, for example, the narrative of
Speaker 4: the trick will tell you what seems to be important
Speaker 4: any one particular time. So if the card is selected
Speaker 4: and the magician says, you know, look at your card
Speaker 4: that the important point then is what's on the face
Speaker 4: of that card, and you look at that moment, that
Speaker 4: allows the magician to do certain secret things because you're
Speaker 4: focusing your attention elsewhere because the narrative are told that's
Speaker 4: an important piece of information.
Speaker 2: You're not looking at his or her hands, and that
Speaker 2: allows them to get away from sleight of hand.
Speaker 4: If you believe in the paranormal and that somebody's doing
Speaker 4: some kind of psychic demonstration such as oh, I don't
Speaker 4: know bending metal, for example, you might not look very
Speaker 4: hard until something surprising seems to happen. When the psyche says, okay,
Speaker 4: I'm concentrating now, suddenly you focus your attention. You see
Speaker 4: the key bending. Well, actually, your belief in the paranormal
Speaker 4: there is tripping you up. What you need to do
Speaker 4: and not a big good observer is to be looking
Speaker 4: very closely before that moment, for your belief tells you
Speaker 4: there's nothing going on, it's not important.
Speaker 2: So I believe their bias is trippers up all the time.
Speaker 3: Well, people often ask me how reliable is eyewitness testimony,
Speaker 3: And the real answer is it completely depends on the conditions.
Speaker 3: So obviously, if you have very good lighting and you
Speaker 3: see something clearly and you're tested, your memory is tested.
Speaker 3: After a very short period of time, we can often
Speaker 3: trust our memories. But the problem comes in when the
Speaker 3: factors are weighing against accurate testimonies. So it's dark you
Speaker 3: didn't get a very good look in the first place.
Speaker 3: A long period of time passes, you're trying to answer
Speaker 3: questions about something that's really now pretty vague in your memory.
Speaker 3: Maybe you're trying to identify somebody that you saw. Maybe
Speaker 3: it's a crime situation and you're trying to identify the
Speaker 3: perpetrator of the crime. Maybe you've got a cross racial
Speaker 3: identification situation going where a member of one race is
Speaker 3: trying to identify a stranger of a different race. These
Speaker 3: are all factors that cause eyewitness testimony to become inaccurate.
Speaker 4: When it comes to human memories, it's very similar to observation.
Speaker 4: What we're doing is not really just pressing rewind and play,
Speaker 4: but rather we're reconstructing the past. So there's been lots
Speaker 4: of studies showing that the way in which you frame
Speaker 4: a particular piece of action can very heavily swear your
Speaker 4: memory of it. So, for example, you can show people
Speaker 4: a film of somebody looking around a house, and then
Speaker 4: you say to people, Okay, that film was taken by
Speaker 4: a burglar, someone who's going to come back and steal
Speaker 4: things from the house. Can you tell us what you
Speaker 4: saw and people will recall where the television set was,
Speaker 4: and you know, the security system on the door and
Speaker 4: all of that. They can take another group of people,
Speaker 4: show them the same film and say, this is made
Speaker 4: by some house buyers looking around.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us what you saw?
Speaker 4: And they'll remember, you know, the size of the rooms,
Speaker 4: and the deckre and so on, so both of them
Speaker 4: seeing exactly the same thing. But then the way in
Speaker 4: which you frame it after the event has happened biases
Speaker 4: their perception and recall that tape so very very important
Speaker 4: ways which memory can be swayed.
Speaker 3: One other things that I've noticed in my research observations
Speaker 3: in actual court cases is that we do rely on
Speaker 3: eyewitness testimony a lot. We listen to somebody give an
Speaker 3: account about the past, and especially if it given in
Speaker 3: a very confident manner, and especially if the person is
Speaker 3: showing some emotion as they tell the story, we tend
Speaker 3: to believe it. It sounds believable, and we tend to
Speaker 3: believe it because we are not thinking of the scientific
Speaker 3: fact that even memories that are fault can be delivered
Speaker 3: with a great deal of confidence and detail and emotion.
Speaker 4: Whenever we are in a situation where something anomalous, something weird,
Speaker 4: something we're not really used to observing actually happens, you
Speaker 4: have to remember that all sorts of factors come into play.
Speaker 2: One is normally stress, two is a surprise.
Speaker 4: Three is you don't know quite how to frame what
Speaker 4: you've just seen, and all of those things will disrupt
Speaker 4: your observation. And so you know, if you go along
Speaker 4: and you get to a seance and objects move, and
Speaker 4: you're in darkness and it's an emotionally charged atmosphere, then
Speaker 4: you're probably not going to be able to remember what
Speaker 4: actually happened.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The same is true of skeptics.
Speaker 4: Might go along to a genuine salance if such a
Speaker 4: thing actually happened and source some genuine phenomena. Again, their
Speaker 4: memory of that may not be very good. They may
Speaker 4: remember trickery that didn't actually take place. So it is
Speaker 4: a double edged sword. There's certainly under circumstances where we're
Speaker 4: not used to observing that there's no reason to think
Speaker 4: would be particularly accurate. Stress and distraction player a big
Speaker 4: role in observation when we become stressed. Attentional spotlight focuses
Speaker 4: right in because you know, you really do want to
Speaker 4: focus your attention on what's going on inside of the
Speaker 4: bushes if you hear a rustling there, because that's where
Speaker 4: the tiger is, or possibly where the tiger is, and
Speaker 4: that's where you really want to focus your attention and
Speaker 4: sort out what's going on.
Speaker 2: So when we become anxious, when we become.
Speaker 4: Stressed, that in spotlights, that becomes very narrow and we
Speaker 4: don't see what's going on around us. With distraction, it's
Speaker 4: slightly different. That tends to be a bottom up, as
Speaker 4: psychologists would refer to it process, and there are certain
Speaker 4: things built into our visual system that says, look, if
Speaker 4: something suddenly flashes or makes a loud noise, or suddenly moves,
Speaker 4: then focus all your attention there because that thing is
Speaker 4: the most thing, that's most important. And so you become distracted,
Speaker 4: and again you don't see what's going on elsewhere. So
Speaker 4: the illusion created by our eyes and brain is that
Speaker 4: we're pretty good observers. We're constantly looking around and and
Speaker 4: so on. The reality is we're focusing our attention in
Speaker 4: a very small place, and so because of that, we
Speaker 4: can miss big things that are happening right around us.
Speaker 3: I think it is a good idea that we try
Speaker 3: to educate the public wherever we can to have accurate
Speaker 3: notions about how memory works. So when they're deciding cases
Speaker 3: or when they're say law enforcement investigating cases, they too
Speaker 3: have a kind of healthy skepticism about human memory. And
Speaker 3: that's what I and other psychological scientists have been trying
Speaker 3: to do to provide that education, either through our writings
Speaker 3: or speaking to media, or speaking out when when a
Speaker 3: particular newsworthy court cases is in the news, or testifying
Speaker 3: as expert witnesses during trials. We are trying to educate
Speaker 3: people about the science of memory.
Speaker 4: As biases beliefs affect our vision and our memory massively.
Speaker 4: So really what we're doing is focusing on what we
Speaker 4: believe to be important, and that's a very sensible way forward.
Speaker 4: The problem is that some of the times what we
Speaker 4: think is important is actually not particularly important.
Speaker 2: So if you take a.
Speaker 4: Magic tricks, for example, the narrative of the trick will
Speaker 4: tell you what seems to be important any one particular time,
Speaker 4: so they can't is selected, and the magician says, you.
Speaker 2: Know, look at your card.
Speaker 4: That the important point then is what's on the face
Speaker 4: of that card, and you look at that moment that
Speaker 4: allows the magician to do certain secret things because you're
Speaker 4: focusing your attention elsewhere because the narrative have told you
Speaker 4: that's an important piece of information. You're not looking at
Speaker 4: his or her hands, and that allows them to get
Speaker 4: away from sleights of hand. So those sorts of beliefs
Speaker 4: are very important in terms of wider beliefs. If you
Speaker 4: believe in the paranormal and that somebody's doing some kind
Speaker 4: of psychic demonstration such as I don't know bending metal,
Speaker 4: for example, you might not look very hard until something surprising.
Speaker 2: Seems to happen.
Speaker 4: When the psyche says, okay, I'm concentrating now, suddenly.
Speaker 2: You focus your attention. You see the key bending.
Speaker 4: Well, actually, your belief in the paranormal there is tripping
Speaker 4: you up. What you need to do and not a
Speaker 4: biggerd observer is to be looking very closely.
Speaker 2: Before that moment.
Speaker 4: But your belief tells you there's nothing going on, it's
Speaker 4: not important.
Speaker 2: So our beliefs their bias. This trippers up all the time.
Speaker 3: I've been studying eyewitness testimony now for more than a
Speaker 3: quarter of a century, and as a scientist who has
Speaker 3: seen just how wrong eyewitnesses can be, both in my
Speaker 3: studies and also in some of the actual court cases
Speaker 3: that I work on, I'm I'm more skeptical when I
Speaker 3: when I hear somebody talk about the past, I'm I'm
Speaker 3: somebody who who often says, you know, I wonder if that.
Speaker 3: I wonder if that's really accurate. I wonder what's going
Speaker 3: on here. I wonder if there's another reason why this
Speaker 3: person is saying what they're saying, other than the events
Speaker 3: really unfolded that way. So I guess that I do
Speaker 3: have a kind of healthy skepticism about human.
Speaker 2: Memory in terms of perception and memory.
Speaker 4: What you have to remember is that when you a
Speaker 4: trip took on one of these obstacles to do usions
Speaker 4: or in sensual blindness or change blindness or whatever, it's
Speaker 4: a very very special set of circumstances that's been constructed
Speaker 4: to trip you up.
Speaker 2: Ninety Nine percent of the time, you're brilliant. You're brilliant observing.
Speaker 4: What's right in front of you, and actually you're pretty
Speaker 4: good at remembering what happened as well. But once in
Speaker 4: a while, and particularly the case when you're up against
Speaker 4: a fake psyche or a magician, someone there who is
Speaker 4: really there to trip you up, all of those biases,
Speaker 4: instead of working in your favor, work against you. So
Speaker 4: most of the time people shouldn't be concerned about this stuff.
Speaker 4: You know, they get through life fairly. Yeah, well it's
Speaker 4: only once in a while they'll get tripped up, and
Speaker 4: you shouldn't sort of overgeneralize those examples to everyday life.
Speaker 1: Mobstert This has been a Monster Talk special episode, Seeing
Speaker 1: is Believing. You heard interviews with doctors Elizabeth Loftus and
Speaker 1: Richard Wiseman. Check out the show notes at munster talk
Speaker 1: dot org from more information at least to their work.
Speaker 1: Coming soon, We're going to have our very first some
Speaker 1: Monster Talk live Google hangout. I've got some amazing guests
Speaker 1: lined up for that. Follow me on Twitter at doctor
Speaker 1: Atlantis or on Facebook in the monster Talk group to
Speaker 1: get more information and the time for that event. The
Speaker 1: results should be available as a future episode of monster
Speaker 1: Talk if the recording works properly. Monster Talk is an
Speaker 1: official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. The opinion is expressed on
Speaker 1: this show, or those are the guests and the host
Speaker 1: do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Skeptic Magazine or
Speaker 1: the Skeptic Society. Monster Talk theme music is by Peachtealing Monkeys.
Speaker 1: Additional music in this episode by Joy Fahrenbachiu's by permission.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.
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