 So far in this unit, we've started to distinguish facts from inferences and the particular type of inference being a generalization where we start with one fact and start to assume that it represents more than just itself. We've recognized that we tend to grab the facts that we can see and we don't always stop to consider what other facts we don't see. And as soon as you recognize a fact, you immediately make all sorts of inferences. Your system one intuitive automatic cognition makes inferences about what caused the facts, how to define those facts, whether those facts are good or bad, and what we should do about those facts. We can't perceive the facts in isolation from other facts. We always see them framed. We see them framed by other facts. And those frames lead us to make inferences about the fact that may have nothing to do with the fact itself. Certain frames prime us to think of certain patterns. Patterns that we carry around in our heads before our reflective consciousness, our system two, becomes aware of what we're perceiving. We can be misled by patterns that we carry around in our minds if they lead us to see patterns that aren't there, or we remember facts that were not real, simply because they fit the coherent pattern that we try to project onto the world. We use these patterns to look for coherence. We look to take the new fact, the new idea and fit into this previous pattern. This is associated coherence, and it works very quickly and very intuitively, but this association comes at the expense of thinking logically. This is especially problematic with stereotypes. Stereotypes are patterns that we use to interpret people. We ignore the logic and think according to the coherence of the stereotype rather than the actual likelihood, the mathematical logic. And generalizing doesn't take very much effort, so we prefer to associate something new with something we already know, some old pattern, something for which we already have a frame or a pattern. And the less we know about a particular thing, the easier it is to fit it into a previously known frame or pattern that we already possess. And that means when we see a familiar object, we can mistake that feeling of familiarity with actual understanding. This confusion is called the illusion of explanatory depth. And nothing feeds our illusion of explanatory depth like the Internet. The Internet is an infinite source for one-sided, incomplete, and wholly inaccurate descriptions, ready-made for easily fitting new things into old frames. Even when we don't find what we're looking for, we don't find the information that we set out to find when we do an Internet search, searching the Internet leads us to grossly inflate our own illusion of explanatory depth, illusion of knowledge. And that illusion of knowledge feels good. We don't like not knowing something. When we are confronted with a problem or a fact that doesn't fit into one of our old frames, it causes anxiety. And that ruins our feeling of closure. So we seize and freeze. We look for the first available answer or explanation. And we feel like we know all we need to know about this new thing. But even if we got this explanation from a really unreliable source, or a source that we know at the time is unreliable, we resist questioning that answer later. We want simple frames that we can use as heuristics to explain everything. Even if that explanation is vacuous or grossly inaccurate. Ultimately we tend to be more concerned with satisfying our need for closure than with learning the truth. Because finding the truth is hard. It takes a lot of effort. It means questioning our assumptions. Making those assumptions testable, falsifiable. And that means making our assumptions available to scrutiny and possibly being proven wrong. That's what the peer review process is all about. Submitting your best argument to the people who have the greatest chance of proving it wrong. A peer reviewer is like a shark with a red pen. But knowing that an inference, a generalization, or a complex argument has been through the peer review process at least allows us to have a little more confidence in that article's conclusion. The trouble is we quickly tend to forget where our knowledge came from. Some things we learned from reputable sources. Some things we learned from hearsay, from gossip. The incoherent ravings of people who are wallowing in their own illusion of explanatory depth. And that was the point made in your reading by Sam Wang and Sandra Ahmad in the article Your Brain Lies to You. Wang and Ahmad describe the way the brain records memories. It records a memory of a piece of information separately from the memory of where we learned that information, the source of that information. They call this source amnesia. As time goes by, we even forget whether or not we believe that new piece of information in the first place. If you hear a false statement and you learned that it was a false statement when you hear it, you might remember that statement later, but you might forget that it was false. This is called truth amnesia. And instead of judging information by the reliability of the source, we tend to judge that information by whether or not it fits into our old frames, the patterns that we assume explain the world, the things we think we already know. Now, after all this talk about the reliability of sources and information, hopefully you're wondering how much you should trust claims about psychology that are found in the opinion section of the New York Times. This isn't a peer-reviewed source, and it doesn't contain any citations of peer-reviewed sources. I sign this and all the other popular press articles instead of academic articles because they're a lot easier for non-experts to read. These two authors, Sandra Ahma and Sam Wang, have published a lot on cognitive science. They also write books for non-specialists. The concepts they describe, like source amnesia and truth amnesia, have been researched for years by other cognitive scientists such as Marcia Johnson and Daniel Schachter. If your first thought wasn't to check the sources to see if they were peer-reviewed or to see if they were based on peer-reviewed, I hope you'll start to do that. You'll start to notice that sort of thing. It's about to get very important. We come across bits of information all the time, like scientific reasons why you should use coconut oil by putting the word scientific in the title or by naming your website OMG Facts, putting the word facts in there. That tends to lead people to assume there's some sort of scientific basis that this has been through empirical testing and peer-review. And articles and second-hand news sources will frequently say, studies show something. But just because somebody says studies show or scientists say, that's not the same as a citation. You can't trace that unless they actually give you the information about that study, where to find it, who wrote it, what methods they went through, or at least the citation information so that you can go find it yourself. In this case, the claims made about coconut oil reference a study, but they completely misinterpret a study. And if you take that information as advice, as a policy claim about how you should eat and what things that you do or don't have to worry about if you're, say, eating coconut oil, that could lead you to misunderstand what you can and can't do with simple solutions like this, with simple answers. A good heuristic is, whenever you come across simple answers, assume they're not that accurate. And that brings us to the reading science for this unit, starting with Jonah Laird's article for Wired Magazine titled, Under Pressure, The Search for a Stress Vaccine. This is a long article, 6,800 words. It describes a lot of difficult information to understand, a lot of biological, sociological, even zoological information. Probably not the kind of thing that you thought you were going to have to learn in an English class. But it's also a popular article, as opposed to a peer-reviewed source. So it's still in that middle area between empirically tested, peer-reviewed research, and the OMGFACTS type of BS. But I chose it because it's a good example of how to write about complex issues in terms that most people can understand. Laird does a good job of taking empirical research and making it comprehensible, and he focuses on the research of the Stanford neuroscientist and biologist and professor of neurosurgery, Robert Sapolsky. And Sapolsky for the last two or three decades has been researching the way stress affects the brain and affects health. And as Laird points out, this started with Sapolsky in Africa studying baboons. He noticed that the baboons had a social hierarchy where the alpha males got to pick on the males below them, the betas, they got to mate with any female they wanted, and they got the first shot at whatever food was available. And then they would beat up on the beta males, and the beta males would console themselves by beating up on the omega males, the males below them. And this trickle-down abuse created visible health defects in the males at the bottom, and the females also they got picked on by the males. Whoever was lower on the hierarchy was less healthy and died younger. And when Sapolsky noticed this, he started taking blood samples from the baboons. He would tranquilize the baboons and then take a blood sample and see what was changing in their blood. And this led him to see stress as not just something you talk about, not just a feeling. Obviously he can't ask the baboons how they feel. He has to gauge the effects on their body based on biological evidence, physiological evidence. That set him to explore the effects of stress in the blood, not only of animals, but also of people. And he writes about this in lots of different scientific articles published over the last 30 years. And reading through all those articles is something the average person is almost never going to be able to do. And so what Lehrer is doing is trying to take all of that research and explain it in a relatively lengthy and relatively detailed, as far as popular press writing goes, relatively detailed manner. But doing that means that he can't just say that Robert Sapolsky studies stress. Most people are going to hear the word stress and assume that what's being described is just the feeling. The kind of thing you have a beer to relieve or just go to the gym to relieve stress. Or as people use the steam engine metaphor when they talk about stress, just vent. Just let it out. Like, don't hold it in, let it out. Well, this is a metaphor that's not actually based on biology. It's based on the 19th century model of the way steam works. So it's not actually very helpful. When you vent your stress, you actually do what the baboons do. You take it out on other people and that causes them to have stress and then they vent to other people and pass it on and so forth. So to get people to think about stress in a way that's different than the usual pattern they use to interpret the fact of observed stress or the way they usually define stress. Lehrer has to walk us through this idea. He has to give us sorts of anecdotes and examples that will help us change our definition. So each stage, each paragraph that Lehrer writes has a purpose, has a communicative purpose. Even if he's giving us information that doesn't actually tell us anything about this so-called stress vaccine that he describes in the end of the article, we're not going to understand what the stress vaccine is or what it's supposed to do unless we change our view about what stress is, how it affects the body and recognize that this kind of thing has not been studied before. Before Sapolsky set out to look at the physiological effects of glucocorticoids in the blood. So Lehrer starts with this introduction of Sapolsky going to Kenya. So at the same time we see the beginning of Sapolsky's forming this concept of stress as a physiological thing and we also see Sapolsky as a person. This is a little bit of biography to go along with the research. Then he has to change the assumptions people have about what stress is and how dangerous it can be. He establishes that stress is something that can actually erode your health. He has to make a very nuanced causal argument, which is to say that stress doesn't directly cause anything, but as he says, it makes things worse. It makes the diseases we might already be susceptible to. It makes those things worse. It makes their effects more noticeable. And that means things like Alzheimer's disease, depressive disorder, heart attack. It hauls out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult onset diabetes. It's a leading cause of male impotence. And most importantly, it shortens our lifespan. In other words, it's not a sufficient cause, but it's a contributing cause. And we'll parse those out when we talk about the stasis of causation later. He also integrates research from other scholars. This is research that Sapolsky would have had access to and that Sapolsky has interacted with. And it also shows how academic researchers work together. Academic Journals Act is a sort of confluence of all of this research so that academics can learn from the research done by each other. In this case, Lehrer begins with Sapolsky studying hierarchies and baboons and connects this to the British researcher Michael Marmot, who has researched hierarchies and stress and health effects in humans. For 25 years, Marmot's study had access to data about 28,000 British men and women. And he was able to look at what their status was in that government hierarchy and what their lifespan was, as well as a lot of other health issues. And he found that their mortality rate was four times higher between the ages of 40 and 64. That means four times as many people at a low status died between 40 and 64, as did people in the high status positions. And this is after taking into account other issues like genetic risks and behaviors like smoking and binge drinking. And he introduces two different ways to think about chronic stress. So he's already introduced the difference between stress as a feeling and chronic stress, which is ongoing stress, stress that we never really get beyond. And now he distinguishes between demand stress, where you're stressed out by the demands put on you, versus control stress. And that's when you get to, you have a stressful problem, but you have some control over how you deal with that problem. And this is very important because a lot of people might say, hey, the guy at the top is under a lot of stress. He's responsible for all these other people, so why isn't he having the health effects? And that's why it's important that we understand the difference between demand stress and control stress. He has control stress, but he gets to decide who does what, whereas the person who works underneath him doesn't have that much autonomy when it comes to solving a problem. But they have just as much responsibility. If the job doesn't get done, then their job is at risk. They're under just as much pressure to get the job done, but they have the additional pressure of following somebody else's orders. And this again helps Larry to distinguish between the stress you feel, the short-term stress that might rise to your conscious awareness, but it's not the kind of constant chronic stress that actually reduces people's life spans. And he reinforces the distinction between these two types of stress by saying, on one hand, stress is a cultural thing. It is a response to an external stimulus, but it's also something that can be measured, not just by self-report, not just by how you consciously feel, but something in your blood, specifically the glucocorticoids and no repinephrine and adrenal hormones. And just as important is how new this view of stress is from a research scientific standpoint, as well as being different than the common understanding of stress. He has to make it clear not only that stress is a chemistry problem, but also how stress is a chemistry problem. So to understand what's happening in the blood, he has to give us an explanation of why these glucocorticoids are there. They're not this sort of toxic substance that's not supposed to be in your blood. They're supposed to be there. They tell your body to shift its priorities from long-term health, things like your immune system or growing new cells, especially new neurons in your brain. They shift priority away from that into fight-or-flight responses. Put all of your energy into fighting or running away. Put energy in your muscles. Increase your heart rate. Things that you're going to need in the moment to get away from this threat. So very important here is glucocorticoids aren't bad in and of themselves. They have a purpose, but that purpose is a short-term one. And that's why chronic stress, which puts you in fight-or-flight mode all the time. You're constantly under pressure. Your body's constantly doing the short-term goal and ignoring long-term processes like building up your immune system and growing new cells or neurogenesis. And here again we have another scholar, another scholar's research incorporated into an understanding of Sapolsky's research. And that is Elizabeth Gould, who is yet another source that helps us understand how brain cells continue to grow. This is another common misconception that scientists had for a long time, which was that beyond the age of five or six years old, a child's brain stops growing. And that throughout the rest of your life, the neurons that are in your brain are the only ones you're ever going to have. Well, it turns out that's not true. Your brain is constantly producing new neurons and Elizabeth Gould's research is the research that has empirically proven that. But important to the article in our case is that the neurogenesis is only happening if you're free from glucocorticoids in the blood, if your body is free to relax from this immediate stressor and devote resources to long-term needs. So just like short-term stress is good, it helps you solve an immediate problem, remove yourself from immediate danger, it's also good to stress out when you exercise. Exercise puts your body under stress, and that's actually a healthy thing. We have to establish that these kinds of stress are good so that we can understand the opposite. And one of the things at the physiological level that makes short-term stress, the kind you get in exercise, good is that there are these neuroprotective factors in your blood that stop the glucocorticoids from doing damage in the short run. As Lara points out, Elizabeth Gould calls these neuromodulators, things like dopamine and oxytocin, that protect the brain and protect the new cells from the damage that could be caused by the glucocorticoids as long as they're both present at the same time. But under chronic stress, these neuromodulators are no longer present, and the glucocorticoids are, so the glucocorticoids go back to doing damage. So what Sapolsky realizes is that you don't have to take the glucocorticoids out of the blood. All you have to do is come up with a way to have these neuromodulators present whenever the glucocorticoids are there. So whenever you're under stress and the glucocorticoids go through your blood, if there's some way to tell your brain only at that point, produce these neuromodulators. And it's at this point returning to Sapolsky that Lara gives this quotation from Sapolsky that reinforces this idea that stress as a feeling is just a side effect of what's going on in your body. And rather than just soothing the feeling of stress, we actually want to stop the damage caused by stress. In particular, stopping the glucocorticoids from damaging the brain. Not removing them, just stopping them from doing the damage. Now the problem is most treatments that you would give someone could maybe help protect cells in most of the body, but there's this barrier that blocks a lot of substances in the blood from getting into the brain. It's called the blood-brain barrier. He needs to get these genes into the cortex of the brain, but these plasmids that would normally be used are going to be ineffective for that because they can't get through this blood-brain barrier. But this modified herpes virus can't. It's small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, and once it's in, it can deliver these neuroprotective, neuromodulators, things like antioxidants, these substances that mimic estrogen, because as he points out, estrogen counters many of the problematic damaging effects of glucocorticoids. And if you're wondering, estrogen is not just something that men have estrogen in their bodies too. Women also have testosterone. We just have different levels of each in our bloodstream. But estrogen is good, and having it there in your brain will actually prevent brain cells from being destroyed by glucocorticoids. And using a genetically modified virus has the added effect that viruses evolved to hide out in your body when your immune system is functioning properly because the immune system could destroy them. So the viruses protect themselves, remain inactive when the immune system is functioning, but when the immune system is not functioning, like when you're under stress, when there's lots of glucocorticoids in your blood, the virus is activated. So in this case, that's a good thing. That means the virus is only going to become active and trigger these neuroprotective factors when you're under stress. It's not going to be working when you don't need it. As long as the usual damaging effects of the virus have been genetically modified, then all it's going to do is basically trigger your brain's ability to protect itself. And Lara briefly describes the tests that have been done on rats, but this is important because he establishes that there is a control group and there is an experimental group. The experimental group would be the group of rats who were given this modified virus to produce these neuromodulators. And the control group would be the group of rats who are not given anything. Both groups of rats are submitted to traumatic events that would induce stress, such as triggering a stroke in the rats. But what they found was the experimental group had no damage. Now just pointing out that the group that had received this treatment got no damage doesn't prove anything. That would be confirming evidence that's not quite enough. You need the control group alongside that to see if they actually did get damage. Because any snake oil salesman can sell you some useless product and say, well, if you take this, you won't get any diseases. And then next week, if you don't have any diseases, he can say, hey, it's the snake oil. Obviously, that's not something that the snake oil would have caused. So you need to see that normally this stroke would have caused this neural damage in the rats. And they see 40% of neurons in a given region of the rat's brain was damaged if they were not given this modified virus. But the ones who were given the virus went through the same shock. They had much less damage to their brains. And a very important qualifier at the end, this treatment is not going to help anyone soon. The research is still years away from clinical trials. That means it's years away from being tested on humans. But all these studies with the rats show is that it's possible that you can reduce the neural damage caused by stress. But as Lara points out, this is just a band-aid. This is just stopping this damage from chronic stress. It doesn't actually stop the chronic stress. Lara doesn't dismiss the problem of the feeling of stress, but he points out it's not just the feeling that's the problem. As he says, the feeling is just the trigger. We are the loaded gun. In other words, when we feel this stress, we feel hopeless, this actually causes us to go into that perpetual fight-or-flight mode in which we can never allow our bodies to focus on long-term health. And treatments like this might be great if they're available someday, but we still want to focus on actually solving the environmental problem, the sociological problem. So here are his basic points. Lara needs to get across to the general reader who's reading this article in Wired Magazine that stress is not just a feeling. It's a physiological phenomenon with measurable effects on health. Not all stress is bad. High control, temporary stress, the kind when you're in charge of a project or you're exercising, it does not harm the brain because there are these neuroprotective chemicals that halt the damage, but chronic stress from being a low status or in a low control situation damages health, shortens life, kills brain cells. And only after he establishes that there are different kinds of stress, the stress is more than just what most people assume it to be. Once he establishes these other definitions for stress, these other kinds of stress, these other risk factors with stress, only then does Lara introduce Sipalski's idea about the modified herpes virus that would cause the brain to respond to chronic stress in the same way it responds to short-term stress where we're in control. But then after that he concludes by emphasizing that the Sipalski treatment does not stop the feeling of stress, it does not eliminate the glucocorticoids, and it will not be available for humans anytime soon. And even when it is available, it will not solve all of our stress problems. So five days after Lara published this article in Wired Magazine, the Daily Mail author Rachel Quigley also wrote about Sipalski's stress vaccine and the Daily Mail article, JAB, that could put a stop to stress without slowing us down. Keep in mind the Daily Mail is a British newspaper and JAB is the British term for what we would call a shot like a vaccination. So basically this is, she's calling it a shot that could put a stop to stress without slowing us down. And right off the bat you should notice a difference in the way Quigley writes, describes what's going on. Each sentence is closer to a platitude than it is to a falsifiable statement. So when she says, forget the age-old remedies of yoga, meditation, or popping pills, relieving chronic stress could soon be as simple as having an injection according to scientists. This is much more vague than anything I remember a minute ago I said just because somebody says study show or scientists say that's not a citation. So when she says according to scientists it's plural for one thing and so far we only know the name of one scientist who's doing this research and this one scientist hasn't said anything about forgetting yoga, forgetting meditation. Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress. She doesn't yet name anybody. And very importantly that next part of the sentence, a single jab that would help us relax without slowing us down. Notice that the only time the word relax appears in Larry's article it's when Robert Sapolsky is saying maybe it's not enough to say hey man just relax. In other words, relaxation is not a solution. We already know that Sapolsky is not trying to help us relax. And she only introduces Sapolsky in the third paragraph where she says after 30 years of research into cures Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University in California believes it is possible to alter the brain chemistry to create a state of focused calm. Now just looking at this sentence and remembering that the British use single quotation marks for basic quotations. Looking at this sentence and knowing that focused calm is in quotation marks who would you assume use that phrase focused calm. In other words who is being quoted here? The only person listed in this sentence is Robert Sapolsky, so it's natural that we would look at this and say Robert Sapolsky said the phrase himself focused calm. So what sources is Quigley using? She doesn't have any citations which is a common problem in newspapers and blogs but she does give us a few clues. She directly references Jonah Larrer's Wired Magazine article. She doesn't mention Larrer himself but her article, but she said Sapolsky made this quotation in Wired Magazine and Quigley's article is written five days after Larrer's article in Wired Magazine so we can reasonably presume that this is it. She also mentions an unnamed Stanford colleague. Now we don't know who this colleague was or how much he or she actually knew about Sapolsky's research. That's a problem. Just being at Stanford doesn't mean that you know what other people on the same campus are doing. We don't know if this is even a neuroscientist if this is somebody who has anything to do with Sapolsky's research or is this somebody who passes him in the hall? Is this an English professor like me who's just casually interested in what's going on in the psychology and neuroscience departments? And very importantly in the last paragraph she implies that she wasn't able to talk to Sapolsky directly. He apparently wasn't answering his email at the time when she wrote this article. So we only have two actual sources referenced in this article and if you search Larrer's Wired Magazine article for the phrase Focused Calm you won't find it. So that leaves the name Stanford colleague who may or may not know anything about Sapolsky's research. And as we read on we see that this is the case. Quigley writes, last week a Stanford University colleague who called the potential vaccine Sapolsky shot said quote, in humans this engineered virus would short-circuit the neural feedback caused by stress that lingering feeling of tension after a crisis has passed. So this colleague, whoever this person is, is assuming that stress is just a feeling. It's just that lingering feeling of tension. This goes against everything that Larrer meticulously set up in order to lead us to understand. The colleague goes on to say quote, it would leave you fresher whatever that means and ready to deal with another threat so you can maintain your drive but with more focused calm rather than bad temper and digestion. So here's where that term focused calm comes from. It doesn't come from Sapolsky, it comes from somebody on the campus at Stanford. We don't know who, we don't know what their expertise was. So this is a really unreliable source. That may not seem like a big deal but in this case the quotation is not only misattributed, it's also wrong. We know from Larrer's article that the shot, if it is someday given to people would not affect the feeling of stress. It wouldn't remove the glucocorticoids from the blood. All it would do would be to strengthen the brain's power to protect itself from those glucocorticoids. So you'd still feel the stress. Larrer's article says nothing about the feeling of calm except for that quotation from Sapolsky that said telling people to relax is not enough. And unfortunately you may have heard the cliche that a lie spreads halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. We see this in practice. Next the New York Daily News describes the Sapolsky research but their only source is Rachel Quigley's article in The Daily Mail. And once Quigley misattributed that focused calm quote to Sapolsky it became part of this ongoing story. So the New York Daily News repeated the story but they presumed that Sapolsky was the source of that phrase and they explicitly attribute the quotation to him. Now the entire quotation has transformed from an attribution to an unnamed colleague to Sapolsky himself. This is sort of the journalistic equivalent of an individual source amnesia. The story keeps going but we've forgotten where these details and where these quotations have come from. So Larry's 6,800 word article for Wired Magazine took pains to shape the inferences that the reader would make when learning these new facts. The biggest problem that Larry confronted was the prevalence of these assumptions about stress that would cause the general reader to misinterpret what Sapolsky's research set out to do. Sapolsky wasn't trying to sue the feeling of stress. He wasn't looking to make people feel better. He was trying to stop brain damage. But when Rachel quickly reduced Larry's 6,800 word article into her 400 word article, she didn't bother distinguishing between common frames and the complex realities of Sapolsky's virus. She briefly mentioned glucocorticoids and that they can destroy brain cells, but she inserts this quotation from this anonymous source that completely negates that description and adopts the common frame of stress as merely a feeling. In other words, the article about Sapolsky's research doesn't actually understand Sapolsky's research. That means that anyone who uses this article to understand Sapolsky's research, anyone who uses it as a source will have an illusion of understanding but won't actually know anything other than some guy genetically engineering a herpes virus to invade your brain. And that leads us to this. The day after quickly published this article in the Daily Mail, the conspiracy theory blog and YouTube channel Prison Planet or Infowars got ahold of this and what they write about sounds like something out of a dystopian Hollywood movie. And as we're going to see, it's largely based on a dystopian Hollywood movie. But all of the facts that were trimmed away by Quigley's article basically serve up this information to misattribution, to misunderstanding, to false positive pattern recognition. We see right away that familiar phrase Focus Calm, Dr. Robert Sapolsky professor of neuroscience at Stanford University in California says the vaccine is intended to impose a state of quote focused calm, end quote by altering brain chemistry. In other words, they're still assuming Sapolsky is the one using the phrase Focus Calm and now instead of just enabling it it's imposing it on you. It's this dangerous attack. You're being attacked with calm. Imposing calm on somebody may not seem like that big a deal to most people but if you're afraid of some government global conspiracy with a scientific dictatorship that's going to lobotomize people or brainwash them or neuter them and sterilize them into subservient compliance, then this little fragment of half true information will prime this coherent narrative that does not come from Sapolsky's research and it doesn't come from John O'Leary's article and it doesn't even come from Quigley's article but this little fragment from Quigley's article triggers the associative coherence with this conspiracy of the media and scientists that are out to brainwash people and turn them into zombies and right from the first paragraph it's clear that the people who wrote this have no idea what Sapolsky's research is or what the difference is between the feeling of stress and the role of glucocorticoids in the blood. In particular they're afraid of being sterilized well ironically glucocorticoids can cause infertility but their understanding of the physiology is clearly not up to that level of specificity. So that fragment from Quigley about a scientist creating a virus that makes people calm triggers a pattern established by lots of different dystopian fiction from the 20th century but in particular both the article and the embedded video make a reference to George Lucas' 1971 movie THX-1138 now THX-1138 was George Lucas' USC film school project that later got made into a movie starring Robert Duval and it was made at a time when people were protesting the Vietnam War when there was this fear that people could be drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam so this triggered a very anti-authoritarian backlash and particularly at California universities the kind of place where Robert Sapolsky would end up but also where Lucas made what was originally a student film. But the context that film has been taken away and that film is being alluded to because in it this oppressive government makes people take a drug, lithium, that makes them calm but also makes them lethargic and unable to resist and question the authoritarian hierarchy in which they live. So we have the triggering of associative coherence even though none of this appears in the article we know from Larry's article that this treatment is not going to be available for humans for years it's not going to stop you from feeling stressed and it's certainly not going to stop you from responding to environmental factors that cause stress but all of that gets left to the side. Remember what Daniel Kahneman said about the less you know the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information it is the consistency of information that matters for a good story not its completeness indeed you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern in other words to use associative coherence and as Wang and Amat point out the information we learn the information we recall fits the established mental frameworks we tend to remember news that accords with our worldview and discount statements to contradict it consumers of news for their part are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce the beliefs they already hold but we forget everything else so remember in order to generalize in order to trigger a pattern you can only look at the elements of the new facts that fit that pattern we ignore, we cut everything else out of the frame and that's what's happening that's clearly what's happening here now this next paragraph feeling stressed, getting angry, expressing emotion and displaying passion are all innate natural and vital aspects of human behavior so if you read Lera's article you would know that Lera and Sapolsky both totally agree with this there is a reason to be stressed there is a reason for fight or flight there is a reason for glucocorticoids in the blood we just don't want them to have them there all the time we don't want our entire life to be in a constant state of fight or flight anxiety because there are clear health detriments and we see that they don't understand the original context of the Lera article or any of the Sapolsky research because in this next paragraph they say scientists are now telling us that getting angry, upset, and passionate is abnormal and needs to be treated so clearly they haven't read the original research this is exactly the opposite of what Sapolsky says and they connect this to the global conspiracy when they say this is blatantly a part of a full spectrum of salt on our minds, our bodies and our nervous system through the contamination of our food and water supply now nothing we've read in the Quigley article or anything else has anything to do with putting anything in the food or water supply and that link looks like a citation very often a blog will cite sources instead of having parentheses they'll just have a link so what happens if you follow that link if you follow that link it just takes you to another Info Wars video in which Alex Jones talks about how consumer foods are contaminated with mind control substances that video itself doesn't have any kind of coherent references to anything outside the Info Wars world view and in the embedded video Alex Jones directly references the Rachel Quigley article just in case you weren't automatically primed to think of evil new world order conspiracies to brainwash and mind control people through chemtrails and contaminants in the water and that sort of thing they give us this nice little medical DNA skull graphic right next to the screenshot of Quigley's article and I know I'm going to lose some of the emotional emphasis that Alex Jones gives when he says these words but around the 5 minute mark in the video he says let's go over some of these articles jab that could put a stop to stress without slowing us down from the Daily Mail it says quote they're going to make humans better it's a 400 word article if you've read it you know at no point in there does it say they're going to make humans better they've re-engineered potatoes and corn why not re-engineer humans in Quigley's article they quote all these major medical journals seriously we identified Quigley's only two sources that was Jonah Lara's article in Wired Magazine and some unnamed colleague at Stanford not a single medical journal they quote all these major medical journals saying how great it is they say this could change society the professor said and they have a government funded because I guess that's proof as part of the conspiracy a government funded Stanford team with these neuro protective viruses this particular vaccine one of hundreds is a live herpes virus engineered to only eat certain key brain tissue so here's the introduction of that word eat instead of a virus that triggers your brain's ability to protect itself now that virus is eating it's a little brain eating zombie and right after he says this there is a clip from the movie THX 1138 this is where the frame comes from this is where that kernel of oversimplified fact which is that Sapolsky is developing a modified herpes virus triggers this dystopian fictional narrative frame when you come across this information from info wars you get to Sapolsky description already embedded within that narrative frame these are genetically engineered nanotech viruses that go in and turn you into a servile biological android do you understand the vaccines that they're rolling out are live virus bioweapons that re-engineer your brain that's an awful lot of information from a 400 word source like Rachel Quigley's article and Jones seems minimally aware that people might be skeptical of all these claims so he says at the very beginning of the video my friends please pay attention to the information I'm about to cover and research the links that will post below this video so you understand that none of this is my opinion it is fact well if you look down at the information below the video you'll see this all the links go to other info wars videos so in other words he's citing himself rather than citing any kind of verifiable source the only external source he cites is the Rachel Quigley article the Daily Mail article which is only 400 words long and gets most of the information wrong and you probably also notice throughout the rest of the video anytime he says this thing is happening and then there's all this information out there instead of showing actual studies they'll scroll through screenshots of Google where they just type in something into Google and they see the results that come up such as vaccines on the horizon but of course the google search will come up with something if you type in any incoherent phrase Google will have results so when you type in vaccines on the horizon and you get a national institutes of health website that says novel tuberculosis vaccines on the horizon at no point does anything in that source say that this is a mind control weapon it just says that we may have a vaccine coming out soon but to Jones all of those bits of information are stripped of any information that don't fit the frame so even with these google searches he's not finding the information he thinks he's finding but we know this is not that unusual this is exactly what the IQ Fisher study showed that people tend to do just looking for something on Google makes us feel like we know more than we actually do it inflates our illusion of explanatory depth okay so let's retrace this transmission starting with Sipolsky's research and then ending up with brain-eating zombies being injected directly into people by a universal government conspiracy Lehrer summarized a lot of Sipolsky's research and he included research from Elizabeth Gould and Michael Marmot he compiled all of that into a pretty subtle pretty well written 6800 word article that clearly distinguishes between the feeling of stress and what stress does the damage stress does to the brain and as a sort of afterthought a very small part of that article is mentioning that Sipolsky is working on a way to use a modified herpes virus to help the brain protect itself from the constant presence of glucocorticoids in chronic stress the only part of that that makes it into the Daily Mail article is the part about there is a virus and it's going to help something about stress but stress is still vaguely defined in Quigley's article and Quigley inserts this inaccurate description of what's happening from this unnamed Stanford colleague and this is where the phrase focused column comes from and that gets repeated and attributed to Sipolsky in the New York Daily News but then once it gets to the Infowars Alex Jones site the only part that seems relevant is the part that will trigger that dystopian narrative from movies like George Lucas's THX 1138 and merge it with this global conspiracy theory so we see an example of source amnesia that extends across multiple people, multiple authors, multiple media outlets and we also see the true amnesia there even when Larry specifically says that this is not about fighting the feeling of stress that gets lost and all that gets remembered is fighting stress it's a clear example of the illusion of explanatory depth that comes just from using a search engine and once that illusion of explanatory depth is triggered it's defended with confirmation bias we just go out and look for tiny fragments of things that seem to fit the frame and therefore make the frame seem more realistic rather than trying to falsify this this is the very definition of BS saying something is true without bothering to find out if it's actually true but it serves that emotional need for the feeling of closure when we come across something new we don't like not knowing something we don't like not having a pattern to fit it into we seize on the most accessible Q prime or information and under adjust our judgments based on other information that may or may not be out there once we have a frame triggered we don't want to question that frame system one your not your intuitive cognition latches on to an isolated fact and immediately tries to frame it tries to trigger all of these other inferences that may not be justified by that fact alone and usually your system two metacognition your reflective awareness focuses on confirmation bias rather than trying to falsify those automatic inferences and this becomes especially problematic when we feel at a loss of control and clearly the infowars guys feel like they are being manipulated by this global brainwashing zombie virus government so when you feel a lack of control as we saw with the Jennifer Whitson Adam Golinski study anybody who feels a lack of control is more likely to see patterns that aren't there to have false positive pattern recognition and unfortunately this is an effect of stress the more you're stressed the more likely you are to see threats that aren't there and this is clearly what's happening an innocuous and rather vacuous piece of writing that highly oversimplifies actual research is all that the infowars guys need to see this scary pattern at work in the world and unfortunately there is a brain eating virus and it is already in your brain and it wasn't put there by the government or the Illuminati it was put there by millions of years of natural selection so living on the Savannah thousands of years ago it kept us alive in certain situations but as Sapolsky points out we're not living on the Savannah anymore and staying in a state of constant fighter flight produces chronic stress and chronic stress dampens our immune system it exacerbates heart disease it erodes the neurons in our brains and it also makes us more susceptible to false positive pattern recognition seeing things that aren't there disengaging that season freeze tendency that need for immediate closure and trying to think critically isn't natural and it takes a lot of practice focusing on stressful ideas makes it even harder but basically it works just like the cognitive reflection test a bat and a ball together cost a dollar ten cents the bat cost a dollar more than the ball how much the ball cost the intuitive answer is ten cents it just pops into your mind but it's what your cognitive system does next that makes all the difference do you seize on to that answer and defend it with confirmation bias or do you calculate the implications before deciding on an answer when it comes to research the process is more drawn out but it's very similar with the internet we can easily seize on sources that confirm our intuitions it's like high fructose corn syrup for motivated reasoning what we have to decide is whether we go with motivated reasoning which feels good it gives us the feeling of closure and it can help make us more persuasive when we communicate with other people so do we do that or do we set our intuitions to decide long enough to run a falsification test that means using critical reasoning that means we have to limit ourselves to sources that use critical reasoning as well so whenever you come across a source even if it's a popular source even if it's a blog post like Rachel Quigley's article about sepalski stress vaccine or the facts article about coconut oil reducing Alzheimer's disease that is a starting point but those aren't sources we want to see what their sources are we want to see how carefully they make inferences based on the available fact we want to question where the patterns that they use come from we want to question the frames that they give us when they describe those facts so each of us every time we read a source we are critical reviewers we are the sharks with the red pins ready to tear this thing apart even if we want it to be true even if we think it might be true even if your source tells you something that seems true something that fits with your worldview you still want to criticize it you still want to fact check it you still want to trace it back to its original sources you still want to subject it to the falsification test in fact the more you want something to be true the more you have to deliberately take control away from system one intuitive cognition and force yourself to look for anything that could be motivated reasoning it's not intuitive it's not natural and it's not easy but if truth is more important than the feeling of closure it's what we've got to force ourselves to do