 is a Porsche Carrera GT. If he decides to buy this car IN FACT by using the money he gets from Big Oil and Big Pharma IN FACT Brian Dunning will never own a Porsche Carrera GT IN FACT Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Dunning Sydney Bradford is a man who was born in 1906. Unfortunately, he was born with a genetic condition and he went almost completely blind. In fact, he did go completely blind as an infant. Nevertheless, he grew up healthy and happy. He had a family. He worked as a machinist. He was able to fill the machine tools in the shop and do his job. And then, in 1958, when he's 52 years old, he had a new surgery and got complete cornea replacements in both of his eyes. And so for the first time, he could see nearly perfectly well. Well, you'd think that this would have been a great thing but unfortunately it didn't work out so well for Sydney. Everything he saw, he had no idea what it was and it terrified him. He would be looking at this and he would walk around and say what in the world is that? Until he did this, oh my gosh, it's a chair. What in the world is that? It's a chair. Everything he saw was completely frightening to him. Cars, buses, trains terrified him. Unfortunately, it didn't work out so well. He took his own life after only about two years. Why would his brain do this to him? He had perfectly good input coming into his brain. His brain was not able to process it correctly and it had tragic results. Could the same thing that happened to Sydney Bradford happen to any of us? Now eyes on me. I want you to all look straight at me. You've all been looking at George Trav, our friendly and lovely and talented host today. I'm going to give you a hint. He's wearing a white suit. He's wearing a bright blue tie. Now by a show of applause, what color shirt is he wearing? Is it white or is it blue? Show of applause if you think it's white. Show of applause if you think it's blue. Step out here, sir. White is tie is not bright blue and his shirt is blue. They're both striped. You all failed. The talk is done. Thank you very much. Okay, I'd like to have... I'd like to have... Oh, let's do one more thing in fact here. What color is my tie? I'm going to give you two choices. It could be dark blue. It could be dark red. Show of applause if you think it's dark blue. Dark red. No tie at all. I think we've got about two-thirds of you so far. I'd like to have one person come up here. Just anyone, the first person to come to these steps is fine. There we go. Very speedy. Awesome. I like it. I'm actually going to use about 20 people during this talk, so if you're interested, just kind of congregate in this area to speed things along. Step up here, please. Now, are you here? Yes. You are present? What's your personal experience you are going through right now? I would like to think. Face the crowd. Wait for low. Say hi. Say goodbye. Turn around. Face the back. Now, since this is your personal experience, you now have an image in your mind of what you've just seen looking out there. I want you to tell me, without turning around, how many people are standing along that left side of the wall? Maybe eight. Just study that image in your mind. Eight is not remotely close. How about this first metal robe? How many people did you see sitting in that? Study the image in your mind. You have no idea. What color was the chair you were sitting in? Red. The carpet out in the hall is red. What color is the carpet out here? I think it's a combination of colors. It's a combination of colors indeed. You scored very poorly, about 25%. Thank you very much. In your life, you've completely forgotten. That didn't work. Now, when I do the Skeptoid podcast, that's okay. We're done. Man, you got ripped off. My biggest enemy on the show is people's personal experiences. No matter what the subject I'm talking about, everyone has their own personal experience by which they know that I'm wrong. I know that Wi-Fi harms me because I've experienced it myself. I know that ghosts are real because we had one in my house when I was growing up. I know that organic food tastes better because I've tried them both myself. And one of my favorites is I know that UFOs are real because my Uncle Bob saw one and he's a very reliable person. Uncle Bob is not lying. None of these people are lying. None of them are hoaxing. They're all perfectly honest people giving me perfectly honest reports. Now, earlier this week in Bruce Hood and Steve Novella have both given talks discussing a lot of these phenomena that we're going to see today. But today we're actually going to do live demonstrations showing how and why a lot of these works. You understand the facts and figures from the people who are actually doctors and know this, now let's see it in action. Okay, I'd like to have 10 of you. We don't even have 10 people here. We need more. Come on up and stand in a line. If we don't get 10, that's okay. We need a group. There we go. We've got a good group. Here's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay. And the rest of you continue loitering. We will need you as well. A lot of you have seen this before. We're going to do it again. I'm going to give a list of words. Listen to this list of words. Was that not 10? My brain failed when I counted 10. Hear the words. Listen to them. Candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good, taste, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart, tooth, cake, eat, and pie. Now, by showing your hands, I'm going to read you a few more words. I want you to tell me whether the word I read is one that was in that list or not. Raise your hand if it was in the list. Don't raise your hand if it wasn't. Raise your hand halfway if you're not sure. That's perfectly acceptable. First word. Taste. Okay. Point. No takers for point. Sweet. Thank you very much. You're all done. Taste is the only one of those words that was in that list. Sweet was not in that list at all. You can return to your seats. Now, this is often described as implanting a false memory, which is probably what you've heard it described as before. And that's not really true. I didn't really implant a false memory. None of them remembered me saying the word sweet. What happens is that their brain didn't store a digitally recorded list of the words. Their brain stored the general idea of the words. Generally, sweet, food, yummy, concepts. And so, when they remembered the word sweet, their brain said, yeah, sweet remembers the general idea of that recollection. So, yeah, it was probably in that list. So I think it's a little bit disingenuous to call that the implantation of a false memory. This way that the brain does this, storing the idea of what happened, rather than the facts and the digital information of what happened, is really what's more useful. If you're a Cro-Manian out hunting elephants. They may have hunted elephants. I don't know. Mammoths? Let's assume for the facts of this case that Cro-Manians hunted mammoths. They probably did. I don't know. You needed to know the idea. You didn't need to know any digital information about where you would find them, you know, the time of day, anything very specific. You just needed to know general ideas. And that's why our brain pretty much works this way. As we live and develop, we build a whole reference database of our experiences. And as we continue growing and developing and living, that reference database changes. And so when we look back the memories that we extract from that are recontextualized each time. And our brain correctly remembers things differently as time goes on. You might remember Steve Novella gave the example of where were people during the Challenger explosion. Right after that, they answered the questions the way they thought it was. Months later or years later, they answered the questions differently. And what's significant about that is that they firmly believe all the subjects firmly believe that their later recollection is more accurate than the one that they had right at the time. Because it's drawing on a different reference database of experiences, the memories have been recontextualized. So heuristics is the term that he used to describe this. In examples of heuristics, these shortcuts to let the brains make easy decisions are things like common sense. Common sense is a heuristic. Rules of thumb is a heuristic. Intuition when you make an intuitive decision about something that's a heuristic. Let's give an example of that right now. After 9-11 the airlines almost all went out of business. We all remember that. A lot of people were afraid of flying, perceiving that flying was more dangerous. So perfectly honestly, show of applause if you felt in any way that flying was more dangerous after 9-11. There's a smattering of applause and a lot more people who were too embarrassed that they thought the same thing. Because we're a skeptics conference. In fact in the six months following 9-11 about 1600 people died in road accidents who would not otherwise have died because of the increased traffic. Flight travel didn't get more dangerous. Road travel did. That was an example of a heuristic, the obvious intuitive guess that air travel seems more dangerous now. Being wrong. So let's have three people come up who did not go to their 20 gear high school reunion because you didn't like the people there. I'm sure there is someone else in this room. No turning around going back to your seat. We're going to use you too. Okay, we've got these three people now. I want you to each give me simply three adjectives that describe the people you didn't want to see. Stuck up. Two. Didn't like nerdly types. What nerdly type you're talking about. Oh, yourself got it. Alright, you've had more than three. Malicious self-centered bullying. That's enough right there. Okay, thank you very much. You're dismissed. Now obviously all the people at your 20 year high school reunions were not all of those things. You had a preconceived notion and it colored your perception of what your experience was going to be going to that. These are all very common things. People who you have not seen in 20 years, you really don't know anything about them and they're probably very different people than they were in high school. So we do have preconceived notions prejudices, things like that. I certainly do. It colors what I do on my podcast. They're very real and they do affect us. And they come again from our experiential database. It's not a brain fail so much. It's your brain working properly interpreting its experiential database. So buy a show of applause again. How many people have taken vitamin C for a cold? How many of you have over the counter cough syrup at home? How many of you expect to get better when you take them? Okay. These are preconceived notions. You've heard that they work based on your experiential database. The data shows that none of those do anything whatsoever for you. But we perceive that they work because that's how we interpret our experiential database. So, for all of you who think you're too smart and too skeptical to fall for any of this, if you've got a pen and paper perfect, if you don't draw with your finger or something, I want you to draw two circles, basically the wheels of a bicycle. You're all so great at perceiving your experiences. Now draw four or five lines representing the frame of that bicycle. And what you're all going to find out very quickly all except a very few of you is that you have no idea what those four or five lines of a bicycle frame look like. Almost nobody can draw one. Anyone having luck with anyone experiencing that right now? Anyone too embarrassed to raise their hand or clap? Come on. I see some hands going up. It is very hard to do. You've seen bicycles 10,000 times at least. You just didn't study them very well. It's like when I made fun of Spoonie up here for her not being able to count the number of people standing against the wall, our brains just get the idea of a bicycle. It's not the digital photograph of a bicycle. Here's something else that we've all seen 10,000 times and a lot of us are going to get this wrong too. What object when held out at arms length is about the same size as a full moon. I'm going to give you a list of objects starting from way too small going to way too big and somewhere in there is the correct answer. Here's the list of objects. A BB, a P, a dime, a nickel, a quarter, a golf ball, a baseball, a softball, a frisbee, a basket ball, and a beach ball. Now let's go through that list again with a show of applause for each one. A BB, a P, a dime, a nickel, a quarter, a golf ball. It's funny, I always see all these people out here doing this. Baseball, softball, we still got some votes coming in. Frisbee, I think we'll cut it off there. Almost all of you voted dime, that was by far the most popular answer when I was hearing up here and I'm not sure how many of you said that because you heard Phil Plate talking about that he was actually asking a different question how far away from you would a dime have to be to appear to be the size of the full moon and it was a lot longer than arms length. The correct answer is actually a P. Now you've all seen the full moon so many times and a lot of you grossly misestimated its size. Next time you're outside and you see the full moon reach your fingers up there about as far apart and you'll see it's a good size to be but it's clearly smaller than a dime. You've all just made perceptual errors. The brain is terrible at collecting data and it's wonderful at collecting ideas. Okay, I'd like to have one person come up here who thinks that they their brain is very good at collecting data. One person who doesn't mind being terribly embarrassed. Now watch this I'm going to read a string of numbers and have you repeat them back to me. Do you want to just run away now? Three, six, four, five, two, one, seven, seven, oh, nine, four, eight, oh. What's the expiration date on that? I killed myself on my own joke, that's terrible. Give up? Those are one in there. One, two, four, three. Wow, you're done. Thank you very much. Think what a better job almost anything could have done than a human brain. A pen and paper would have kicked that little job's ass. You could have carved it on the side of a cave and gotten a better answer. Obviously any kind of a recording device would have done a far, far better job than a brain at something as simple as that. So while we're on the subject of perceptual errors this is kind of the meat of the show right here. We need to have five volunteers who are good at perceiving things. If you believe you're pretty good at perceiving and this is no trick questions how many people are in the room if you think you have a good general ability to perceive the world around you step on up. One at a time here. Next obviously the one whose most confident in his abilities. These are questions about how you perceive the world. These are not exactly right and wrong questions. Here is an example if I ask you which is bigger a house or a flagpole? Which is taller a house or a flagpole? Obviously some flagpoles are shorter than houses obviously some houses are taller than flagpoles but generally a flagpole is taller than a house. So if I were to ask that question which is taller a house or a flagpole say flagpole. I want no help from the audience, no reactions no twittering ok here we go which is heavier a school bus or a locomotive? I think a school bus a school bus a locomotive a school bus ok which is physically larger a novel or a dictionary? I've seen a lot of big novels I'm going to go with that yeah it depends on the language of the dictionary but I'll go with novel I'm going to go in a rich dictionary I'll also go with the dictionary uh with the novels I read I could pretend to be smart or dumb here but I think novel ok which is louder? a gunshot or a basketball bounce? depends on proximity but I'm going to say basketball bounce that would really depend on the gun right in general basketball gunshot basketball which has more parts? a lego set or a rubik's cube? rubik's cube lego set well there's that death star with 5000 pieces so I'm going to go with lego set rubik's cube which has more spots? two dice or a book written in braille which has more spots? more dots spots whatever you call them two dice or a page of a book written in braille? dice yep dice dice braille? dice which goes higher? a balloon or a rocket? a balloon balloon's clear balloon balloon which holds more water? a bucket or a wheelbarrow? a bucket bucket which is longer? the golden gate bridge or a football field? football field yep football field football field football field which is faster? a race car or a satellite? satellite oh race car race car satellite race car three more which lasts longer? a parade or a work day? well there's a Puerto Rican day parade uh parade work parade the parade which looks brighter in the sky? venus or the full moon? venus venus venus venus full moon and finally which is smaller? a coin or an aspirin? a coin aspirin? which is smaller? a coin or an aspirin? aspirin coin okay thank you all very much and I'll take your seats now we see that one of our fine volunteers did not take his seat you may have noticed that I whispered something in fact I certainly hope you did because that would be a perceptual error if you missed it I whispered something each person and he's here because I whispered something different to them I told him to stay behind I told all of them to always give me the wrong answer at what point did you figure that out? I was very confused I was like what did I you gave some answers that you believed to be wrong because other people were giving them didn't you? maybe okay thanks you can go for real now Steve mentioned this brief this is called the ash conformity effect conforming to our peers and wanting to say what other people expect us to say and having the experience that we believe that we're expected to have is the ash conformity effect and it's another major driver of fallacious perception why people's personal experiences are wrong to them they genuinely want to be conforming maybe not consciously at a subconscious level we all want to have the experience that we're expected to have okay here is one more way that our brain can fool us show me a sign of applause if you think that emergency room visits are more common during a full moon how about applause if more babies are born at hospitals during a full moon someone's been listening to skeptics guide to the universe more police calls for violent crime during a full moon okay now most other audiences who don't listen to skeptics guide universe they applaud wildly for all three of those and a lot of you applauded for some of them the fact is of course the data shows clearly that none of these are true however the people who work in the hospitals the police departments the emergency personnel many of them firmly believe that these are true even though their daily personal experience shows them that it doesn't happen they are misperceiving it what do we call this confirmation bias this is something that colors it's one of these things that colors our perception colors the way we retrieve information from our experiential database it's one of the better known and still one of the most common brain fails so I'm just one I didn't bring my tin foil I'm going to leave you with just one little story that I think is a great example of this a great example for all of us to try to follow many of you may have read Robert Heinlein's novel stranger in a strange land and in this story there were characters called fair witnesses these were people whose whole job was to simply observe and they were very trained in the powers of observation powers of perception and their statements were legal testimony in court it was accepted as fact one of the masks one of these fair witnesses what color is that house up on the hill and she says it's blue on this side how many of us would have made an assumption about that that's not necessarily true thank you very much my name is Brian Dunning this talk is Your Brain Sucks and I give it wherever anyone buys me a clean ticket to go thank you very much Brian Dunning