 You were involved in the early 80s in quite a bit of controversy with the band Judas Priest and the claim I think was that they had backwards messages in their rock music that led to some unfortunate outcomes Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, was the late 80s early 90s actually I believe early 90s wasn't it? I thought it was 82 No, no, that was much much earlier. That was with a pastor from California Okay, so the trial with Judas Priest was actually I think in the early 1990s So what had happened? the general story is the two young men Two days before Christmas We're sitting in their basement of one of their houses drinking beer smoking marijuana and listening to Judas Priest and the all-afternoon and then at the end of the afternoon they picked up a shotgun Walked to a local church playground that had swings and tear daughters and that kind of thing proceeded to sit down on the swings or a bench and I can't remember the details now and Attempted to commit suicide. One of them succeeded. The other just blew his face off, but managed to survive In the hospital immediately after when the police asked him, why did you do this the response of the survivor was life sucks which is not a common response among Teenagers as they were But the parents then a few years later actually decided to sue but they didn't decide to sue the gun manufacturer They didn't decide to sue the the brewery that provided the beer or the place that sold it They didn't decide to go after the drug Dealers who had sold in the marijuana No, they decided to go after Judas Priest and CBS Records So that's the suit was lodged against about alleged Subliminal content of two kinds backward messages. So the messages that you hear the forward messages normal Language, but play backwards. It has a completely different meaning And some forward subliminals so low-level forward messages Okay, so the parents thought that there were messages in the music of Judas Priest That was the cause of their sons to commit suicide, right? It was the it was the straw that broke the camel's back So they may have been depressed for other reasons and drinking and talking marijuana's gonna be somewhat depressive as well And that this was had it not been for the backward messages in the music and the and the forward subliminals They their argument was they wouldn't do it now. That wasn't their idea. They came to this because of I suspect media exposure about other bands Aussie Osborne had been sued For the same kinds of things over in his case. It was all forward messages In a song called suicide solutions Which in fact was a Song against suicide with ironically enough it was sued for that and in his case They just threw it out of court because the the the free speech amendment of the American Constitution protect speech The judge you let in this current trial the Judas Priest trial let it go forward because he argued The the backward messages the ones that you would only hear in the forward direction, which would be innocuous rock commentary I Were messaged you couldn't protect yourself against because you weren't aware you were hearing them So therefore the 14th amendment of the American Constitution to apply that sounds like a reasonable Claim to me Assuming there are such messages as and assuming they affect you Right, so that was his his that's why the trial went forward Yeah, and because people were asking we'll give the president of Aussie. I was the president of Aussie Osborne Why are we going through this trial? Yeah, now my involvement then was after that So I received a phone call because of work. I'd done back in the early 80s. I received a phone call from the head lawyer for Judas Priest and CBS Records. It was actually a whole firm of lawyers In Reno, California, which is where the trial is going to take place It's about a year before the trial. I received this phone call Because of the work I'd done on backward messages and rock music with Don Reed a colleague of mine then at the University of Lethbridge that we done in response to this pastor from California coming to town and holding his big rallies about Backward messages and rock music that were leading young people Down the path of life such as sex and drug use And he claimed it was because of the backward messages in the rock music led to a big Rally at the end of his two days there where people showed up and broke records and things like this It was quite the cusp of it in in Lethbridge. I was a brand-new professor in 1982. I just arrived in Lethbridge And so I got a phone call back then From a local announcer of a rock station in Lethbridge calling me up after Pastor Gary Green won't had arrived Saying is there anything in psychology that we could use to speak about this alleged Backward messages and rock music or subliminal messages. They were calling them and I turned to my colleague Don Reed We both went not that we're aware of and that we did a little research We couldn't find anything on backward messages But you were initially skeptical of the claim that that backwards messages could influence or we were open to the idea that they could Moderately or I just minimally to be honest But what I did do is I then went to his presentations to see what he was doing It was leading so many people to be so upset about it because it was the front page of newspapers all the radio stations and so So I went to one of his actually one more more than one of his rallies to find out what he was doing And on the basis of what he was doing it seemed to be pretty clear That there really wasn't the effect that he thought it was going on But rather just some standard psychological phenomena that we were well aware of old old phenomenon psychology So was on that basis then that Don Reed and I said but To be fair we should run some research, right, but this is a claim nobody's investigated He's he was earnest wasn't like he was just con man or something. He was actually earnest on far as I know We still is actually believes this this is true and So we decide well fair fair enough But his claim and it's more subtle than most people think so when it really hit the press in the in the mid 80s People had the wrong idea of what in fact he was claiming So his concern is not that they're that Messages of being certain rock music because obviously the forward messages in many rock songs right our Promote drug yes, and the like so that was in his concern his concern was that as he rephrased it at one of his meetings I'm paraphrasing now is that well good Christian Teenagers with a forward message would hear it to understand and reject it Yeah But his concern was this as much for subtle and to be fair I thought that the guy deserves a shake because he's not just thinking very glibly about this stuff His concern was that because it was backwards and it's hard to register consciously If the message is still getting through the meaning of the backward version of the message was getting through Then they would be unaware of the source. They wouldn't be able to attribute it to the record Yeah But the thought popped into their head by some unconscious mechanism He never specified what that would be but if it did then they would have a message in the head with no attributable source Except themselves and so they couldn't protect themselves against it exactly so they would now be looking at thinking oh It's fun to smoke marijuana must be my idea Not that's because they would reject it He claimed if somebody just walked up and said hey, but it's fun to smoke marijuana All right, they can reject it because it's popped into their head Apparently without any source. It must be their idea or even a message from a high of power Okay, let's go there, but so that was his argument so that I Watched what he did and what he would do is he would walk in with sections of rock music That he must have spent hundreds of hours obtaining listening to all this rock music backwards and finding these passages and he's found quite a few So he's got quite a demonstration at the time you could actually write to him and he would send you full cassette tapes Of all the examples he dug up to that point and then more so what he would do is he would then come in he'd say okay This is this is for example Queen another one bites the dust and you play a passage of Queens another one bites the dust in the forward direction and sound perfectly fine to you Famous song and then he said oh here's the same section. I'm going to play it backwards And I want you to listen for in this particular example. It's it's fun to smoke marijuana And he placed the passage for you backwards and sure enough everybody starts laughing because everybody hears it We use it as a classroom demonstration now And it's quite a parent, you know, it's quite apparent. Yes, it sounds like that sort of but it's like visual illusions You're also aware at the same time. They didn't really like that. Yeah, right? So it's it's got those two levels going on at the same time, but it you could go Yeah, okay, I see what you mean, right? It does sound like it's fun to smoke marijuana And he's been to other examples like that, but that's his procedure and he just comes in for about an hour Says here's another passage. I want you to listen for them place it And by the time he's done after but an hour people are totally convinced all these backward message I heard them all when he asked me to hear them So every time he tells you what to listen for and then you hear the tape man here backwards So we thought okay, he's got a theory He's got a he's got an explanation of why he's concerned that if it did manage to get in without you being aware Of it's of the source that that in fact could be some concern So we thought and there's no research. So why do we actually see if you can influence people's behavior by the meaning of The backs or the the semantic content of the backward message when you're hearing the passage forward Yeah, so that the semantic content the words. Yeah Yeah, so they that there was something about their behavior is going to be influenced consistent with the meaning of the backward pass But they're not hearing the backward passage. That's the point. I can hear the forward direction now What we didn't do was use rock music Because we thought that just makes the task harder got all this other noise going on We in fact didn't study anything satanic All the headlines afterwards talked about us studying backward messages and rock music. We did nothing of the sort So what we did do is We took senses normal sentences that had various properties. We were interested in investigating the English senses and then I've heard them So the logic if you follow me for a moment So we played the message the the passage backwards because we know what it's so the forward meaning is not the backward meaning if you follow me Yeah, okay So in the forward direction, they're just hearing backward speech. Yep, which is yeah, yeah, right That's what it sounds like and then We asked for his questions. So I'll get back to you as pretty shortly So this is game we We started with some really recent questions So what can people do with backward speech and some of the questions we asked that came about because both Don and I don't read And I when we first started playing with these senses, but those are very speech like so when you turn Speech around English in particular what we were using you shouldn't have read it still sounds like speech But it sounds like a foreign language. You don't know Right now to us and because the Muppet show was on at the time To us it sounded like the Swedish chef on the Muppet shows Muppet show because neither was not Swedish That later came to By this When a global mail reporter completely misinterpreted what I was saying and said that vocation read claim that all rock music Would play backwards on Swedish. Yeah Anyway So we decided to explore that because it's speech like maybe there's a bunch of things that you already have the skills because you're most Of us are well skilled at language and speech that we could still do so the very first thing We asked is so we're playing them passages backwards And we just had some recorded by women and some recorded by men and we just asked them when they're hearing the backwards Is that a man or woman and They were virtually perfect in scoring that so they can easily tell the gender of the speaker It wasn't quite a hundred percent because one person meant to tick one box and tick the other box So otherwise we have a hundred percent So clearly you can tell gender that's not too surprising because women tend to have higher frequency voices than men and play backwards the frequencies remain So the next one we tried what we tried all sorts of things with a few well hit a few highlights We then wanted to see if they could For example determine what language the person was speaking. So we had a fluent bilingual in German French and English who We got all these passages and we had him translate them Because I'm barely unilingual and so what he would just translate the English sentence into it's equivalent in French It's equivalent in German and he he'd read them all in the normal fashion and then we turned them all backwards and So the meaning hasn't changed just the language you use is changing and we asked we told people what we done And we said now it's up to you to decide whether when you play a passage to you which of the three is it Yep Freddie given passage by chance alone you'd expect them to hit it correctly a third of the time and they were well They're up well over 60% so not as well as they could do with the gender judgment, but So remarkably quiet. We thought it was remarkable that they could do that Well in nailing what the language was even though they're hearing it backwards probably for the first time for many of these people They've never had anything backwards before and yet they could still tell the language We didn't explore the exact details as to why that's true but if you just think about some of the sounds in the language you can probably In your head figure out well that kind of guttural some backwards would sound listening so we're probably gonna Link to that paper, but can you can you summarize what the what there may be four or five things that people could and Couldn't pick up when they were backwards That's about what they could do. Yep Also, that's about as far as you could get and then we tried and those are Notice we're not even asking anything about the meaning despite we're just asking physical properties of the tape gotcha So people could detect mail from female. They could detect language in some way and is that it? Well, we tried some things we thought would work that were strictly physical like Question or declarative statement because we thought what people would realize that normally when you hear a question The end of the sentence goes up as in Valley speak And that therefore if you heard a sentence start by going down sweeping downward you should recognize It's probably a question. Yeah, couldn't do it. Can't do questions. It could even do that Then we tried again something that should be relatively simple starting to move toward meaning We took sentences and read them as they were or read them scrambled So one is meaningful the other's not the other's nonsense and simply asked We're not asking at all. What they're the meaning is just really tell us if one is meaningful or nonsense Yeah, and they couldn't do that. Okay, and so then we started to move into more direct Questions about the actual meaning. Can you get the meaning at all? And if we ask direct questions, so what would that mean if you heard it in the form of direction zip Right, even if we made it a two alternative first choice task. It either means this or this which of the two couldn't do it So we play the backward we play it so we knew what the forward meaning was we had ones that were matched So they had the same meaning, but we changed how we expressed it passive voice with versus active voice for example So they have exactly the same meaning, but their superficial structure changes They couldn't even tell that when we had to listen to the backwards So the bottom line is people aren't very good at picking up the the meaning or the words in Very simple messages when they're played backwards. No. Yeah, when they're when they're hearing them backward No, so you this is difficult to do. Don't tell me tell me what the bottom line is. They're hearing the the The forward sense backwards the meaning they're going for is the meaning the forward sense would have had in fact That's what that's what they're told if you heard this in the forward direction. What would it mean? Yeah, other kinds of magic desks But remember none of those are in fact what Greenwald was arguing He said it was a conscious process as conscious recollect the recollection of what was being heard or what was being played But unconscious and all our tasks are asking you to record. What does that mean? And He made no statements about that. He didn't say people were consciously in fact His concern would be had they been so he wouldn't be concerned if they could consciously experience it so We then went to indirect tests as they're called or tests where it's not necessary that the person be consciously aware of What they're hearing but they can still be expressed in their behavior And we did a series of tasks like that A varying sensitivity according to the literature for normal speech or normal tasks and They couldn't do any of them even indirect measures of the content of the messages didn't come through so for example simple things Such as trying to influence their spelling By pre-exposing them to particular meanings of Homophones so that we use homophone pairs that had a high frequency and low frequency interpretation That means one of them if I just said it to you that's the only spelling you think of so if I said read to you You don't think of marshes. Yeah, you think of books. Yeah, but so our EED is the low frequency spelling our EAD So high frequency spelling So we place we we actually copied it experiment that had been done with people suffering from a syndrome nose Corsacoff syndrome In which they've great difficulty learning anything new they're fine for the past but can't learn anything new and When they were exposed to Sentences like climbing a mountain is a remarkable feat With FE AT at the end. That's the low frequency interpretation They'd have that conversation with the whole bunch of homophones included and all those are non homophones as well They kind of disguised the task and then they'd be asked Then next day the experiment will come back the next day and say, okay I'm going to give you a memory test for words I talked to you about yesterday and of course that response was we talked to you yesterday So that's got a complete chance on the recognition test, but then she'd say well, I'm going to give you a spelling test not mentioning anything about the past and The spelling test would have some of the homophones have been biased towards the low frequency interpretation others that hadn't as controls and So what they should do is the ones that were biased towards a low frequency interpretation if the memory was there They should circle them they should select them and otherwise they should select a high frequency interpretation It's exactly what was found with people with Corsacoff Probably going to go through the whole the methodology of of your experiments, but what did you find? well, so we took that very basic idea and Repeated it with backward messages. Otherwise, it's identical. Okay, everything's the same except We just turned all the message all the all the sentences backwards first. That's it. And then give them a spelling test nothing Completely a chance they showed what they did is in fact for all homophones whether they were pre-exposed or not Backwards they chose the high frequency spelling as you would predict. Okay So even something as subtle as that which works with people who have no explicit memory for the task They still show this in their behavior people given backward messages in the exact same experiment exact same kind of paradigm Do not so people given backwards messages were where we're not influenced completely uninfluenced So if you to put that I don't want to put it in my words What what was the what was the bottom line of that experiment so people given we found no? A fact either conscious or unconscious direct or indirect on their behavior From backward messages in as far as we could tell none of the meaning of backward messages was getting through none Even in a very very subtle experiments. So given so you've created an experiment with Extreme amount of scientific rigor you've found very little evidence for the fact that backwards messages not okay You found no evidence for backwards messaging influencing people either consciously or unconsciously so presumably people Then just read your study and reacted positively to and the court case was thrown out. Is that what no we hadn't got to the court case yet so what happened is Don Reed and I presented because it had happened in our community We asked to do a public presentation at the public library for the community to find to explain what we'd found It was because a concern was still going on about this terrible thing about these insidious messages and rock music some state to banned Backward messages and rock music the government was considering Requiring stickers to be placed on all rock albums warning about backwards of liminal content You can imagine what happened at that point if you were a rock band wouldn't you want the sticker? What fortune your old boy could resist? Satanic messages. Oh boy So what happened after that point of course is that many rock bands started putting? Backward messages in there in their music and they're easy to tell unlike the ones where it's kind of a You know you barely get the message to work it out when you hear backwards They these were very clean ones. They'd put it start telling stories backwards So you hear it on the record is as the backward speech, but if you turned it around and played it was very clear And so Pink Floyd did it the Beatles did it many many bands started doing it Precisely because you'd sell more records if you could claim you had backward messages in there So the first effect of us presenting at the public library is it went over the wires? They had wires in those days called the wires And we got interviewed by everybody we were on every talk show you could imagine Right around North America and including Australia and the UK and so on for about a year It was just all everywhere. It was just constant and We eventually wrote it up both the research and our experience with it because virtually every Report we read after we'd go for an interview or a reporter would call us up Or are you an honest? We were on a talk show the report of it would always get it all wrong So We eventually published paper 1985 that explained our research and and what had happened with the media that they really couldn't understand these Very simple messages. So one of the biggest mistakes they would make is to say that we had found that You could have people Hear anything you wanted to just by suggesting it now In fact, we had conducted one of the major pieces of our research was a set of experiments precisely to show that that wasn't true That you can't make people hear or see whatever you want them to hear or see The the thing that they're hearing you're seeing has to at least be consistent in some way So for example, I could point to a cloud out there and and oh look, it's a bunny rabbit And it was just a round cloud you go. I'm sorry, but a bunny rabbit sleeping. I'm not sure what you're getting at, right? But you would have no question at all if it had two big protrusions at some point, right? Same thing has to happen with the with the backward messages. It has to at least be consistent so we designed a series of experiments where we actually took passages and Flip them around and then listened listened and listened much like Greenwald have done with his original demonstrations and Constructed little bits that fit certain passages of these of these particular tapes and what so we had two different Passages we had Jabberwocky because it makes no sense forward or backward Jabberwocky The was brilliant in the slide. They told us the guy and gimbled in the wave And on and then we also took the 23rd song because Greenwald had claimed that no religious Passages had backward messages And so the dawn read and I got together in good scientific fashion at his place because he had the better stereo I Recorded one of the passages and flipped it backwards and then don't read or quarter the other one to flip the Backwards so we can control for voice intonation and then we just listened to them very creatively now to help that process We used case of beer had to send out for more actually Eventually we managed to construct six Messages if you want for one about the six messages for say the 23rd song and another completely independent six for Jabberwocky And here's the basic experiment was then was this if we completely always played the whole passage to this was a class of introductory students in another class of Cognition students in the second-year cognition course and So we play always play the entire passage of either Jabberwocky or the 23rd song to them And then we'd say that we'd ask them Okay, I want you to listen for and we'd either choose something that we had we had constructed to be consistent with that passage Or we'd borrow a phrase from the other passage that wasn't consistent Okay, and we'd say listen forward and we give them the passage then they'd hear the whole 23rd song or Jabberwocky And we record how often they actually said they thought they heard it and basically the results were almost perfectly not exactly perfect But almost perfectly that if it was one we chosen what sorry one we constructed for that particular passage Then they would say they heard it if it was one that we borrowed from the alternative passage They would say they didn't hear it Indicating that it has to at least be consistent to the extent that Don Reed and I were able to construct semi meaningful phrases as I said the the Scientific beer meant we were sometimes more creative than probably was good. So some of the passages When you we just hear what we chose don't make a lot of sense, but they're consistent So one of the ones that we use in class all the time as a demonstration You saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth That's what Don Reed and I came up with and it does actually fit, but it doesn't make a lot of sense And and you won't hear that if we play the 23rd song backward Okay, you won't hear that particular passage, but you will hear it if we play the Jabberwockie backwards So that show that it's no we can't get you to hear just anything it has to at least be consistent with the passage Contrary to what most media reports would would Conclude that we had found So that the background published the paper in 85 Come the early 90s and we I get the phone call from the lawyers for Judas Priest and arena Nevada where the trial is going to Take place. This is a civil suit and the plaintiffs have filed for millions of dollars, by the way in damages And so she calls me up and says You're the only authorities on this nobody else's republished a paper on backer messages And they were claiming there were a number of backwards of limos in This particular album the stained-class album by Judas Priest and I said, oh, okay, it's that's fine I'm more than happy to serve as an expert for you I'll provide you all the research I can get for you and other kinds of things and she says well, we don't get thank you very much It's very nice, but we know we want you to come and testify for us and I said well There's a problem and she goes what what problem I said you I said you probably want my co-author To do this job. He's actually had experience in court as an expert witness not in this domain, but in eyewitness testimony And she said no, no, you're the first author. We have to have you and I said well I'll tell you what I want to agree to do all this and come to the trial if you bring my colleague with me She's fine. No big deal And so a year or almost a year She calls me in once twice a week. We talk about things are things going it's only says okay So, you know, you're ready to get thinking about your testimony. It's kind of stuff Well, as I said, I think you really want my colleague So here's what happens the day of we're flying down there for the first weekend meeting of actual face-to-face meeting Now the reason I was reticent and I'd actually told her is that I actually look like one of the band members Shaggy long gone here and The judge is known for having somewhat less than positive attitude toward People who look like me and she's all not problem. Don't worry about it so the day we were fly down to meet the team and Judas Priest Don Reed was leaving from think it was Vancouver and he got the earlier to Reno than I did from last bridge So I'm the last to arrive and I it's about five in the afternoon I go to the cabin big law firm and I go in there and there's a big meeting room There's big doors and open very very dramatic entry and I come walking in and there's this woman I've been talking to her for a year She's the head lawyers all the other lawyers that Judas Priest around the table There's dawn sitting there like walking in and she looks up and meet you because oh my god And then says now dawn when you're in the stand So I actually didn't testify to Judas Priest Wow Well, you wonder this is good. You had a good backup plan. Yeah, so but I did get to meet various characters in this long story of Subliminal messaging So Wilson Brian Key, for example was there to testify for the plaintiffs So I got to meet him and we spent some time talking. We had a lot of fun actually speaking not intentionally It's great funny. I used to be professor at Western Ontario University And then left in the 1970s because of all the books he'd been publishing on What happened in the trial? What was the outcome? Well, the first outcome was there was a pretrial Hearing we are dawn read presented our evidence about backward messages all we were going to comment on and The judge said well, okay, the conclusions. He's pretty clean through that all out So no longer did but backward message is playing a role. However, they had been one forward subliminal. They had alleged was on one of the songs Better by you better by you better than me on the stain class album That the engineers came in because they had the original night or 14 track Original multi-track tapes for this song and was able to isolate what this alleged forward subliminal was was if I'm remembering this correctly I may not be that it was a Passing just a passing light touch of a bass string that wasn't meant to be played at that moment And then fraction of a second later a slight click on the drum kit kind of backer noise happens all the time in the recording While the rest of the band is you know, making a lot of noise And so it gives a Which they interpreted is do it Not doing much for Nike stocks, I don't think but so the idea was that that The the plate is alleged that the boys were borderline I've drinking beer and talking about all that kind of stuff And they heard this message and they're now making the argument that Greenwald had made or similar to Greenwald's argument About background messages and that is is that because it's the top you can't really hear it. It's subliminal like very low volume on the Record that when it when they appreciated what they were hearing do it They thought it was their own thought and that's what led them to pick up the the rifle go across the street killed themselves So that that's what the case came down to So at that point I'm basically out of it. There's no longer about subliminal messages. It's about that one forward subliminal and After the testimony of the engineers about the where they found these noises on the tape The judge didn't dismiss the case because he thought the whole thing was nonsense He'd already remember ruled that it would be it would not be protected by the the free speech amendment He dismissed it because as he argued there was no evidence that Judas Priest and CBS Records had intended the message to be there Which is bit dangerous if you think about it so that left open a sort of precedent for this to not to be resolved Right, so that if somebody for example Put a low-level subliminal forward subliminal in and intended it to be there So I don't know how what the state of the the laws now with respect to that ruling But it was I thought it was an unusual somewhat scary ruling about that However, so Judas Priest and CBS Records in a sense won except the judge awarded all the costs against them Because of course the families had no money But they were suing so they won and lost at the same time But at least they they won in the technical sense that that Like Ozzy Osbourne. They were at least not convicted of anything or it didn't have to pay the lawsuit So that's the story Judas Priest That's amazing It seems that people are hearing things that aren't actually there. How is that possible? said Kind of a two-level answer to that one. The first one is that's all that ever happens Do you the world doesn't really look the way you think it looks? As you know Even when you call solid objects or just made up of molecules with big spaces between them So it doesn't really look like that. There are no colors in the world Okay, right color is a is a something you bring to the to the processing of of the information you receive So in some sense what you just said is always true. Okay, you're never really seeing what's out there So that's one level of explanation. So in fact Hearing things that most other people would argue or not there or seeing things that other people argue or not there is Not saying much. Okay, because that's always true What I think is meant is to try to dissociate I think what you're asking about from a straight hallucination When there actually is no input source that should lead to that conclusion about something being out there which is usually result of brain disease or or Probably do some chemicals as well where the brains Processing gets quite distorted and it's actually doing more than just trying to put together a reasonable construction It actually creates a whole cloth as as for example when people who have had their eyes are nucleated So they're completely blind, but claim they can see Okay, and you're saying oh, I'll drive, you know Interesting phenomenon one particular case the the individual Who they knew could not see because they had no eyes, but claimed he could They'd ask him so how you know how many fingers over holding up and they wouldn't even hold up in a figure Three What colors my tie yellow no tie on right? So there's there's that part of it So there there are people who suffer from various diseases that in fact lead them to really see things that aren't there in the sense that Another person standing right there with them. It's just there's nothing there. I think right those are hallucinations though So we're talking about in these particular cases where we could lead people to think that they heard I saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth something bit different We've given enough information Much like we do in the real world These aren't threshold phenomena that either is or isn't it's that Your perceptional systems are accumulating evidence And then you can also make use of all sorts of biases that you've developed over your lifetime To at some point say yeah, I'm confident enough to go with claiming I hear this or see this Mm-hmm at later turns out. Oh, it was just the way the blanket was folded Thought it was thought it was my dog in the bed, but it just turns out it was the plane was full But because I expected my dog there That's what I saw. So that would be not a lot not an hallucination An illusion of a sense of a type I guess it's the way to think about it. So that's all we're really doing and that's just Standard normal processing. So we're not there's nothing unusual happening here. It's just it's just what we're doing all the time Is that what they call paradigm? some yeah Yes Yes, okay, it's you got to be careful to separate it from hallucinations. It's the is the big issue Okay, I think I think the distinction is important Oliver Saxel ate his book he goes out of his way to convince people that there really is important to separate the two the two hallucination and Paradox yes, yes to that they're not don't equate one phenomenon with the other and then don't even think the mechanisms for one Are necessarily the same as the other as is often done where people try to blend the two the two issues So yes, that's that's that's what I'd argue, but I would argue that all perception Is paratolia that's what we're all we're doing. We're not really seeing the world as it is. We're we're just trying to create something that's Reasonably predictive of allowing us to act in the world It's just sometimes we're right in the sense that it matches up with what others would say with what others would say in the World and I agree with you versus Not or did not intend to do right so for example if you if you take a normal scene in a room like this and Pick up some color So let's say the color along that wall there and you might put the beige Although I'm sure my wife would have some subtle distinction. She detached that But it's all full of shadows So in fact even though you see that all is the same color if we actually went up and looked at it very very closely We'd seen that well, that's not beige at all. There's purple and blue over there And there's think of somebody who an artist when you paint the paint snow a good artist the one that's trying to represent the natural world as They see it There'll be no white where they painted snow It'll be blues and purples and yellows and so on. Yeah, you see it as white snow but more than that It is the impression a lot of people have is that all we have color receptors in the back of their eye And when reds in the world the red receptor indicates that when blues in the world Actually, I don't have blue receptors, but when greens in the world The green receptor tells us but that's not in fact. We see color at all That's not the mechanism underline color version except for under extreme circumstances If I put you in a completely dark room and give you a pure wavelength, then that's true Okay, you'll see red when I show you read that should that makes the the red receptors Go off Generally speaking the way you see color is in a color constancy sense So that we could all agree I'll walk into this room and go yeah, that's beige and yet if we measured it precisely We might find that there's actually no browns coming off that surface at all This was work that I didn't land it in the early 60s showing in fact, that's quite true Even if all of us agree now is that pareidolia? Because in fact there is no brown there And yet every single person who comes in says oh, yeah, definitely And that's part of the reason I argued earlier that there is no color in the world Yeah, color is something we bring to our interpretation of things And but it's not to say that it's not And why I say that is because evolutionarily speaking look at things like berries They go out of their way to make themselves a bright red to contrast with the green. So you'll eat them So it's some sense in the world too But it's more of an act that you bring to the world and I think that's true for for most perception It's a mistake to put it in the world As much as we all agree on our approach don't remember our point thing is that you get through the world without following in the holes Bumping into things and getting eaten by lions But that's it What what you what you perceive what what you construct to perceive? Just has to meet those criteria. It doesn't really matter that it actually matches the world in any other sense It just has to match the world so you can move your way through it and Which might be a good argument when you think about it yourself There's a good chance that maybe the way you perceive the world is nothing like how your dog does Or on the other hand you can tell a lot of the tasks we have to solve are much the same. So maybe it would be the same. Okay So following from that This course is about the science of everyday thinking there are people out there who want to make better decisions Think better and do better based on your research What in what what advice would you give them? I'm based on my research Aside from the obvious, you know exercise good diet. Get a good sleep. Is that what you're interested in? No, I don't know what my research says about that. We do know that when you put yourself under conditions of sleep deprivation ingesting certain chemicals and even common ones alcohol and tobacco and the like And put yourself in high stress situations So your limbic system is is going off that we tend to increase the rate with which we're going to produce these Errors. Yeah, right We're now become more likely to see blankets as dogs and shadows as things that might threaten us Makes good sense evolutionarily that you're in those situations to become much more Signal rules much more dangerous than it is But so part of it to make good decisions don't make them under conditions of high stress of lack of sleep under a high chemical arousal and those kinds of things to make a better decision about things So maybe my research is something like that. Okay, so if you're going around the world When you're making your way through the world be conscious of the fact that I'm trying to rephrase trying to rephrase what you said in In terms of the person in terms of what people can do so you touched on it in the end So in order to make better decisions be conscious of this which will allow you to do that Okay, I see what you're getting at. I guess what I was talking about is that is that it's all an adjustable Criterion that you use to to decide that there's something there. I have to act right So clearly it you're much better to false alarm to tigers In the bush next to you then not to miss it, okay, or North America here that bears And therefore if you're in a high stress situation, that's late at night, and you're all lost and so on It's that makes good sense that you're gonna see a lot of the things as bears Even though they're not and it's not that you just come to the decision by stroking your chin going Okay, I think that's a bear. No, you see a bear makes no question about that Even though in some sense, there's no bear there, but it's giving off enough Cues that are consistent with the interpretation that that's a bear much like our backward messages If they were consistent with the phrases that that Don and I made up lead you to that conclusion But it's not like it's not yes or no Under the law, I'm quite sure it with our backward messages experiments. Have we put people in highly stressed situations? They would hear through the wall. Yeah, right or if we put them in situations in which the cost went the other way If you get one of these wrong Right, you you will not complete the course Then they might be a lot less so if you if you flipped the payoffs around the Threshold might be different. Yeah, and make it so that no no you really have to control this stuff Don't make these kinds of errors. Then yeah, I suspect they would go. No, I don't hear it's I saw a girl with a reason on her mouth, which is a stupid phrase. Anyway, I mean they would come up with and It's and it's the way things actually work It's it's when you've accumulated when you when the system has accumulated enough evidence to go and has good reasons to do that It goes this and it makes it makes some really good sense. So in that sense is what I was getting at if you want to make Good decisions in that kind of rational sense, but it actually makes sense To go with it if you are in one of those situations is late at night. It's dark. I'm your lost Doesn't make good sense not to just assume there are no bears I mean seriously, right or when you're walking down the street don't have $20 bills hanging on your pockets to attract martyrs I mean just Even though you might do that So but because those mechanisms actually are life preserving and they've had been selected for I presume for for tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of years That's why you're here and others aren't because you chose your parents well So that part of what is so if you're thinking about say Danny conan's recent book on thinking fast and slow There are certain situations see outlines where the the thinking fast really gets you into trouble But it also many many situations where it gets you out of trouble where thinking slow would not so it's there's not a simple panacea here My name is John. I think about knowing