Click each image to enlarge.

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:11
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Pascual. With me, as always, is Ben and Celestia. Hi guys!

BR: Hi there.

Celestia Ward: Hey.

PR: So, this week we’re going to be talking about all kinds of interesting things under kind of the topic of how senses fail us. And this is a topic that Celestia proposed because she’s done a lot of investigating into this topic. And I’m really excited because just this week we had a very interesting example come up. So this week I think we should just jump right into it and find out what we’re skeptical of.

CW: Yep.

(MUSIC)

CW: Well, we normally record a couple days before we’re recording right now, but as it happened, the delay was very fortuitous because much like the dress that divided a nation, we have had in the past 48 hours an example fall into our laps of sensory ambiguity, make headlines and social media feeds and everybody’s tearing their hair out. And there’s now Team Laurel and Team Yanni. And we can totally talk about that because we’re doing a whole podcast episode on how your senses can fail you or how they’re designed to fail you or how it’s not really pass fail. There’s a lot of ambiguity going on. So we looked at Yanni versus Laurel. For those of you who have not heard, this week a YouTube influencer named Chloe Feldman, not Corey Feldman, who hasn’t influenced anybody in a long time, but Chloe Feldman found this little sound snippet on Reddit and reposted it and asked people to comment what they heard. Since then, countless hours have been wasted as people stopped what they were doing at work or at school. Even Ellen DeGeneres paused her whole show to get everybody in the audience to listen and figure out which word they were hearing. Now we actually have a tabula rasa with us. Ben had not heard about this phenomenon quite yet. He had his head in other things. But Ben, have you listened to the clip yet?

0:02:50
BR: I have heard the clip. I, as you mentioned, I know it’s been all over social media and this and that the last few days. I’ve been super swamped with various things and I had seen notice of it and I figured I will get back to that. And I’m not team anybody. So apparently everybody else in the world has already seen it, as they’ve seen the most recent Avengers film.

0:03:13
CW: You just heard it in the past like two minutes, right?

0:03:17
BR: Yes. Pascual played it for me for the first time about two minutes ago.

0:03:21
PR: Yeah. So what we’ll do is we’re going to play a clip right now of the original file. Now keep in mind this is the file as I pulled it off of the polling from Twitter. So this is in the same quality that I heard it off of Twitter that I presume most people heard it originally.

0:03:39
CW: It’s the circulating copy, not the original file, but the circulating copy.

0:03:43
PR: Precisely, and that’s very important. So let’s play the clip.

(CLIP PLAYS)

0:03:51
BR: Okay, so Ben, what did you hear on this clip? I was going to say I clearly heard, but it certainly was very clear to me that I heard Laurel as in Laurel and Hardy. To be honest, I had briefly forgotten what the alternative was until I remembered it was Yanni or whatever. So but yeah, I every time I heard it, I heard Laurel as in actor Stan Laurel.

PR: Okay, yeah, for me, it’s basically been like that since I first heard it. Of course, this is sort of where some of my expertise can really come in handy. I noticed a lot of articles are kind of jumping into talking to language or speech or hearing experts and those people, they do matter in opinions about this stuff, but what they really need to be talking to is an audio engineer because…

BR: Like you!

0:04:44
PR: Right, like me. Because what you’re hearing is less about a perceptive, I mean an issue of perception. Perception matters to a degree, yes. I mean if you prime someone to hear something, in this case you could probably prime someone to hear this Yanni sound that is in the file. However, the file, I’ve analyzed it, I’ve broken it down. We’re gonna hear some split versions of it I did, and it very much does say Laurel.

0:05:13
BR: I’m right, exactly. Let’s all go home now.

PR: This Yanny thing is actually an artifact. So what we’re hearing and what I think… There’s a number of things we’re going to talk about here as far as why you’ll hear it, but what’s happening is the Yanni sound is in the high frequencies of the audio spectrum. So you’ve got your audio spectrum, it goes from very low to very high and that wasn’t very either but so what you’re hearing is on the top end. That’s where that Yanni sound is and it’s a very hissy noise and on the low end is where Laurel is or low to mid and so what I did was I Actually put it into Pro Tools and I ran two separate tracks of the same file. One I used an EQ plug-in to basically either pull off the low end or pull off the high end. So I reprocessed the audio with with either no highs or no lows and so I’m gonna play them back to back right now and then we’ll talk about it right after.

(CLIPS PLAY)

PR: So, the first times you hear it, you can hear it’s very tinny and high pitched. Now, it still to me sounds a lot like Laurel. You know, I’m primed to hear it that way at this point, and so I can’t, you know, and I’ve been listening to it a bunch this afternoon while I was processing it, so I don’t really hear it, but you’ll hear that hissy kind of syllable, or the two syllables that would make up Yanni, and I’m hoping some of our listeners who maybe are listening through phones or something might have picked that up out of the high end.

BR: Well, I’m baffled as to how anybody could get Yanni out of that. Well, I mean, I know it’s my own perception, but it seems so so self-evident that it’s Laurel.

0:07:20
CW: I listened to it for the first time yesterday at about midnight or I guess this morning at about midnight. And I just put it on repeat. And I after about six hearings, I heard Yanni. All I could hear was Yanni. And then after about six or seven times of it repeating, I heard Laurel and then that was all I could hear. So it’s almost like it was like a little curve for me. I heard it one way and then I heard it the other way and I think I was I think I was consciously trying to hear it the other way because I was like, oh, okay, I hear it this way. I wonder how other people hear it. And then suddenly that’s all I could hear.

0:07:54
BR: Okay, I have a question before because again, I you got you both of you know far more about this than I do. What is the origin of this?

0:08:03
CW:Well, that’s actually one of the things that makes this an interesting case, because there are ways to perceive the objective truth. You can rely on your senses by just hearing or listening, or you can try and dig and do some detective work. And many journalists have looked into this. The New York Times credits a teenager named Roland Szabo, S-Z-A-B-O, an 18 year old in Georgia. It says that he got it from a vocabulary.com website listing for Laurel. So the original source is Laurel. Wired.com credited two different teenagers, but apparently it was a group of friends. So it actually comes from a group of kids in Georgia.

BR: Probably Banksi.

CW: And they were listening to it as part of a vocabulary assignment. Vocabulary.com has spoken about this and said that, number one, it’s not a robot voice. This is an actual human being that was recorded about 10 years ago. He’s an opera singer, but they don’t want to give out his name because they don’t know if he wants to be a viral superstar right now. But they had hired opera singers to pronounce about 200,000 words for them when they were a startup. And so this is an opera singer pronouncing the word Laurel. Now, by the time it got around to Twitter, it had been audio degraded so many times that it kind of sounds like a robot voice, to me anyway.

0:09:27
BR: Let me just interject here. I mean, there’s part of the problem right there is you have all this debate, and I’m using debate very loosely. And you’re having different people who are literally hearing different things, so it’s it’s not a fair comparison to say well, what did you hear? Well, it depends entirely on which version you heard.

CW: And which speakers you’re hearing it through.

0:09:48
PR: Yeah, so and and that’s important so as we heard in my examples that we just played we heard the high-pitched one where I took out the high end or took out the low end and then we heard the low pitch version where I took out the high end and it becomes much more clearly Laurel in the latter. Now, there are a number of questions you have to kind of answer here. So first off, the hissy noise that Yanni seems to be happening in is most likely the result of audio compression. If you listen to the actual Vocabulary.com site, you’re much more likely to hear Laurel as the audio is much clearer there. So real quick, I’m just going to play that. So people hopefully will hear the difference. Now we’re recording from the website so hopefully going from one computer to another through our audio interface we don’t lose too much but here goes.

(CLIPS PLAYS)

PR: Now to us here in the studio that sounds clear as day. There’s just no comparison. Now folks if you want to hear it for yourself go to vocabulary.com search Laurel and you should hear that very clearly. There’s nothing going on with it. And on the Twitter account that you hear it, you’ll hear a lot more noise. Now we’re going to play that real quick.

(CLIP PLAYS)

0:11:06
PR: So you can hear that it’s just, it’s real tinny and small sounding. It’s still Laurel to me. Yeah, and it still sounds like Laurel to me as well, which brings me.

0:11:14
CW: That’s the problem with these. You can only hear them so many times before. You’re just ruined.

0:11:19
PR: Yeah, you’re never. Once, I mean, and that’s the thing, you know, we’ve already primed ourselves to the point that even if it was very clearly Yanni, we wouldn’t even know.

BR: Well, except for me and my virgin ears.

0:11:34
PR: Right. Now, but that brings me to my next point is the question of technology. Now I already mentioned compression, but beyond that there’s also a question of the source. As I said, on the website it’s very clear. On the Twitter account it sounds like someone recorded it through their phone microphone off of a computer speaker or something.

BR: The world’s most boring bootleg.

PR: Exactly. Precisely. Kids these days, what are they doing bootlegging vocabulary.com? But I don’t know, maybe that’s better than the bootlegging we used to do. But anyway, it’s that you’ve already soiled the quality of the file by doing that and recording it through a tiny little, nearly microscopic microphone that, while phone microphones have definitely gotten much better, they’re still terrible on the scale of you know bad to good microphones. They’re nothing like what we’re talking into right now because of that the microphone, you know may or may not be able to pick up a lot of frequencies. So it’ll cut off some and then just the hiss in the room and the the way that the microphone can compensate for noise That’s another thing you’ll hear kind of an oscillation in the audio because it’s trying to compensate for noise to compress it. Because a lot of phones, especially when you’re using recording software or video software, it will compress the audio while you’re recording it in order to keep it kind of even sounding. And so there’s just a number of things happening just by recording it in the first place. And then when you start sharing it around on the internet and people start recording and re-recording it, and you just get worse and worse examples of it, and you get all that noise in it. And then the other problem is you’re going to be listening to it through any number of different types of speakers. We’re listening to it through studio headphones right now. When I was editing it, I was listening to it through our rather pricey studio monitors, which are speakers with drivers in them that are designed to provide the clearest possible example of the sound you’re listening to. And it is very clearly Laurel through those and as I was processing I switched over to I have what we call reference monitors which are just smaller much cheaper monitors that are used to compare the sound between two different speakers that when you’re mixing you don’t just make it sound amazing on expensive speakers and then terrible through headphones or something and so when I went to those that Yanni sound kind of became a little more apparent. And so, speaker quality has a huge effect on that.

0:14:07
CW: It sounds like you’re describing a long technological version of the game telephone.

0:14:13
PR: Precisely. That’s exactly how it works when you’re reproducing audio, you know, especially when you are, and actually on two levels it works because, you know, it degrades over time to the point that it becomes unrecognizable as you’re re-hosting and re-recording the audio. And then the second issue is that people are whispering something, and when you’re whispering, depending on the frequencies you’re hearing, I mean, you’re hearing basically a series of hisses that make words when you hear a whisper. And you’re going to pick different frequencies out of what they’re saying, and you can hear something completely different than the next person. And that brings me to an issue that I kind of hypothesized, which is that hearing degradation probably plays a part in this. As you get older and you’re exposed to more loud noises, you lose your hearing from the top down frequency-wise. So, as you get older and as your hearing takes a beating, the higher frequencies basically start getting carved off. So…

0:15:15
BR: Is it the cilia in your ears?

0:15:17
CW: Yeah.

0:15:18
PR: Yeah. And so what’s happening is when you’re a kid, you can hear just this huge range of frequencies, just ultra high pitch noises you can hear. And as you get older, it just drops down. And this is where we come into what are called the mosquito ring tones. These came out probably about 10 years ago now. Now these they’re really popular with teenagers, and I don’t even remember how I heard of it But probably something on the internet, but they’re ultrasonic ringtones, and they’re up in the like 17.5 kilohertz range which is pretty high and usually you can’t hear above 17 kilohertz after the age of 25, so that’s a very…

BR: This is actually a thing?

PR: Yeah, and this is literally a thing like so kids were putting these ringtones on their phones that were like at 17.5 kilohertz and Teachers could not hear them because anyone over 25. It’s just highly unlikely that they can hear that sound.

CW: Aha, but that was also used against the young whippersnappers. I didn’t have time to triple check this there were some convenience stores I heard about that were employing a method of trying to keep the loitering teenagers out from, you know, they were constantly congregating in front of the stores. And so they would broadcast a high-pitched whiny sound that just apparently just aggravated the kids and made them leave. But it didn’t bother anybody else.

PR: That’s that’s that’s really a great idea. I mean it’s the same concept as like one of those Dazzers or whatever they’re called. They’re made for scaring dogs away.

BR: Oh, yeah, yeah.

PR: Same concept. And yeah, so that’s what it is. After the age of 25, you can’t hear that tone anymore. And as you get older, that number drops. I think by age 40, you can’t hear above 15 kilohertz usually and so on. And that varies wildly on how well you take care of your hearing, how much loud music you expose yourself to. But for the most part, these are, I mean, it’s pretty across the board. I know I can’t hear 17. I probably can’t hear 15 either at this point.

0:17:28
CW: Yeah. Now, this is originally present, well, originally, like beyond the Vocabulary.com listing of this sound. It was presented recently as a poll. The kids who put it on the on Reddit and and Instagram or whatnot made it into a poll saying, what do you hear? Now, I haven’t I looked at a number of articles. I was not able to find actual poll results that corresponded with age. I don’t think that was set up that way. So it’s not like we have a curve showing how many people above age 30 heard one word and how many people below age 30 heard another word. But all of the experts quoted in the many articles are saying there’s a very good chance that older people are hearing Laurel and younger people are hearing Yanni on the average.

0:18:15
PR: Yeah, I think on the average you’ll find, you know, if you were to poll everybody, you’d find that older people were less likely to hear that Yanni because it sits in the higher frequencies and the fewer of those frequencies you can hear the less likely it is you’ll hear that.

0:18:29
CW: Well the whole age split adds a different level to this faux tribalism we’re seeing on the internet. You know, I’m old so damn it’s Laurel and then you’ve got people, no I’m young so I know it’s Yanni. And you’ve got people taking sides just as you saw with the dress.

0:18:48
PR: Yeah, yeah. I’m just going to say this. There is no Yanni, only Laurel. But, yeah, there is an issue of perception, but the truth is that, you know, what you’re, you know, like, as I’ve broken down, what you’re hearing is very dependent on a number of things. But when you carve off that high frequency, there is no denying that it just says Laurel.

BR: But, now, can you play a file for me where I will clearly hear Yanni?

PR: That see, that’s the tricky part, because this is and this is where my theory about age kind of comes in, because you can you can hear it. I mean, I can perceive it. I the first time I heard it, I I could hear what that Yanny sound was. I don’t believe once you know it’s Laurel and you’re just it’s like I honestly think it’s almost impossible to hear after that.

BR: I would have to deny the truth that I know in my heart.

PR: Yeah like that that high-pitched example I try I edited down was as close as I could get and I’m hoping some listeners can pick that up It may just be that you know I couldn’t do a good enough job of isolating it.

0:19:54
CW: Well all of us are also well over 25 So if you’re isolating for frequencies that we can no longer hear then it will still do no good to us.

0:20:03
BR: So basically what we’re saying is, it’s Laurel, and get off my lawn!

0:20:08
CW: Ha ha ha ha!

0:20:09
PR: New York Times shared a tool to help you hear both, and it’s, it says it’s on the upshot, just look up the title, we made a tool to help you hear both Laurel and Yanni, and so we’re gonna play it right now, you guys should be able to hear it, I’m gonna slide it first to the Yanny side then to the Laurel side. What you’re going to be hearing is the low frequency the low end of it get lower and lower and lower and the high end get higher and higher when it goes to the Yanni side and then in the Inverse as we go to the Laurel side, so here we go.

CW: They did what you did

0:20:41
PR: Yeah, they did what I did with actually a little more spent a little more time.

BR: To it to be fair to be fair we don’t have the resources of the New York Times, despite our generous patrons.

0:20:53
CW: Not yet, anyway.

0:20:55
BR: For another $150 a month, though, folks, you go to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. I can edit these all day.

(CLIP PLAYS)

0:21:34
PR: So there you heard it. So hopefully you were able to hear a pretty distinct difference when it was processed really well like that. And you could hear that it really brought out that yanny sound, the yanniness of the laurel as we went one way and then laurel the other way. Again, this is very dependent on that specific file because as we played earlier, the Vocabulary.com recording is pretty clear.

0:21:51
CW: So I’m thrilled that we were able to have this in a timely manner for all the folks hopping from the controversy online. I think this Laurel Yanni example demonstrates a few key things about failures of our human senses. You have an ambiguous thing. They’ve been calling this like an audio version of Rubin’s vase, where you can either see two faces or a little flower pot. flowerpot. We have no context for it. The word is not said in a sentence, our brains, you know, to some extent, our brains have no like ahead of time clues. There’s no priming to hear one version over the other, though it could be argued that you’re primed after a while, especially if you find out that younger people hear one and older people hear another. And it also depends on equipment that people are hearing it through headphones versus some other high-end speaker. And, you know, I’m sure Ben is right now thinking, wow, that’s exactly like EVPs, which have all those things going for them. Well, we’ll discuss that a little bit later as we talk about our main topic, but this is all well and good if we’re just discussing a dress online or an audio clip of one word, but unfortunately our senses are relied upon to convict alleged criminals, or to report a UFO, or to make really critical decisions in a crisis. So let’s talk about our senses coming up.

(MUSIC)

0:23:28
CW: Well, welcome back. One more thing before we get on to senses as a whole. If you were very interested by the audio breakdown of Yanni versus Laurel, I can highly recommend a podcast episode from about 10 years ago. It was a 2008 episode of Skeptoid with Brian Dunning. It’s episode 105 titled, When People Talk Backwards. And in that episode, he samples some work from Matt Davis using sine waves and audio tones that have no human speech in them. And it’s really almost like a magic trick. It’s an example of audio pareidolia, where your brain senses a pattern in something where there’s actually not that much of a pattern to begin with. And I can’t really tell you more about it without wrecking it for you, so I just, I highly recommend episode 105 of Skeptoid when people talk backwards for any audiophiles out there who wanna just kinda have their mind blown at having sounds appear.

PR: If nothing else, just to hear Brian Dunning’s dulcet tones.

0:24:40
CW: Yeah. But yeah, the whole Yanni Laurel debate and audio pareidolia is a perfect appetizer for our main course here. And it’s a removed way to look at something that when you really get into it, quite frankly, it makes a lot of us and myself included, kind of uncomfortable. It’s breaking down something that is part of who you are, that is really how you identify yourself and how you identify the world around you. It’s pretty straightforward to blame frequency shifts and degrading audio data and sh*tty headphones for hearing something wrong. But when we’re looking at confusing sensory data, in our everyday life, we have to admit that we are the terrible hardware. And we have got data storage problems that degrades. And we are going through life with this vulnerability to ambiguous input. So it’s not an easy idea to really grapple with. It’s so much easier to just get really rabid about, that’s a blue dress, not a gold dress for Team Yanni. But let’s get into the real world here and look at some, break down what people might not necessarily think about every day when they are just walking through the world, experiencing life with their senses. First off, senses are two-part. There’s the sensory organ, and then there’s the brain. Things can get fouled up either place or on the way from one to the other, but it’s a really a main tenet of skepticism to try to understand the blind spots that our brain has and the ways both of our senses and our brain can fail us, from biases to the lure of fallacies, to even the way that our eyesight and our hearing works. As Scientific American says, “it is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.”

0:26:38
PR: Actually, I have listened to Intelligence Squared debates pretty regularly and I heard Deepak Chopra make an argument that all of existence, which is funny because on one hand I found myself slightly agreeing with him in that it’s a construct of your own mind, but rather instead of using the word all of your experience as a construct of your own mind, he’s all of existence, so I thought that was pretty funny. But it was also kind of a good way to sort of walk into some of the ways that you get very wrong ideas from the input that you’re being given. When he talks about experience or when anyone talks about experience for that matter, it’s very subjective to them. So when you’re trying to talk about the reliability of their description of the experience or their memory of the experience, you’re relying on every single thing to have worked perfectly, what they heard, what they saw, what they smelled, what they touched, and that can be a really challenging thing to even overcome when it comes to using that information for any kind of real evidence-based idea or if you’re trying to make a case or something like that.

0:27:58
BR: Yeah, I think that one of the things that often gets overlooked is that the ambiguity goes unnoticed most of the time. In a case like the dress, what color it is, or the Yanni Laurel thing. We’re focusing attention saying, hey, look at this thing, everybody. Pay attention to this and see how you parse this out. But of course, in our everyday lives, we’re continually making a variety of mistakes, perceptual mistakes in terms of time and distance and touch and smell.

0:28:21
And most of the time, it’s not a problem. I mean, unless, for example, we miss a step because we don’t see it, or we’re having vision problems or something, the sorts of perceptual errors that we encounter, they’re not important. They’re just like, oh, whatever, I thought my keys were here, but they’re over there, or whatever else. One thing that I sometimes do is I would go and reach for a jug of milk, and I would tend to think that there was more milk, and so I would like lift up the jug, it almost hit the top of the fridge, the inside of the fridge, because I assumed that it was full, when in fact it was light, so I just sort of had this muscle memory. And so it’s useful to keep in mind that our perceptions were basically being unconsciously micro-corrected all the time. And so for the most part, we don’t even notice the little misperceptions that we actually have.

0:29:18
CW: Well, that’s one of the reasons why something that’s a glaring example like the dress or the the audio clip is it makes headlines everywhere because people are stunned to discover their own fallibility and it’s a shocking thing. And for a lot of skeptics, we kind of yawn and roll our eyes going well duh that’s how senses work but not everybody you know besides magicians or you know audiovisual artists or sound engineers you know people don’t spend their lives focusing on how you can trick your senses you know not everybody is is employed creating optical illusions all day.

BR: And of course that’s one of the things that you do as an artist I mean I remember you know you and I were talking about the art of caricature, and you were explaining sort of little, I don’t want to say tricks of the trade, but little ways that you can suggest the presence of a facial feature without actually drawing it, and it’s because there are perceptual ways.

0:30:15
CW: Yeah, I was actually trying to show my brother how to create some aspect of somebody’s face. My brother is an engineer. I’ve got two brothers. Both of them are engineers, and I was trying to explain to one of them how some sort of facial thing worked and he was he had this moment of utter confusion he said you just drew something that’s not there it’s not like that on his face but you drew that and it made it look like the thing that how did that you know… I was like you have to lie sometimes to tell the truth in art. That’s the way it works, you know. If I’m trying to create a certain stretch, I will pull something that is not actually in the face that I’m trying to represent, but when a human brain looks at it, it reads more like the face to have that stretch. So without getting too deep into caricature theory here, I mean, I do have an anecdote, this is a personal anecdote and it’s not really about caricatures or art, but that comes into play here. A very important aspect of trusting your senses is when you are a witness to a crime. My husband, well he was my boyfriend at the time, this is like a good 12 years ago or so, we came back from seeing a movie and stumbled upon a car, my car, that I had just bought that morning, and somebody was breaking into it trying to steal it. And this was at night, there was an overhead light, but you know, it was a nighttime light with a spotlight above. And this guy got out of the car of the passenger side as I put my key in because we had tinted windows. So I couldn’t tell somebody was in there until the car moved as I’m unlocking the door. This guy gets out, hops up, looks at me and my husband, neither of us look fast. We’re big people, we don’t move very quickly. This was a young spry thing and he had the gall to like smile at us as he realized he was going to make a clean getaway and he took off running. Now, I immediately called 911 and was describing him head to toe and I had purposely made an effort to, okay, face, shirt, pants, you know, he’s wearing a plaid shirt, dark jeans, you know, the height, the race, the fact that he was wearing a bandana on his head. I tried to gauge everything in like a checklist as quickly as I could, and I was repeating it to myself as I’m calling 911. My husband, or boyfriend at the time, just took off running after him. And I ended up identifying the guy at the scene because as it happened, the 911 dispatcher got in contact with a cop that was right around the corner. He was in the, he was right by the apartment complex. He knew the area and he knew there was an area of the wall where people would climb over and try and like get out of the apartment complex. And so he went right there and caught the guy right as he came over the wall. And they took me over there and sure enough, he was wearing the blue and white plaid shirt I had described, the same pants. There was no, I said, there’s no bandana. And he said, well, here’s what we found in his pocket. And there’s the bandana. He had shoved it in his pocket. And it looked, it looked like the guy that I’d seen. I registered some facial features. I’m not going to repeat them now because it’s been 12 years. I honestly don’t remember. But at the time, but my husband, Rob, who also is a caricature artist, he had taken off running after the guy he Rob chasing him was what made him jump over the wall. And trust me, if you see Rob chasing you, you will jump over a wall. He’s a big guy, but he’s not likely to catch you unless you slow down. So Rob said, That’s weird that you saw him in a blue top because I could swear his top was red. And the officer at the scene said, yeah, that happens whenever somebody’s angry or hyped up or running, and they got a lot of blood rushing through their head, they see red. And I was like, I thought that was like a myth. I did a little bit of joke of jumping around. And there’s some mixed results. There is some work by some psychologists out of North Dakota State University, that it kind of sounded more like a personality test than a critical examination of sensory input, that people who were more likely to see red in an image were also more likely to score high on how hostile they were, whatever that means. And of course, in nature, often red does mean danger or poison. You know, red flowers, red animals, red insects tend to sort of signal people as like this is dangerous And when people when another human being is really angry and about to punch you they usually get red in the face. So there’s some there’s some just so anecdotes about that, but but regardless, I was able to give a description and I identified the guy at the scene and fast-forward a couple weeks into the future, or actually is more like six or eight weeks into the future, we were at the DA’s office and they were prepping us saying, okay, we’re going to have a trial and the defense lawyer, this is the guy’s third strike and they’re saying that there’s no way you could have identified him at the scene. And hey, to the lawyers credit, that’s good lawyering. You want to try to knock down the witness and say there’s no way they could have identified the person. And yeah, it was dark but there was an overhead light. And I just mentioned, I was like, you know, he did turn around and smile at us before he ran off. And I kind of just mentioned off the cuff, I said, you know, I’m not sure if this matters, but I’m a quick sketch artist. I draw faces all day for a living. And I’ve had to draw three year olds that didn’t stand still as long as this guy did. And the DA’s face just lit up and he said, oh yes, that matters. And he said, that’s just turned you into an expert witness. And he left the room and he came back five minutes later and he said, they’ve changed their plea to guilty. So that’s my little story about how visual perception can be affected. Like my husband and I had very different memories of what had happened and it was influenced by our state of mind. He was running and in a panic. I tried to be laser focused, 911, remember everything you’ve just seen. Like I said, it matters also if you can recognize somebody, how attuned are you to recognizing facial features? How accurate is that? How accurate is your memory? I would never be able to pick this guy out of a lineup now. It’s been 12 years later, but at the time I was able to pick him, I was able to be very confident in identifying him at the scene. I had just seen him two minutes earlier. That’s one of the things that I looked at in terms of having your senses fail you is your memory. Often it’s not your sensory input that’s failing you, it’s your memory of what you have seen. And memory is such an intertwined thing with our senses. If we were to do a future episode about memory, we would have to just block out a whole other couple episodes to talk about memory, so we’ll do that another time. But your senses take in information and then the brain stores them, and police lineups, investigation techniques, have all been really confounded by people’s memories and people’s senses, not really being completely accurate. There is an Atlantic article from 2014, Why Police Lineups Will Never Be Perfect, and that author, Virginia Hughes, goes into a bunch of data telling us how we can improve the police lineup system and how witness confidence bears very strongly on that. There’s still a debate and a controversy now as to which is more optimum, having somebody look at a group of photographs of people at one time, a grouped lineup versus a sequential lineup where you look at one face and you say, no, that’s not the guy. And then you look at another face and you say, no, that’s not the guy. You just say yes, no to these different faces. One of the, now the sequential lineup is far more prone to missing correct identifications. You’re going to have more guilty people get off the hook that way. The grouped lineup where you’re seeing them all together, you have a much higher instance of false positives. So you have more innocent people going to jail wrongfully. So it’s going to be a question. Our legal system does always try to sway towards not getting innocent people convicted wrongly. But, you know, that’s not always the going trend. So we’ll just have to wait and see and hope that science will slowly improve our methods to verifying what we have seen and what we remember seeing. But I wanted to talk more about the neurological aspect of sensory input. I was wondering how many skeptics out there have migraines?

0:39:17
PR: I know my wife does badly sometimes, so I’ve definitely, I’ve been party to it. I’ve never had one.

BR: I’ve fortunately never had a migraine, although when I was visiting some friends of mine in Durban, South Africa, she had, she had migraines and she called them megrains, just FYI.

0:39:36
CW:Megrains you grains we all grains for migraines. I Got struck with my first migraine when I was like 13 and I was in I was a 13 year old atheist in a Catholic Church That’s when I got my first migraine and it’s a wonder. I didn’t come out of there a total believer.

PR: It was a sign to leave.

CW: But I think it’s no coincidence that one of the most prominent skeptics I like to follow, Steven Nivella, is a neurologist who specializes in migraine. It’s definitely just the whole experience of having one or knowing what they are is a primer in being very aware of how your senses can just go away. can be interfered with. You can have the brain sensory input chain can be completely severed when you have a migraine. There’s different visual auras you get. I’ve experienced my vision telescoping and going black and white and turning fuzzy like a TV. You start hearing things. You hear rushing water sometimes in your ears and then you fall down or something. But it’s not even like anybody hit you on the head. It just happens to you. Seeing how that can really mess with what you’re able to see and hear and perceive is a great reminder to not always trust your senses. And it’s important to remember that you can have your senses fail due to other conditions, a fever, temporary ringing in your ears after a concert, when one of your arm or your leg falls asleep, if you’ve been leaning on it too much, and of course, every single night when you’re about to fall asleep, when you get hypnagogic. Now you know what that is like, Pascual.

0:41:24
PR: Yes, I have definitely experienced that, and that’s a really, for me, and we’ve talked about it in a previous episode, I have experienced sleep paralysis, and my brain has told me all kinds of weird things. It just, it put in, there’s input, the visual input, I think I see something, I think I feel things, and you just get a general sense of dread. And since the first time I ever experienced it, I always knew it was some kind of dreamlike state that I was in.

BR: So there’s a certain self-awareness that sort of protected you from being…

PR: Yeah, I mean, thankfully, you know, I was in the right frame of mind when it started happening to just be pretty quick to understand that it wasn’t actually happening but I can see why most people who experience it especially if they have any level of spirituality or magical thinking will just immediately think that wow that’s a ghost that’s an alien that’s a demon you know and and they will and they’ll or just the sense of dread and they’ll be like there’s a presence and I mean I understanding when most people you know swear by an experience that they they’ve had especially when it has to do with with that twilight moment in your brain when you’re between sleep and being awake and I sympathize with those people I try my best to explain to them what I’ve experienced because I hope that my experience will help them understand what it is maybe a little better because I’d rather them realize it’s just a psychological kind of weird brain problem. It’s a weird moment you’re having rather than you know think that demons are literally in your home or you’re about to get abducted.

0:43:17
BR: Well and that’s one of the reasons that you know when I’m interviewing somebody who’s a witness to something weird whether it’s a lake monster, ghost, or UFO, whatever else, when I’m interviewing them about what happened, I don’t challenge their experience. I wanna try and understand their experience, but if someone says, I saw this happen, my answer is not, no, you didn’t. Because as far as I know, they did. So I learned pretty early on that challenging someone’s experience is not gonna get you anywhere. And they’ll say, no, that’s my experience, you weren’t there and so on so So that the angle into it the right that I take in my investigations is okay Well, I don’t doubt that was your experience. I wasn’t there. You know this is in your head Yeah, and I don’t mean don’t necessarily mean that derisively, but it’s you know it happened to you the question Then of course is interpretation. What else could it have been a dream? Could it have been a passing car whose lights went through the window that you didn’t know? And so this is where I try to get people to open up the variety of explanations available to them. Because oftentimes, of course, we’ll just lock on to one. It’s like, well, I had this experience. This was a scary entity attacking me at night, or this was a ghost, or this was a Bigfoot, and you can’t tell me otherwise. And if he says, okay, well, you know, let’s, let’s break that down. It could be that, what else could it be? And then once you start opening that up, and that’s, that’s one of the ways when you start looking into the different ways that our senses can fool us.

0:44:40
CW: Well, yeah, that’s, I think that’s an important thing that you’ve always done in your investigations is you don’t fall into that false dichotomy of either she saw a UFO or she’s lying and she’s a hoaxer. It can be it can be in the middle of that. It doesn’t have to be either a hoax or a completely true objective thing that happened. It can be, well, OK, that person is telling the truth, but they’re mistaken in what they think they saw. And and I think as far as witness, as far as witnesses being sure about what they’ve seen, confidence and time are the enemy of any sort of skeptical process. Because, I mean, as I was looking up police information on lineups and and prosecutions that relied on eyewitness accounts, one thing that they’ve instituted is they’ve, at least, police have started to record how confident a witness is at the time of identification. Because they had a lot of instances where a witness would be, you know, right after the event, they’d be like, yeah, I think that’s the guy. I’m not entirely sure. But if I had to place a bet, I’d say it was that photo. So they’re kind of unsure. And then fast forward two years, and they’re in the courtroom saying, I am absolutely certain that is the man that stole my purse. You know, they’re completely sure the confidence level just ratchets up as time goes by.

0:46:05
PR: Yeah.

0:46:06
CW: So if you’re talking to somebody, and I’m certainly thinking of the experience you had with a psychic detective where the psychic detective was more and more confident of all the hits she got as time went on. She remembered it a certain way and she was more and more confident and it was like 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I forget how long, but it’s like, no, you can’t really be certain of anything after that much time has passed. You need to rely on written records and other means besides just your memory of how confident you were in a certain sensory perception that happened a long time ago.

0:46:44
BR: Yeah, and of course, part of the problem is that because most people use their experiences as a reliable guide to the world, which works pretty well most of the time. I mean, most of the time, our personal experience is a pretty reliable guide. The problem is that, for example, with a lot of paranormal claims, the evidence is so ambiguous and tenuous that that ambiguity, that twilight, that is the evidence. It’s not like there’s a mountain of evidence that something is true and they’re waffling on the last 10%. That’s not what’s going on here. The problem is that when you boil a lot of these phenomena down to their basic parts, we don’t have hard evidence for these things. We don’t have hard evidence of ghosts or Bigfoot or UFOs or whatever else. A lot of times it comes down to personal experience, which is all well and good. Personal experience can be valid, but of course it can also be terribly flawed. And because the bulk of the evidence is personal experience and things that are very subject to misperceptions and misremembering things like that, therein lies the rub. That’s where the bulk of the evidence is, and it’s inherently problematic.

0:47:57
PR: Yeah.

0:47:58
CW: Yeah.

PR: A good example that I have a little bit of experience in is the world of audiophiles and particularly people who judge quality of audio equipment and different things. This is especially present in things like cables. Cables are usually the biggest and people you know who are kind of at my level of audio work, especially in the professional world where we have to make decisions on audio equiptment. We have to know that what we’re buying is what we’re buying. And not so much these days, but I remember probably about 10 years ago, you’d go to Best Buy and buy a TV and they’d be like, hey, you need to buy this gold-plated, metal-braided HDMI cable.

0:48:46
BR: It’s infused with yak semen from Tibet.

PR: And I mean, these things could run you into the hundreds of dollars I even remember Amazon at one point having one that was like in the thousands of dollars and and and you know, that’s it’s simply a perception that it’s better and so when someone buys it and they plug it in they’re like wow, this is so much better than the cable I was using before. But you know first off in this this applies to a lot of things, but especially digital signals, audio or video signals, cables, the important thing is that the information gets from point A to point B. That’s what matters in transmitting almost anything through cables. Now, cable quality does have an effect on certain things. If you’re using radio frequency, how well it’s insulated matters. If you’re using electricity, you know, insulation and grounding, I mean, that’s all very important. And the quality of the cable certainly matters. When it comes to running the audio signal from your receiver to your speakers, not that big of a deal. There was actually a study done a while back where they tested this by getting very expensive speaker wire, running it to the speakers and having people listen to it. And then they literally used coat hangers and ran the same experiment. And people just did not know, experts, so-called experts, did not know the difference. They couldn’t tell the difference between a wire hanger and a speaker wire.

0:50:22
CW: I have heard, I’ve just heard tell in, you know, skeptics talk about the cable wire, the fraud going on. Well, I shouldn’t say fraud because I don’t know for sure, but the confidence buying that’s going on with audio cables. And I know Richard Saunders mediated a trial at the last amazing, one of the last amazing meetings I went to where they just had people walk up and like it was a double blind test as to which was the really good like $2,000 audio wires versus the cheap like $12 audio wires and there’s always this idea that there are some people with golden ears who can actually tell the difference. Do you know whether or not that’s anything to there is there anything to somebody being like a golden ear to much the way we have super tasters or whatnot.

0:51:12
PR: There is some, there is something to it. I wouldn’t put too much confidence in how well you could use that to your advantage in discerning quality of cables. There are people, for instance, who have what we call perfect pitch, and they can hear a note or a key in music and name it right off the top of their head. That is something that very few people have and I’m not sure if it’s a learnable skill. I can usually tune a guitar by ear without knowing exactly, and it’s pretty close, but it’s not perfect. So there are people that can discern the differences between very subtle pitch differences and more importantly, they can produce a note from off the top of their head that’s in perfect pitch in perfect key with you know, like if you wanted to test them you’d be like, you know I hum a C note and then they do it and then you’d hit it on a keyboard or a piano and it’d be perfectly in Tune with it.

0:52:14
CW: But apart from pitch, you know being able to recognize and reproduce pitches, you don’t know of anything where people have extra cilia in their ears or whatnot and can actually tell the difference between these two between two vastly differently priced cables?

0:52:31
PR: Yeah, as far as physiologically, I don’t believe there’s a I mean there are people that have better hearing than others that would matter I mean certainly If you know one person who has better hearing than another may be able to discern certain differences now I will say that if it’s a coat hanger and a speaker wire in a controlled environment, you wouldn’t notice a difference. Now, I would argue that if you were in a place where there’s a lot of electrical or radio frequency interference, a bare metal surface could pick up some other stuff, and you may be able to make a distinction between the two. And when I talk about cable quality, there’s certainly an important consideration to be made for how durable it’s made and how well it’s shielded and things like that, like I mentioned with radio frequency. But as far as I know, under those controlled situations where you can get the same audio quality out of a wire hanger or speaker wires, I don’t think anyone’s really capable of some superhuman perception. They may be able to hear a difference in tonal quality or something, but I doubt that they’d be able to say, well, this is the garbage wire hanger that’s running the audio.

0:53:43
BR: Right, I mean, it reminds me of the difference between clinical significance and statistical significance.

0:53:49
PR: Yeah, yeah.

0:53:50
BR: You know, it’s entirely possible that a study will show that there is a significance, there is a difference between drug A and drug B, but if you’re the average person, it means that your headache will last 20 seconds fewer with drug A than B. It’s not really useful. And so I think of a couple things. Number one, of course, the importance of double blind studies. These are exactly why double blind studies are so important. It’s because it helps you to avoid the experiment or effects and knowing what effect to get out of a certain condition.

0:54:27
CW: And yeah, being primed. Accidentally primed.

0:54:31
BR: Yeah, and the fact is there are many, many things in our everyday lives that we just really can’t tell the difference on. You know, as Pascual was saying, between high-end speaker wires and coat hangers, right? This is why, for example, there’s been many tests that have looked at high-priced wines versus medium-priced wines.

0:54:49
PR: Yeah.

BR: And, you know, I mean, yes, many people can tell the difference between a $3 bottle and a $300 bottle, but many fewer people can tell the difference between a $30 bottle and an $80 bottle of wine.

0:55:01
CW: The different tests that they have done on people’s ability to discern wine types is a great example of how our senses are sometimes overblown in our own head, how we’re taking for granted that we have more sensory abilities than we do. That has been another thing I’ve heard. They’ve blindfolded people and people are not able to tell if they’re drinking a red wine or a white wine.

0:55:24
PR: I found that hard to believe. I feel like I could tell.

0:55:29
BR: We don’t know.

0:55:30
PR: I have to try it sometime.

BR: But again, it’s one of those things where unless your attention is drawn to it, as it was with the laurel, the sound as it was with the other cases, unless your attention is drawn to noticing the difference, you’re not going to notice it. For example, I don’t know if you guys know, but there’s a real problem with counterfeit fish. There’s fish that’s intentionally mislabeled. There’s cheaper fish that’s mislabeled as more expensive fish, and people buy it and they consume it and they all know it’s fine. It tasted fine. You didn’t complain about it, but yeah, in fact, Consumer Reports and other organizations have done tests. They’ve gone and bought fish that was labeled these different things, and they find that fish that is a rare, more expensive cut of fish is oftentimes substituted for cheaper fish. And it’s that people, and you would think, well, you can tell the difference between mahi-mahi and salmon, right? Well, maybe you can, maybe you can’t, depending on how it’s prepared.

PR: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. And also why I highly advise people to buy fancy fish from fish markets where the heads are still on them for identification purposes.

0:56:42
CW: Well, see, I hasten to say, what does it really matter? If somebody can convince me that I’m eating the best, most wonderful, expensive fish that I’m going to really enjoy, and it’s really just like monkfish, but I enjoy it because of the priming. I kind of want that. I would like to pay a lower amount for something and enjoy it as much as I would enjoy something that’s a higher price. I would like to exploit the problems in my senses sometimes. Like, you know, I’ve got a friend who’s a high-end sommelier, and I know he earns his keep by making the people at the table enjoy the wine that much more because he’s priming them. He’s saying, you’re gonna be able to taste notes of this and hints of that, and there’s gonna be an after flavor of berries and this, or what. He even said there’s a word for wine that tastes like shit. It’s, I think it’s called Earth Tones.

0:57:39
PR: Oh, I thought it was called Boone’s Farms.

0:57:42
CW: Yeah, it’s a different kind of tasting, like shit. But for the actual flavor of manure, which is present in some wines and appreciated by some people, they call it Earth Notes or something.

0:57:55
PR: Earth Notes, wow. It’s like calling a house rustic when you’re trying to sell it.

BR: Well, it would be an interesting experiment, right? It would be to have different sommeliers give different descriptions of the same wine to different people and say, okay, they’re going to describe this wine and then ask them, how accurate do you think this wine is? So you’d have the same wine and you’d have the person describing maybe three or four different mutually exclusive descriptions. It’s possible someone’s done this experiment, I don’t know about it, but it wouldn’t surprise me that all three of them would say, yes, he described the wine perfectly. It’s like, well, it’s the same wine that somebody an hour ago said is totally different characteristics.

0:58:38
CW: If I’m not mistaken, I think there have been done, I think there have been a few experiments like that. If the listeners want to just Google wine experiments and wine tasting studies, you’re gonna find some interesting results. I haven’t gone over it recently, but there’s certainly been a bit of work in that area. Another category of our senses kind of failing us or not being as great as we think they are, we’ve talked about, for instance, when the failure is in our mind. If you’re having a migraine, then your senses are going to fail you, but it’s not going to be the fault of your eyes or your ears. It’s going to be grounded in your neurological processes. Right. You know, there’s also many ways our senses can fail us in terms of, you know, temporary blindness or ringing in the ears or deafness or all sorts of other flaws in how the sensory organ is working. But another category is when things are working the way they’re typically supposed to work. And I don’t want to use words like design because I don’t believe that our senses were designed by a strict sense of the words meaning, but the way that our senses were slowly put together by evolution has not resulted in a perfect product. We have a blind spot, we have a literal blind spot in our vision, this is why we have to turn our heads before we change lanes and you don’t just rely on one mirror, you’ve got to check thoroughly because you have a blind spot.

1:00:03
BR: This is gonna come as new to a lot of people. No, I don’t!

1:00:09
CW: Google how to test that you’ll be surprised

1:00:11
PR: And and you can and you can look at many optical illusions

1:00:15
CW: That are designed to show you how how you have flaws in the way that you perceive the world. That’s just a fact of nature Magicians exploit this yeah cartoonists cartoonists and artists exploit that exploit this anybody who’s you know? Painting a mural that relies on perspective. We’re doing different things that trick the eye into seeing something that’s not there or a sound engineers use it to trick the ear into hearing things that aren’t there. And there’s so many ways. One of the ways that interests me is how senses can work together but they can also sort of screw each other up. The way that senses kind of mix.

BR: Like synesthesia?

CW: Well synesthesia is a good example of when it goes way off the wonky deep end. But then we also have, for instance, we have the McGurk effect. Have you guys heard of the McGurk effect?

1:01:18
PR: No, what’s that?

BR: It sounds awesome, whatever it is. I want one.

1:01:22
CW: Well, that’s when you will be, you’ll hear a certain word or a certain set of syllables, and if you’re looking at a videotape of somebody’s mouth making the letter B, like Bumblebee, you’ll hear the B as a B. But if you’re seeing a K or a K, you know, the way that the mouth forms a K sound or a P sound, then you will hear the, if you’re hearing the same audio clip, you will hear the syllables differently depending on what you’re seeing in front of you in terms of the moving mouth.

1:01:56
PR: Oh, okay, I have seen some videos of that.

BR: I wonder if cartoon animators use that when lip syncing dialogue for characters.

CW: I was going to bring that up.

1:02:07
BR: Oh, sorry.

1:02:08
CW: Well, no, I was just going to say that really fine-tuned animation takes this into account. There are certain ways that you animate the expressions of certain words. So, granted, there’s a lot of cheap animation and anime that just, the mouth opens and closes, and it’s a hole, and it’s not a hole, and that’s all. But that’s where you get the people from Pixar, who are spending a ton of time and research getting every little muscle movement correct. And if you just throw, you know, if you look at a bad lip syncing video, you know, you can, it’s not gonna necessarily take away your ability to hear it the right way. But if you look up videos of the McGurk effect, you will be kind of amazed at how it changes how you hear things.

1:02:59
BR: Yeah, and I highly recommend checking out also, now that you mentioned it, Bad Lip Reading on YouTube. Because that’s a great example of how you can just make it look like people are saying anything, you know, as long as the syllables and the general shapes match up.

BR: And there was one of the late night hosts, I’ve forgotten which, it’s been a while, but he used to do, I think it’s Adventures in Unnecessary Censoring, bleeping or something.

PR: Oh yeah, yeah.

CW: Oh yes!

BR: It’s really remarkable, if you bleep it a certain way it sounds pretty dirty even though it’s clearly not.

1:03:43
PR: Yeah, that is actually a very, how Frankenbites work in interviews and documentaries and things because if all you have to do is just take out keywords in a sentence just enough to where, I mean, people don’t even realize there’s an edit there, it can sound like they’re saying something completely different.

1:03:57
CW: Wow. Well, you know all the tricks there, Pascual. I’m glad you’re sharing some some of that with us. Yeah the other illusion that I came across that involves the melding of the different senses is The rubber hand illusion are you guys are familiar with this one, right?

PR: Yes, where the the where you put your hand up against someone else or something in the touch both hands but you watch you you’re looking at it, right? Yeah, it involves the eyesight of where they have a rubber hand on the table, and then they have the participant’s hand under the table, and they will take a feather or their finger or something and rub both hands at the same time, and then they’ll stop rubbing your hand or the participant’s hand, and they will just rub the rubber hand, and the person feels it. Their senses are attuned to, I’m seeing my hand get touched, I’m feeling it. And again, it’s a neat little way to trick yourself or to realize that people can be tricked.

1:05:02
PR: Yeah, that’s something that I had a very bad injury to my right hand when I was a teenager. I almost completely severed my index finger on my right hand. There is no feeling in that finger I mean just there are the nerves do not connect to the to the tip of the finger on at least the majority of the last like 50% of my finger and I My entire life since that has happened I get all kinds of weird Phantom sensation, you know, sometimes it feels like it itches Sometimes you know, it’s like I feel like pain. That’s not that I mean there is no physiological reason I should be feeling anything, but my brain is like sending signals to the finger and perceiving something, you know, where the quote-unquote wires are kind of short-circuiting. And that’s, you know, again, it’s like, my brain expects the finger there, and you know, it did for, well, actually now, that’s less than half of my lifetime ago, more than half my lifetime ago. But my brain spent enough years wired to that finger to still think it’s there, and still, I mean it is there, but the sensations are literally not there.

1:06:13
CW: So you’re getting phantom phantom sensations.

1:06:15
PR: Yes, exactly, exactly.

1:06:17
CW: The finger’s there, you shouldn’t feel it, but you do.

1:06:19
PR: Yeah.

1:06:20
CW: Well, people, for some reason, I’ve always been fascinated with people tend to feel something and then realize, oh, that’s just a phantom feeling like my hand was asleep or something Or I don’t know how many times I have felt like my phone was vibrating in my pocket and then you reach down you realize your phone is on the table like 10 feet away And and other friends of mine, I’ve confirmed with other people. Oh, yeah, I hate when I hate when that happens But they’re perfectly fine discounting that sense like oh, yeah, I felt I thought I felt my phone move But I didn’t or or I smelled something the sense of smells the other thing where you’re like do you smell that you kind of have to check with people like it? Did anybody else smell that smell am I the only one? Oh, I guess it’s just you know I guess I’m having a stroke, you know And and you can kind of shrug it off But if you see something your vision is so important to you that if you think you see something you will swear it till your dying day that you saw a whatever it was, a ghost, a Sasquatch, a you know something in the peripheral vision of your eye, you will remember it till your grave and swear upon it and be very confident of it, but our other senses, yeah, take them or leave them.

1:07:32
BR: Yeah, I mean and again there’s examples from everyday life. very clearly several times where I had seen centipedes. And I don’t like centipedes. I don’t know that anyone does, but I especially don’t like centipedes. And, but I remember, but the thing is like, after seeing it, it would be like, you know, 11 o’clock at night, a centipede skitters across the floor. And of course I’m thinking, I got to burn the place down now. But for days afterward, any twist tie, anything small on the ground is a centipede. I’m just hyper aware and it could be a shoelace and it goes away after a few days.

1:08:13
CW: You’re like a horse with a garden hose then.

1:08:18
BR: It’s just amazing how quickly you become attuned to that.

PR: Just swing back to the phantom phone thing, I always found it kind of interesting because I never have used my phone on Vibrate. I don’t like it. It always, it just something about it, the first time I ever felt that in a cell phone, I was like, this is not, I don’t like this.

1:08:38
BR: It’s unnatural.

1:08:39
PR: I don’t, it just, it was like, the sensation bothered me. So I just stopped using it instantly. So I’ve never used it. So I’ve never had that phantom feeling because my brain just has no frame of reference for it. One time I didn’t like it and I never did it again. It’s interesting when people talk about it to me because I’m like, wow, literally you’ve conditioned your brain by keeping your phone in your pocket or wherever and it vibrating enough that your brain just, that cluster of nerves on your leg is like expecting it now.

1:09:09
CW: You programmed yourself to have false positives. Whereas you have kept yourself virginal and unprimed.

1:09:16
PR: Exactly. So I will not be bothered by phantom vibration syndrome.

1:09:21
CW: Well, I think you know, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground and and and talked about some experiences I think in the world we’re living in now with so many technological things around us and so many screens and so many reflections. I mean, I could do a whole nother episode just on the challenges that I’ve been hit with as an artist who relies on visual data. Cell phone lens warp. When people say, oh, no, this is definitely me. I’m like, no, the lens has warped you. I can’t see either of your ears. You’re stretched out. You’ve been humpty dumpty. It doesn’t really look like your face. Send me a better photo. Here’s how to take one. Or, oh, I see this orb in this photo and that’s clearly evidence of something. No, it’s an artifact. There’s also ways that you look at a reflection. I don’t know how many people have told me they’ve seen a UFO and they described to me what happened and I’m like wait, you looked out the window of a moving train and you saw a streak of light go by really fast. I’m like that could have been somebody’s watch sitting on the opposite aisle on, you’re reflecting on the train window. You know, there’s clear ways that your senses can be fooled by stuff reflecting off of light and it looks like a UFO and people swear to it.

1:10:38
PR: Yeah, yeah, that’s where in Santa Fe where I grew up, during the winter, there were always lights up in the sky that you’d see and they just slowly move up and down and up and down and people would just swear they were UFOs. And the first time I saw it, I was like, what the hell is that? And what it turned out to be was during the winter, the ski area has these grooming plows that drive up and down the ski runs. And the thing is, is that mountain is like almost 11,000 feet, and it’s several thousand feet, about 4,000 feet above where you’re standing, and Santa Fe’s right at the foot of the mountain, so they’re right above you. It looks like it’s right up there with the stars because you can’t see the silhouette of the mountain if the moon’s not out, and you’re just seeing these lights going up and down. It’s the perception of… Because you can’t perceive the mountain, the lights become something else automatically in your brain. Even I was like, wait, what the hell are those?

1:11:40
CW: So hopefully we’ve kind of covered some ground here and helped make all the listeners less sure of themselves and what they experience as reality.

1:11:49
BR: You’re welcome.

1:11:50
CW: And I know anybody who wants to read more about the audio stuff I can highly recommend Ben’s chapter in his latest ghost book about ghosts on audio the EVPs and the real ambiguity that plays into there. Ben, do you want to speak to that for a minute or two?

1:12:07
BR: Yeah, I’ll just briefly touch on that. Yeah, that, of course, ties in closely with what we’re talking about today. And in ghost research, of course, it’s an EVP or electronic voice phenomena, and it tracks very closely to this stuff. It’s, you know, people interpreting ambiguous sounds and making words and sentences and meanings out of them. We should do a whole show on that. I’m sure we will. But no, the issue of misperceptions and misunderstandings is really in many ways core to skepticism and just recognizing that we’re all fallible. We’re all humans equipped with the same fallible brains, and a lot of times that works fine. Other times it doesn’t. And that’s one of the things that I think is one of the most important things for skeptics to recognize is just how fallible we are. And I know it’s not a fun lesson to know, to realize, like, damn, I don’t know everything. I can be mistaken. But it’s the truth, and the sooner you recognize that, the better.

1:13:10
CW: Yes, it’s all a game of telephone.

(MUSIC)

1:13:19
you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

(MUSIC)

PR: So that about does it for this week. Next week’s gonna be a lot of fun. A good, good friend of mine, a guy named Kyle Conquiel is going to be on. He’s the bass player of one of the top bands in the world right now, as a matter of fact. They’re called Bad Wolves, and right now they’re topping the charts with their record and most notably their cover of the Cranberries’ song, Zombie.

1:14:18
CW: Oh, we could have had them on three weeks ago when we talked about zombies.

1:14:21
PR: I know, that would have been great. This will just be a little follow-up sequel to that. There you go. A spiritual sequel, if you will. But yeah, Kyle will be joining us, and we’ll be chatting. He’s on tour right now, so I’m really excited to kind of catch him while he’s out there. Maybe he’ll talk about us on stage or something. We’ll get a few new listeners. He won’t. But anyway, but yeah, so Bad Wolves, Kyle Conquiel is going to be on next week, and we’re going to be talking about music myths, everything from some misconceptions about certain musical themes or musical ideas to rumors around musicians and songs and things like that. It should be a really fun topic and Kyle’s a great guy to talk to about this stuff.

1:15:05
Can’t wait.

1:15:06
I really want to find out if Ozzy Osbourne really eats bat heads in his spare time.

1:15:10
We will talk about that. So until next week, we’ll see ya. Bye bye. Take care. Swearing Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitard and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer Celeste Giordano. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, and of course, our listeners and patrons.

1:15:42
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo