Deception Inc – The Simplicity of Fooling the Brain and how to Prevent Being Tricked
Posted: Saturday, December 18, 2010
by Connor Davidson
The brain is the most complex computer like system that we know of. It’s made up of billions upon billions of neurons forming millions of connections. The brain carries out its enormously complex task of decoding the millions of items of stimuli we encounter and making sense of the ever changing nature of our surroundings. Our brain is so complex that humanity’s collective brains have not yet been able to reason its most inner workings – psychologist understandably refer to the brain as “the black box".
There is one great example of this that I experimented with. What you do is hold a pencil in your hand and, with your other hand, hold the bottom of your sleeve. Now peel your fingers holding the pencil off one by one. When you are down to your last finger, move your index finger from your hand holding your sleeve to hold the pencil. Finally, remove your final finger. To someone watching it will look like the pencil is floating. Then you turn your hand around and show them your finger holding it. It’s clever, it’s sneaky, it’s entertaining but it’s certainly not magical.
Now I must make an important distinction.
“However, there is a darker side. This is what I call Deception Incorporated”
Deception inc consists of people and companies that make money from tricking and deceiving people. The obvious is a conartist but there are also groups such as psychics and alternative medicine practitioners etc who ply their trades virtually unregulated. These groups often use several cunning tricks to make you believe all sorts of nonsense. Watch the following video:
People actual fell for that. Shocking. There was nothing to the scam - nothing particularly clever. All it took to fool those people was changing of two variables at once (which should have been obvious if you were thinking sceptically) and a bit of early high school physics. Though, you must remember, the people being fooled were open to the fact that stones may have magical powers. They don’t really exemplify scepticism. I hope after being caught out they will have learned from it
There you have it. The first way to spot when you are being deceived is the changing of two variables at once. Remember in the video when the man did it once without the stone and with an open hand and then with the stone and a closed hand? That’s changing both the variable of the stone and the hand position at once. A scientist would write a huge void over that test and so should you.
As I write this, psychic phenomenon has never been proved under proper experimental conditions – James Randi still has the million dollars. Thus, no psychic can claim to be psychic. No proof then no powers. Psychics play on people’s head nodding. It should be obvious that asking a huge number of yes or no questions does not constitute supernatural power. It’s called cold reading. That is what most psychics use and it is pretty poor. If psychics were really psychic and could talk to dead people or read minds do you not think they could just rattle it off without the need for questions? But of course they won’t. They need the questions. They’re not psychic. However, there have been documented cases of psychics having one hit wonders and solving cases. I do not dispute these but I do not dispute the laws of probability and statistics. There is nothing impressive about doing something highly statistically improbable if there are millions of people all over the world trying to do the same thing. It’s called chance and it happens by chance.
This brings me to by second and third points about being deceived. The second is, when people ask you repeated questions before giving you “amazing" answers, the answers are not to be taken as amazing. The third is, watch out for counting the hits and neglecting the misses. If you throw a thousand darts to hit the bullseye and the one thousandth and first hits the bullseye, you’re a crap darts player even though you did hit the bullseye. Once. And. Only. Once. The next technique is probably the most important. It is that you can only begin to entertain the extraordinary once you have eliminated all the other possible alternatives. However, even then the extraordinary cannot be concluded with any certainty – the extraordinary needs proof first.
The above was wonderfully demonstrated in part two of Dr Philip Zimbardo’s great twenty six part documentary series “Discovering Psychology". In the episode a magician laid out cards on a table and then asked a volunteer to pick one. After she picked the card he turned it over and then lifted up his shirt to show a t-shirt with that card on it. The magician turned out to be a psychology professor that went on to show what would have happened if the volunteer had picked another card. Had she picked one of the other options he would have taken out his handkerchief which had that card printed on it. Or had she chose yet another he could do something else and so on through all the laid out cards.
Moving on. What about seeing things: be it ghosts, ghouls or gods? Well, that too has very rational explanations too. For one, our brains have evolved a kind of facial recognition software that gives us the ability to see something in nothing. I’ve discussed this phenomenon at length in a previous article. Many, many ghost stories can be explained away with this.
In fact, near enough the whole of deception inc has been explained into the nonsense that it is by science. Why? Because science moves on. It changes. It’s almost like the fluid mosaic model of cell membranes: constantly changing with the good stuff being allowed in and the bad or out dated stuff being ousted. Our brains may well be subjectively biased but by working objectively with reason this can be overcome.
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More commentsIf you listened very closely Connor you would have heard the 'psychic' say something to the effect that their positive attitude about the stone will produce good results. "Their positive attitude", NOT the stone. You are right that there are many charlatans posing as psychics. But to paint all supernatural phenomena with the same brush is to do yourself a disservice. You may miss something very good. As someone who has a good deal of skepticism I find it often interferes with producing "happy" events in my life. I believe the trick is to balance skepticism with blind belief. In spite of your faith in science, not all things that are in fact valid can be "proven" by objective scientific testing.Well you've got me sussed on the whole paint thing. I reject all pseudoscience. However, I don't understand your last point. If something cannot be proven by objective scientific testing, it is false. Furthermore, science does not need faith.
Thanks for the comment.
Fascinating topic Connor, I've spent most of my life trying to understand these con games. There are so many people who lose money everyday to these hucksters, and the worst part is that these cons usually target the ones who can least afford to be swindled.
I'd love to read more of how you believe a person can protect themselves from falling for such tricks. It seems to me that in each of these areas, lotteries, magic tricks, psychics, and spiritual guides, the key is that the victims all see what they want to see, which forms the foundation of the con.That's essentially it.
Thanks for the comment.
I think more of these type of articles should be written and compared to the psychology of religion. The world is "nuts" cause there's too much BELIEF in the world and not enough reason.
I enjoyed your article very much.Thanks for the comment.
Great article Connor- I enjoyed it immensely- Did this throughout--- :-) Thanks- Always- EllaThanks for the comment.
Hi Connor.
Very interesting article and very well written. I've also enjoyed the discussion it has sparked.
Great job!
Hugs,
DianneThanks for the comment.
Hey Connor!
A Clever written article, and i loved the explanations about the psychic, bullseye and of course the ghosts.Thanks for the comment.
Connor, this is great.
Now, how can you tell if a blooger is authentic and truthful or not?
Happy ChristmasCross reference. Look at other sources. Yes, these sources could be wrong but the more concurrence you can find the stronger the evidence for or against the blogger. Even better get down to the actual evidence: peer reviewed articles etc.
Thanks for the comment.Sorry...I was trying to be ironic.Sorry. I see that now
Ho Connor, long time no see. it is amazing to see the innocent people simply parted their money for some baseless objects in the streets, just like that. We don't simply fall for such market sales tricks nor we get that "excited" over things like that in the video but thanks for writing this to remind us not to trust stones etc...........Really - do people not fall for this? I'm afraid people do.
Thanks for the comment.
I never knew you were so up on the "art" of deception! Very interesting.Thanks for the comment.
I never knew you were so up on the "art" of deception! Very interesting.
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