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Walter Watts
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Patternicity
« on: 2008-11-20 02:34:12 » |
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excerpted from the December 2008 Scientific American: Skeptic column
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Patternicity
Noun. The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise
By Michael Shermer
Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.
Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern— call it “apatternicity”). In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning, and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens.
Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.
In a September paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko test my theory through evolutionary modeling and demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity. They begin with the formula pb > c, where a belief may be held when the cost (c) of doing so is less than the probability (p) of the benefit (b). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.
The problem is that we are very poor at estimating such probabilities, so the cost of believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind is relatively low compared with the opposite. Thus, there would have been a beneficial selection for believing that most patterns are real.
Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind), the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals—human or otherwise—to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”
In support of a genetic selection model, Foster and Kokko note that “predators only avoid nonpoisonous snakes that mimic a poisonous species in areas where the poisonous species is common” and that even such simple organisms as “Escherichia coli cells will swim towards physiologically inert methylated aspartate presumably owing to an adaptation to favour true aspartate.”
Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.
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Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic. com) and author of Why People Believe Weird Things.
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Walter Watts
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Hermit
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Re:Patternicity
« Reply #1 on: 2008-11-20 23:44:40 » |
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This should be read in connection with the U Geneva studies on Dopamine levels which proved that the ability to detect false positives was greatly suppressed or eliminated by enhanced dopamine levels, as experienced by people meditating, praying, experiencing flagellation, some modes of TMS, taking "mood" enhancement drugs or other forms of clinical induction, causing them to undergo "religious" experiences and correlating anything with everything. Reduced dopamine levels as induced by anger, stress, other TMS or clinical induction, result in a greatly suppressed or eliminated ability to detect false negatives. It follows that a test of such discriminatory capabilities could be used to detect a great deal about the mental state and even brain chemistry of the subject, never mind their susceptibility to religious hysteria.
Another conclusion might be that a happy, but not too happy, monkey, is an effective monkey. Must be why partnerships work out so well for so many of us.
Kindest Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Fritz
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Re:Patternicity
« Reply #2 on: 2008-11-21 20:59:29 » |
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So clearly I'm an unhappy Monkey, if these little nuggets still hook my attention.
Cheers
Fritz
Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.
Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F Kennedy was elected President in 1960.
Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.
Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.
Both Presidents were shot in the head
Now it gets really weird.
Lincoln 's secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy's Secretary was named Lincoln.
Both were assassinated by Southerners.
Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.
Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.
John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.
Both assassins were known by their three names.
Both names are composed of fifteen letters.
Now hang on to your seat.
Lincoln was shot at the theatre named 'Ford'. Kennedy was shot in a car called 'Lincoln' made by 'Ford'.
Lincoln was shot in a theatre and his assassin ran and hid in a warehouse.
Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran and hid in a theatre.
Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.
And here's the kicker...
A week before Lincoln was shot; he was in Monroe, Maryland.
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was in Marilyn Monroe.
[Fritz]What was the mental state of the Monkey that figured this out ?
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Hermit
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Re:Patternicity
« Reply #3 on: 2008-11-21 23:13:22 » |
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The last couplet is funny even if it is wrong. Which is what put me wise to the whole thing. Norma Jeane Baker died on 1962-08-05, John F Kennedy 1963-11-22. So unless JFK was a necrophiliac he wasn't "in Marilyn" "a week before he died." Facts which are not facts are easy to convert into coincidences, you make them up to suit the story you want to tell (just ask GW Bush & Co). So I went to my first stop for dealing with BS, Snopes.com who didn't let me down. They even confirmed what I had suspected, that it wasn't written by a person but by a parade. Tricky to analyze the mindset of the contributors without knowing the contributions each made. But I can tell you that the last one had a dirty mind and a nice sense of wordplay.
Yours very sceptically
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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