The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  I spend a moment struggling to absorb what he has just told me.

  ‘You’re saying, Carole might have been abused?’

  ‘You’ve been asking, is this satanic abuse, or is she imagining it? But there is a third option. She got abused – although not satanically – and then had a psychotic interpretation of it.’

  ‘I’m sure the family are innocent,’ I say.

  ‘A hell of a lot of abuse is not by family members,’ he says. ‘Maybe she had been abused by somebody outside the family and developed a distorted memory of it. This is one of the horrible cases where we just don’t know what really happened.’

  *

  On 21 June 2005, after years of silence, Carole unexpectedly phoned her brother Richard. She told him that she was lonely in London and that she had no friends. She had decided, after all this time, that she wanted to move back to Stockport to be with the family. On Wednesday the 29th, the day that Carole mysteriously died, Richard wrote the letter that would be discovered by Dr Fisher and would eventually trigger the family’s search for truth. He recounted the latest news – about his business, his brothers, his dad’s heart attack – and finished with a flourish that, in retrospect, seems haunting and prescient. ‘One shouldn’t maintain too great a distance,’ he wrote, ‘as once the moment is gone, it is gone.’

  11

  ‘There was nothing there, but I knew it was a cockerel’

  So now we know. The men and women of science have delivered the shaming news and humanity has responded, in the main, by ignoring it. Of course it has – this is just what you would expect from brains that have evolved to project an image of reasonable, wise, clear-sighted coherence and yet whose decision-making engines run on a slick conjuration of illusion, prejudice and ego-bolstering sleights of truth; a system of irrationality that includes a kind of neural blacksmith’s workshop for dealing with uncomfortable facts – there the furnace for softening them up, there the hammer and tongs for reshaping them, there the window from which to toss them out.

  But all this is not enough. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the brain’s desire to have the outer, real world match its inner models of it – it takes us part of the way there. It tells us that a properly functioning brain cannot be trusted to think rationally and, because our minds play these tricks without telling us, that owners of brains cannot be trusted to judge their own rationality. But since meeting Gemma the Homeopath, I have come to suspect that there is something else going on – some crucial process that I have missed.

  Gemma had one fact that required explanation: her belief that homeopathy cured her cancer. When I asked her to explain this belief, she gave me far less than any respectable scientific study could offer – no data, no proof. And yet she also gave me more. Gemma told a compelling tale. A young woman on her deathbed, a hapless medical service, scenes of lonely devastation, of falling hair and swelling moon-faces, of a deathly oncologist and a sensational recovery just in time for Christmas. Crack open the belief and something magical bursts out. A story.

  The model-defending brain tells of an organ that is, naturally enough, defensive. But before it has any models to defend, it has to actually build them. If I am to track the source of faulty beliefs, I need to discover how they become a part of the model in the first place. I have to understand, not just the brain’s destructive powers, but also its creative ones. Creativity is, after all, a defining quality of humanity, and my journey has already found great glittering piles of it. Many thousands of followers of Swami Ramdev benefit from what I believe to be the placebo effect, and yet spin tales about ancient Eastern wisdom battling evil Western medicine. Buddhists feel the proven effects of meditation and yet run far from those safe lands, towards karma, reincarnation and extra-mortal realms inhabited by giants. Men and women feel an unexplained itch and weave a plot atop their welts that tells of nanotechnology and tiny wasps and a medico-industrial conspiracy. John Mackay experiences life in the world, and the mystery of its being here, and explains it using creation myths from the deserts of the old Middle East.

  These are stories, and they seem to have a terrible effect on truth. With their narratives of good and evil, heroism and villainy, they are neural seducers, coaxing people ever deeper into the darklands of craziness. For Rufus May, this happened literally. He was bored and unhappy and began to tell himself an exciting tale in which he was being recruited as a trainee spy. Partly through a process which has the appearance, at least, of a pathological cousin of confirmation bias, he began to see evidence for this narrative everywhere. The story became the truth and Rufus became mad.

  Whether Rufus May’s experience has anything in common with that of the alien abductees is not clear. There is no consensus on if and how ordinary self-deception overlaps with the dangerous delusions of psychotics. But in a paper published in the Journal of Philosophical Studies, Lisa Bortolotti and Matteo Mameli point to the ‘considerable continuity’ that is evident between them. Both, they write, ‘serve to either preserve positive emotions, deny unpleasant or disturbing facts or satisfy some other pressing psychological need.’ Psychiatrist Robin Murray, meanwhile, says that schizophrenia can be seen as a ‘salience disorder’ in which random events in an individual’s daily experience are soaked in too much significance. ‘Everything seems important. Why are there all these red cars? Why are all these people wearing red jumpers? Could it be because someone has hired them to follow me? Could it be because I’m very important? Or could it be because they’re all out to get me?’ It is as if the mind of the schizophrenic is suffering from an excess of stories. This, I have come to suspect, is not a coincidence.

  We humans are creatures of story. And the story of story begins in the unconscious.

  *

  To reveal the secrets of the storytelling brain, we need to lead our search backwards in time. Throughout childhood and until late adolescence, our brains are building their internal models of what is out there and how it all works – physical, social, emotional and so on. After that, our core beliefs harden and we find change, according to Professor of Psychiatry Bruce Wexler, ‘difficult and painful.’ The power of our many cognitive biases skews our view. We attack unwelcome information. The gravity of our personal worlds attracts us to other, similar worlds – people who ‘see it like we do,’ whose opinions give us the warm, reassuring pleasure of comfort, familiarity, safety. It all thickens the illusion that our way is the true way. And some take it even further. In their heroic, heretical and wonderfully human way, they get up and get out there and attempt to change the models of other people so that they match their own. They write, they blog, they preach, they create.

  But before all that, our models must be built, and it is in this building that the first awakenings of our need for storytelling can be discovered. Developmental biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert writes that babies ‘construct reality through converging lines of sensory and motor information’ – by interacting with the world and learning how causes create effects.

  Cause and effect is at the core of belief. It is at the core of thinking, the core of being human. It has to be. Cause and effect is what we do – we just have to make things happen. It is sometimes known as the ‘effectance motive’ – the urge to learn by interacting with the world. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called effectance ‘almost as basic a need as food and water.’

  Our understanding of the law of cause and effect is so fundamental that our brains are wired to spot it everywhere, even when it doesn’t exist. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Professor Daniel Kahneman invites his readers to observe two words: ‘bananas’ and ‘vomit’. ‘There was no particular reason to do so,’ he writes, ‘but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.’ Professor Wolpert, meanwhile, writes of studies in which people who view moving discs on a computer screen cannot resist the belief that they are bouncing off one another.
Similarly, moving dots often appear as if they are involved in a chase.

  Our models are built by ever more complex observations that are based on a simple question – if you do that, then what will happen? This is why emotions are so crucial to thinking. They tell us the answer. They are the strange, ancient whale-songs of your models communicating with you, predicting the effect that will follow the cause. They represent a mode of language that is millions of years older than any human one. It is a form that we have been using since before we were human. If you are about to do something that your models predict will be good, you will get a subtle encouraging hit of pleasure. If you are about to do something inadvisable, you will feel bad. We are assailed with a constantly shifting sense-scape of complex feelings: disgust, pride, hate, hope, love, lust, rage and all the rest of them. Everything we come across – every sight, every smell, every person, every idea, everything – comes coupled with a feeling, no matter how subtle. These feelings are your models – your unconscious mind – speaking to you. Professor Michael Gazzaniga writes that ‘All decisions we make are based on whether to approach or withdraw, including our moral decisions.’ Without emotions, we would be incapable of making these decisions.

  Emotions guide all of your behaviour. In essence, they work by rooting through the past to tell you stories about the future. In their silent language of feelings, they are your constant adviser, hitting you with dread or desire or any one of their other terrible, shimmering, beautiful states in order to guide your thinking.

  The old notion that there are two simple states of mind – conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional – remains useful for describing these ideas, but is now known to be radically simplistic. Recent theory on the unconscious – where those other simplified objects, the ‘models’, reside – says that it is not a single thinking-centre but, in the words of Professor David Eagleman, ‘a combination of sub-agents’ who often want different things and challenge each other for control of your actions. The mind, he writes in Incognito, is ‘built of multiple over-lapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices’ and are ‘locked in chronic battle.’ What you decide and how you act is mostly (possibly completely) determined by the outcomes of these fights. ‘Your behaviour – what you do in the world – is simply the end result of the battles.’

  The point at which you sense that emotional hit, then, is usually the point at which these fights have been fought and won. We have many models of the world, which offer many predictions about the future, many different answers to the simple question: ‘If I cause this to happen, what will be the effect?’ The emotion that you feel when trying to make a decision – approach, withdraw – is a kind of match-report, informing you of the outcome of this complex debate between experts.

  We have experts inside us, we have competing models of the world and we also have other people. When we are young and building our models through observations of cause and effect, we are not just seeing what happens when we shake a rattle. We are also creating models of human relationships, by interacting with others. Professor Bruce Wexler writes that the psyche is seen ‘as an emerging organisation that evolves through increasingly complex interchanges with people.’ He describes the psychoanalytic theory that we are prone to identifying not just with humans, but with animals, the ‘heroes of a previous generation,’ long-dead ancestors and even characters from fiction, internalising them, so that they ultimately become components of ourselves. In Brain and Culture, he offers the example of young Native American men who, on reaching sexual maturity, are given the names of certain animals with the intention that they will assume ‘important qualities of that animal.’ Reading about all this, I cannot help but recall Ron Coleman and the frighteningly vivid models his brain contained of the criminal priest and of his lost love, Annabel.

  Along this journey, I have given descriptions of our limited perception, cognitive biases and faulty, bickering models. Because the focus has been on our flaws, it might be easy to conclude that the brain is not particularly good at its job. This is not so. The models it creates and the predictions it makes have to be largely effective, otherwise we would simply not be able to operate. Indeed, there is a good chance that you have no idea how clever you really are. This is because you have no direct access to your unconscious models – the bits of yourself that are the most brilliant, mathematically, analytically and creatively. In fact, the part of your mind that you do your conscious thinking with is, in the words of Professor David Eagleman, ‘not at the centre of the action in the brain, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity’. These whispers very often tell of wisdom and calculation whose sophistication might astound you.

  Scientists at the Monell Centre, Philadelphia, had participants in a study smell gauze pads that had been worn under the armpits of people who had watched various films. Without knowing why, many of the sniffers could detect which pads had been worn during comedies and which during horrors. Then there are the amazing chick-sexers. When chickens are born in industrial hatcheries, they have to be separated by gender. Because newborn chicks look identical, professional sexers are hired to do the work. Unfortunately, the professionals cannot tell you what the difference between a day-old male and a female chick is either. In order to learn, an apprentice sexer just starts working, examining each young bird and guessing, while an old master tells them when they are right or not. Somehow, a part of their brain eventually just gets it. Researcher Richard Horsey says, ‘They just look at the rear end of a chick, and “see” that it is either male or female.’ He quotes one former sexer who says, ‘To be close to 100 per cent and accurate at 800 to 1200 chickens per hour, intuition comes into play in many of your decisions, even if you are not consciously aware of it. As one of my former colleagues said to me … “There was nothing there but I knew it was a cockerel.” This was intuition at work.’ By trial and error – cause and effect – these sexers develop brilliant models for male chick and female chick. Their unconscious minds use the sight of a chick’s backside to compare it with their models, then use emotion to ‘tell’ the sexers the answer.

  In an experiment that looked at just how intricately advanced ‘intuition’ can be, a team led by Professor Antoine Bechara gave participants $2,000 in play money and four decks of cards and told them they were to use them in a game. Different individual cards won or lost different sums of money. They should just go ahead and turn the cards and try to win as much money as they could. But the cards were not random. In fact, some of the piles were far more profitable than others. On average, it took the gamblers around fifty card-turns before they began to report a conscious ‘hunch’ that some of the decks were more profitable. But when their behaviour was analysed, Professor Bechara discovered something remarkable. Measurements of the electrical conductance of their skin, which can reveal levels of anxiety and nervousness, indicated that their emotions were subtly warning them against the bad decks after just ten turns. Their unconscious mind had worked out what was happening far quicker than their conscious minds and had warned them with a hit of bad feeling. They knew before they knew.

  All of this seems to border on magic. But the brain, as we know, is also an organ of bias and prejudice whose rapid responses are made possible by its models – stubborn approximations of how the world works. Studies have established that qualified yet overweight job applicants are often assumed to be less intelligent, lazier and more immoral than their thinner counterparts. One sad experiment demonstrated that interviewers can unconsciously attach negative qualities to an applicant after they have seen them sitting next to an overweight person in the waiting room.

  These unpleasant decisions are compounded by the fact that we usually don’t even know we have made them. If we did, we might be able to use our rational minds to suppress them. But those instances are rare. Most thinking is emotional, and happens without you even being aware of it. We can’t question ourselves, either. The great electrical thinking-galaxies th
at bloom and churn behind the eyes of the mind cannot tell us why they have decided that sitting beside an overweight person is bad. They cannot speak.

  All of which leads us to an intriguing and essential problem. If our unconscious is mute, and yet driving most of our decisions, then how can we explain our own behaviour? As Professor Leon Festinger and his co-researchers into confirmation bias found: when confronted by a new fact, we feel an instantaneous, emotional hunch that pulls us in the direction of an opinion. We then look for evidence that supports our hunch until we hit the ‘makes sense stopping rule’ and our thinking ceases. Our mind completes the process by fooling us into believing that we have made an objective survey of the arguments, then gives us a pleasurable neurochemical hit of feeling as a reward. But all we have really done is confirm the hunch, silence the dissonance, reinforce the model.

  If this is so, and all we are doing is defending the conclusion that our mute unconscious has already come to, it suggests something terrifying: that we don’t know why we believe what we believe; we don’t know why we do what we do. It says that all we are really up to when justifying our actions and beliefs is guessing. All we really know is how we feel, and our explanations for how we feel are inventions. They must be – because we cannot talk to the parts of our minds that have made these decisions. A homophobe cannot ask his own unconscious why he believes that homosexuality is evil. All he knows is that, when he thinks about gay people, his emotions say ‘withdraw.’ He feels disgust. Then he weaves a narrative that explains his disgust. He tells a story.

  As we grow – and our knowledge of causes and effects become ever more sophisticated – so too do our natural abilities as storytellers. As Professor Timothy Wilson writes in Redirect, ‘One of the main differences between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have a large brain with which we can construct elaborate theories and explanations about what is happening in the world and why.’