Closing Thoughts and Final Quote

You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Your esc ape to reality . Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 30th, 2020. Joining me this week or Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jane Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon, everyone. Bob, how was Bermuda? Bermuda was beautiful. I wish I got my time machine working because I'd go back one week when we were on our way right now. But uh oh well. It was it was a lot of fun. Went to Bermuda for a couple of days. Uh enjoyed the uh the cruise ship, the independence of the seas from the Royal Caribbean line. It's like a skyscraper mall on the ocean. It this thing was just so massive, it just blows your mind. And I looked at the at the evolution of this of this ship, and so it's like the fourth biggest one that they have. It's a and now I want to go on one of the mega ones that are even bigger than this one. It's just they're such an amazing thing. And you try to think of the logistics of like, yeah, how do we feed 4,000 people um, you know, more than three times a day? I I I wanted to get a tour of the kitchen. I never got one just to see how they handle the It's called the galley. Yeah, oh my god. Yeah, right? It's just it was just an em uh just an amazing trip. And h how are the C's? Were did they agree with you or did they send you, you know, heading for the railings? No, I mean, yeah, there was it's very weird to be all of a sudden like in you know, you're in a huge structure. It seems like you're in a building or somewhere, right? And then all of a sudden the the floor starts moving and it's it's just a bizarre feeling. But yeah, it was fine. I mean I I really don't get seasick. Um and I I there was one person, actually our neighbor, when we arrived to Bermuda, she was like , Thank God we're here. Because I think she probably wasn't feeling very well the night before. But it was still very trivial in terms of just uh the motion. The seas were there was a lot of white caps. Uh we saw some some h good sized waves, probably ten or fift ten feet at least. But the ship the ship is so big it just goes right through 'em with very little movement. But it's noticeable at times for sure. Did you experience anything uh paranormal out on the water, including things like uh St. Almo's fire or uh I don't know, Rogue Waves. I don't know if those are considered per legendary anymore. Well anything odd happen? No, the be I looked at a map, the Bermuda Triang Triangle apparently starts at the very southern tip of Bermuda. So the island itself is not within the Bermuda Triangle. So we didn't see it. That's exactly why. No whirlpools, no kraken, no nothin'. I love how all the the roofs on Bermuda are designed to collect water. So everyone has access to uh a source of fresh water. They just go they get you know, sent down into the basement where they're filtered and cleansed and they use it for for a lot of their their fresh water needs. And there's also other sources. Um, you know, there there's uh apparently there's an uh on a few parts of the island there's a water table which uh you can get water from there. You could also just buy like bottled water or or not bottled water, but if you're low on water, you can just buy hundred gallon tanks of of fresh water that you can then just put into your basement. But otherwise they're very uh needy in terms of like getting imports. As you might imagine, as the as the island grew, they they're not really selling their onions like they used to centuries ago. They're just like uh they they need their imports. So of course it's one of the most expensive countries in the world. $15 for a loaf of bread. So yeah, you need some money to live actually to live there. Uh which is must be rough for the people that that aren't wealthy. But beautiful, beautiful place. Recommended. Well welcome back. Thank you. You came back with a little bit of uh boat crud there? Boat crud, yeah. Got just a just a bit of a cough. Fairly trivial, but not you know not ideal. Alright. Hopefully you're quarantined. And uh Right, Jay? All the time. We're gonna start this episode with another installment of Back to Basics. We're gonna cover Paridolia and Apophenia. Actually we use the term Paridolia a lot more than Apophenia. Do you guys know what apophenia means? Yes. One of them is the bigger one. Yeah, it's more generalized. Go ahead, Jay. What's the apophenia is seeing patterns. Um paridolia is seeing the pattern of human faces Right. That's facial paridoli. Yeah. So paridoli is just is is images, not specifically faces. It's mostly faces, but it's anything yeah, it's seeing an image in random noise. Whereas apophenia is just seeing a pattern. And that pattern can be anything. But could but it is you said you said seeing a pattern. Is that vision? But it could also be audio, okay. Yeah, like a pattern of beingat. Or mental. It could be you know saying just like coincidences in data. You know, that's apophenia. So apophenia is just the seeing pattern in noise, right, in data and par iaidol is visual. There really isn't a specific term for audio, so we call it audio paridolia. Yeah. Oh, I see, but Bob, you're getting hung up on the fact that he's saying the word seeing. Yes. Yeah, but it's not visually seeing. Yeah, apophini means it's perceiving, thinking there is a pattern. That would have been a better word for you to use. Yeah. It's also called patternicity, right? It's a cognitive bias. Oh, I like that word. A tendon to see patterns even where they don't exist. Where they don' s part of our pattern seeking behavior. Right. Just part of the way our brains work is to see patterns in the world, to make sense of those patterns. Right. That's partly how we understand the world. But it's well established that we over detect patterns. We have hyperactive pattern recognition. Which is much better than underactive. Is that that is that a more recent phenomenon as opposed to people from hundreds of years ago maybe didn't as badly? No. There's no reason to think that. This is b baked into how our brains work. So it in fact, essentially how our brains work, how we evolved , is that we have hyperactive pattern detection, right? We detect lots of patterns, even ones that are not real, and then we do real ity testing to pair away the ones that are not real. Right. So we see patterns, most of which are not real, and we and then we ask ourselves, yeah, but is this real? And then we get rid of the ones that are not real. We're left with the runs that are. So you know this this this implies that the selective pressures favored false positives over false negatives, right? Mm-hmm. That it's I guess it's much more detrimental to miss a pattern than to see one that isn't really there. But in any case, you can use reality testing to then get rid of the false positives. Basically saying does it make sense, you know, that this would be a pattern. But of course, even then, you know, that takes critical thinking and logic. And, you know, an analytical thinking at least. And we often fail there as well. And that is the cause for many superstitions, right? It's seeing a pattern and then thinking there's some magical cause to the pattern rather than saying And we tend to reach for that when we feel insecure. In fact, there's research that shows that people's tendencies to see patterns, even ones that have nothing to do with anything, right? Just random patterns, is greater when we feel insecure. So if you have a research paradigm, for example, where you put somebody off their game in some way, you m you give them a tough question that they get wrong or whatever, or you trick them in some way. Then you say, all right, you see a pattern here. If the people who were tricked or who who were something was done to them to prime them, to make them feel insecure, are more likely to see a pattern than people who were not . That makes sense. Yeah. So one other wrinkle I want to talk about is that so for people who are let's say conspiracy theorists, and I'm not talking about like the opportunistic conspiracy theorists, you know, you believe a conspiracy because it supports your tribe or your ideology. But people who believe every conspiracy, right? Like when again, when we research how many people believe in conspiracies, there tends to be those two types of people, although there's always an arbitrary cutoff between the two. But there's people who believe like one to two conspiracies that tend to be consistent with their political beliefs or religious beliefs or whatever. Right? Like a lot of liberals believed that 9-11 was an inside job. A lot of conservatives believed the 2020 election was stolen, right? Not as much the other way around. But conspiracy theorists believe every conspiracy. They believe that because they're a conspiracy theory, not because it aligns with your ideology So if you look at those people, people who endorse five, six, seven conspiracy theories, and you ask the question, so why, what's going on in their brains, right? Is this purely cultural or learned or personality , or is that or do they have a tendency to see more patterns than people who aren't conspiracy theorists? What do you guys think the answer to that is? Because that's been researched. Not saying that we have a definitive answer, but the research we have so far does have an answer. I mean it seems like it. It makes sense if they did. Yeah, it's certainly it's one way to make sense of why do they endorse so many more why do they engage in so much apophenia, right? Because conspiracy thinking is often apophenia, seeing patterns in data when it doesn't exist. It's it's it's it's it's both, right? Because it's a community of of conspiracy theorists that are both introducing new conspiracies and then feeding off of other people's conspiracies. Not to mention the hucksters out there who know these it's all crap. Then they're then they're being exploited. Right. And then they're being exploited for political reasons or whatever.