Do you remember when Nelson Mandela was killed in prison in the 1980s? Apparently there are a lot of people who, for some reason, had this memory. Of course, Mandela was not killed in prison, he survived and went on to become president of South Africa.

This false memory, however, gave rise to the term, “The Mandela Effect,” which refers to remembering some detail of the past that is simply not true. There is a disconnect between our memory and reality.

This should not be surprising to anyone, especially anyone even slightly familiar with memory research. Our memories are constantly changing, they merge, details shift, and entire memories can be confabulated. If there is a conflict between our memory and documented reality, it is clearly our memory that is at fault.

Despite this obvious answer, there are groups of people who feel that the Mandela effect represents something else. The disconnect between our memories and reality is due, they argue, to a shifting in reality, perhaps due to a crossing of the streams between parallel universes. Alternatively it can be a glitch in the Matrix that happens when they apply a new patch or expansion.  Between physical reality and memory I would say that memory is the one that is slippery and changing, not reality.

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Recently I received the following e-mail:

Thank you so much for your show. The other night your podcast saved me from a night full of stress and fear. I woke up in the middle of the night after a nightmare not being able to move and started hearing voices. My eyes were wide open, I could see that everything was normal but kept hearing a voices asking me to go to bible studies. After five minutes of freaking out I remembered sleep paralysis stories from you show and realized what was happening to me. I rode the strange voices out for an hour just realizing my mind misfiring and not having a spiritual awakening.

I have heard similar stories from other readers/listeners and also my patients. I have also had similar experiences myself (always when sleep-deprived). They can be quite frightening and unpleasant. A typical episode of sleep paralysis, or hypnagogic (when falling asleep) / hypnapompic (when waking up) hallucinations includes the feeling of being paralyzed combined with a sense that there is a malevolent presence in the room. Often there is also the sense of pressure on the chest, as if it is difficult to breathe or even that something is sitting on your chest. There may also be auditory and visual hallucinations to complete the package. The situation is scary enough, but there also appears to be an element of spontaneous terror as well.

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In one of the most famous child abuse cases in recent history, the “Little Rascals” ritual abuse case in Edenton, NC involved 90 children accusing 20 adults of long term ritual sexual and other abuse. Among the adults accused were the mayor and the sheriff. The reports from the children included the following claims:

• being taken to the back room of a store and sexually abused. There is a very wide opening between the back room and the rest of the store, so that any sexual abuse would have been perpetrated in the full view of customers.
• being taken on board a space ship and flown into outer space where they were abused.
• seeing a large fish tank where sharks were trained.
• being taken on board a ship into the ocean and abused while trained sharks swam around the boat.

As far as I can tell from reports none of the sharks had frikin’ laser beams on their heads. The case has become a classic example of a modern witch hunt – driven by hysteria and incompetent investigation.

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In 1998 Andrew Wakefield and 12 coauthors published a now infamous paper in the Lancet alleging a connection between regressive autism and nonspecific colitis (bowel inflammation). They also reported a “strong temporal association” between this alleged new syndrome and injection with the MMR vaccine. The study was based upon 12 case reports of children with this apparent syndrome. It sparked fears regarding the MMR vaccine specifically, and vaccines in general, that spread initially through the UK but then around the world, including the US. The result was a surge in the anti-vaccine movement, declining vaccine compliance – and in some communities low enough to reduce herd immunity resulting in outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, like measles and whooping cough.

In early 2010 the Lancet finally retracted the paper, citing ethical concerns, and later that year the General Medical Council found that Wakefield had acted unethically. He was eventually struck off and now is self-employed in the US – professionally disgraced but he remains unrepentant and a martyr and hero of the anti-vaccine movement. Like many cranks, Wakefield hides behind a veil of accusations of conspiracies and persecution.

Despite his downfall, the damage had already been done. During this time journalist Brian Deer relentlessly investigated Wakefield and the Lancet paper. The chilling result of this investigation is now detailed in a BMJ paper (the first in a series).

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One of the major themes of scientific skepticism is  – know thyself, specifically the many frailties and foibles of human cognition. Skeptics generally hold that the many anecdotes of strange experiences, sightings, abductions, encounters, and healings are not evidence of a paranormal world lurking beneath the physical world, but rather evidence of our flawed thinking, memory, and perception. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the latter, rather than the former, hypothesis.

Memory by itself is a sufficient explanation for many apparent anomalies. Our memories are not an accurate recording of the past. They are constructed from imperfect perception filtered through our beliefs and biases, and then over time they morph and merge. Our memories serve more to support our beliefs rather than inform them.

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Perhaps, but as yet we do not have the technology to read it. This is the holy grail of law enforcement, counter terrorism, and intelligence – the ability to detect with absolute accuracy whether or not a subject is lying or telling the truth. It stands to reason that the process (on a neurological level) of fabricating a lie would be different than remembering an actual event. So why shouldn’t we be able to detect whatever differences there are?

This question has now gone from theoretical to very real with the conviction in India of a woman of murder based upon a controversial new technology called Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature test (BEOS) developed by Indian neuroscientist Champadi Raman Mukundan.

Theoretical Background

It is not impossible based upon our current knowledge of neuroscience that there would be detectable difference in brain activity between lying and telling the truth, or recalling a true memory from a fabricated one. There is already a great deal of research looking at this very question. Much of the recent research uses fMRI, which measure blood flow to the brain and from that can infer the relative activity of the different parts of the brain. Using fMRI for this kind of research is doable – but very tricky. The awake brain is constantly in a state of chaotic mental activity and it can be challenging to tease out the relevant activity from the tangential or incidental.

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One of my favorite old SNL skits was a commercial for a stage hypnotist featuring numerous people all droning in monotone, I loved it, it was much better than Cats. Im going to see it again and again. The humor, of course, lies in the fact that hypnotism does not really work that way. But what is hypnotism?

This remains a tricky question. We know what it isnt. Hypnotists do not put people into a trance or altered state of consciousness. When someone is hypnotized they are awake and their brains appear to be functioning normally (despite the youre getting sleeeepy.. cliche).

Being hypnotized seems to be linked to suggestion. Psychological experiments show that humans in general have a measurable degree of susceptibility to suggestion. Our thoughts and memories can be influenced by having facts, words, or claims suggested to us even if we are not consciously aware of the suggestions. For example, numerous experiments have shown the following: expose a group of subjects to an event (in writing, in video, or even live in front of them), then ask them a series of questions about the event. The details of their recollection can be statistically influenced by making subtle suggestions such as asking what she was wearing; suggesting that a cloaked person whose sex was not apparent was in fact female. In lectures I often show the audience a list of words and ask them to remember them, then I show them words one at a time and they are asked to raise their hands if they remember the word. Words that are related to (suggested by) the original list of words but were not on that list are included and most people report remembering seeing that word, and some even say they can visualize the word on the list.

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There are times when I am discussing the paranormal with a believer that I am struck by the vastness of difference between us. I do honestly try to grasp for the common ground – facts that are in evidence, undeniable logic, or some things which seem to me to be part of the universal human condition. But sometimes I fail – what I think should be common ground crumbles like dust beneath my feet. It is as if we are trying to grapple with brains that have fundamental functional differences, that construct the world in such different ways they simply cannot understand each other.

This question has fascinated me – was I born skeptical? Are true believers born true believers? Do their brains actually work differently than mine? Perhaps a “logic circuit” is absent, or else that part of the brain that needs to believe overwhelms all else. Or is it all culture and experience? Could a bit of training in critical thinking drop the scales from their eyes and make them see reason?

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By now it is old news that so-called “repressed memory syndrome” is a dangerous myth, but it keeps cropping up in the news from time to time, and the notion still has its adherents. Recently, Harvard researchers published an interesting study suggesting that repressed memory syndrome is a cultural phenomenon, not a scientific one. The lessons of this sad episode in therapy are timeless and it will likely endure as a classic cautionary tale of psychological pseudoscience.

The Courage to Heal

In 1988 Ellen Bass and Laura Davis published The Courage To Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (now in its third edition). In it they claim that over 45%, maybe more, of all women have been sexually abused as children, but most have repressed the memory, resulting in a host of psychological problems from eating disorders to depression. The book sparked an industry of repressed memory therapists whose goal in therapy was to recover the repressed memories of abuse as a path to solving the psychological manifestations.

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It’s fairly common knowledge at this point that the polygraph test for detecting who is lying is not reliable enough to be used practically. Here is a good summary by the American Psychological Association (APA). The bottom line is that the entire idea of a lie-detector is problematic for various reasons. First, the underlying premises have not really emerged from psychological research, and has not been validated by research. The idea is that people will display physiological signs of stress when they are making an effort to be deceptive, or when confronted with incriminating information. However, the relationship between physiological signs and mental stress is too complex to develop any test. There is no universal feature of lying that can be detected.

The polygraph uses two basic techniques. The first is the control question test (CQT) – you ask questions of the person being examined, control questions that do not relate to the crime in question, and relevant questions related to the crime. The idea is that they will react more to the relevant than the control questions. The other method, the guilty knowledge test (GKT) is similar – mentioning random items along with one directly related to the crime may reveal guilty knowledge that only the perpetrator should know.

The idea sounds compelling, and it does work in that using these techniques results in a slight statistical advantage in determining who is lying and who isn’t. However, a small statistical advantage is all but worthless in practical application. There are too many false positives and false negatives to be useful. For any individual suspect, at the end of the test you still don’t know if they are lying or not.

Part of the problem is that people are complex and variable. Not everyone responds the same way to stress, or to the situations provoked in the testing. But the problem is worsened by the existence of effective mental countermeasures. There are two basic countermeasures that have been shown to be effective – lowering further the statistical effect of the polygraph. The first is to assign mental significance to control items or questions, thereby reacting similarly to the control and the relevant items. The second is to create mental distance to all the items, including the relevant ones. Focus on something else – the sound of the words, their precise dictionary meaning, or imagine a famous character saying them. If the statements are in writing, you can focus on the color of the ink, the font, or other superficial aspects.

These countermeasure work. They successfully blur any difference between control and relevant items.

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