Episode 2 − Illusions - Uncut conversation with john vokey

You were involved in the early '80s in quite a bit of controversy with the band Judas Priest. The claim, I think, was that they had backwards messages in their rock music that led to some unfortunate outcomes. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yes. It was the late '80s, early '90s, actually, I believe. Early '90s, wasn't it? I thought it was '82. No, no. That was much, much earlier. That was with a pastor from California. Okay. The trial with Judas Priest was actually I think in the early 1990s. What had happened, the general story, is two young men, two days before Christmas, were sitting in their basement of one of their houses, drinking beer, smoking marijuana, and listening to Judas Priest all afternoon. Then at the end of the afternoon, they picked up a shotgun, walked to a local church playground, with the swings and teeter-totters, that kind of thing, proceeded to sit down on the swings or a bench—I can't remember the details now—and attempted to commit suicide. One of them succeeded. The other just blew his face off but managed to survive. In the hospital, immediately after, when the police asked them, "Why did you do this," the response of the survivor was, "Life sucks," which is not an uncommon response among teenagers, as they were. The parents then—a few years later, actually—decided to sue. They didn't decide to sue the gun manufacturer. They didn't decide to sue the brewery that provided the beer or the place that sold it. They didn't decide to go after the drug dealers who had sold them the marijuana. No, they decided to go after Judas Priest and CBS Records. That's who the suit was launched against, about alleged subliminal content of two kinds: backward messages, so the messages that—you hear the forward message as normal language, but played backwards it has a completely different meaning, and some forward subliminals, so low-level forward messages. Okay, so the parents thought that there were messages in the music of Judas Priest that was the cause of their sons to commit suicide? Right. It was the straw that broke the camel's back, okay? They may have been depressed for other reasons, and drinking and smoking marijuana is going to be somewhat depressive as well, and that this was had it not been for the backward messages in the music and the forward subliminals, they wouldn't do it. Now that was their idea. They came to this because of, I suspect, media exposure about other bands. Ozzy Osbourne had been sued for the same kinds of things. Though, in his case, it was all forward messages. He had a song called "Suicide Solutions," which in fact was a song against suicide. Ironically enough, he was sued for that. In his case, they just threw it out of court because the free speech amendment of the American constitution protects speech. The judge in this current trial, the Judas Priest trial, let it go forward because he argued the backward messages, the ones that you would only hear in the forward direction, which would be innocuous rock commentary, were messages you couldn't protect yourself against because you weren't aware you were hearing them. Therefore, the 14th Amendment of the American Constitution don't apply. That sounds like a reasonable claim to me. That's a good judgment, right? Assuming there are such messages, yes. Assuming there are such messages, and assuming they're effective, right? So that was his piece. That's why the trial went forward—because people were asking, well, given the precedent of Ozzy Osbourne, why are we going through with this trial? Now my involvement, then, was after that. I received a phone call—because of work I had done back in the early '80s—I received a phone call from the head lawyer for Judas Priest and CBS Records. It was actually a whole firm of lawyers in Reno, California [sic], which is where the trial was going to take place. It's about a year before the trial. I received this phone call because of the work I'd done on backward messages in rock music with Don Read, a colleague of mine then at the University of Lethbridge, that we'd done in response to this pastor from California coming to town and holding his big rallies about backward messages in rock music that were leading young people down the path of life such as sex and drug use. He claimed it was because of the backward messages in the rock music. It led to a big rally at the end. I was two days there, where people showed up and broke records and things like this. It was quite celebrated in Lethbridge. I was a brand-new professor in 1982. I'd just arrived in Lethbridge. And so I got a phone call back then from a local announcer of a rock station in Lethbridge, calling me up after Pastor Greenwald had arrived, saying, "Is there anything in psychology that we could use to speak about this alleged backward messages in rock music," or subliminal messages, they were calling them. I turned to my colleague Don Read. We both went, "Not that we're aware of." We did a little research, but we couldn't find anything on backward messages. But you were initially skeptical of the claim that backwards messages could influence, or you were open to the idea that they could? Moderately or, I guess, minimally, to be honest, but what I did do is I then went to his presentations to see what he was doing that was leading so many people to be so upset about it, because it was the front page of newspapers, all the radio stations, and so on. So I went to one of his—actually, more than one of his rallies—to find out what he was doing. Out of the basis of what he was doing, it seemed to be pretty clear that there really wasn't the effect that he thought was going on, but rather just some standard psychological phenomena that we were all aware of—old, old phenomena in psychology. So it was on that basis then that Don Read and I said, "To be fair, we should run some research," because this is a claim nobody has investigated. He was earnest. It wasn't like he was just a conman or something. He was actually earnest. As far as I know, he still is. He actually believes this is true. So we decided, "Well, fair enough." Now his claim—and it's more subtle than most people think, so when it really hit the press in the mid-'80s, people had the wrong idea of what, in fact, he was claiming. So his concern is not that messages are being inserted in the rock music. There's obviously the forward messages in many rock songs that promote drug use and the like. Quite dark, yes. So that wasn't his concern. His concern was that, as he rephrased it at one of his meetings—I'm paraphrasing now—is that, well, good Christian teenagers, with a forward message, would hear it, understand it, and reject it. But his concern was this—it was much more subtle. To be fair, I thought the guy deserves a shake because he's not just thinking very glibly about this stuff. His concern was that because it was backwards and it's hard to register consciously, if the message is still getting through, the meaning of the backward version of the message was getting through, then they would be unaware of the source. They wouldn't be able to attribute it to the record. But the thought popped into their head by some unconscious mechanism—he never specified what that would be—but if it did, then they would have a message in their head with no attributable source except themselves. Yes, and so they couldn't protect themselves against it. Exactly. So they would now be looking at—thinking, "It's fun to smoke marijuana. It must be my idea," because they would have rejected, he claimed, if somebody just walked up and said, "Hey, bud. It's fun to smoke marijuana." They could reject it. But because it's popped into their head, apparently without any source, it must be their idea. Yes, or even a message from a higher power. Okay, let's not go there. So that was his argument, so that I watched what he did. What he would do is he would walk in with sections of rock music that he must have spent hundreds of hours obtaining, listening to all those rock music backwards and finding these passages. He's found quite a few, so it's quite a demonstration. At the time, you could actually write to him and he would send you full cassette tapes of all the examples he'd dug up to that point and then more. So what he would do is he would then come in; he'd say, "Okay, this is," for example, "Queen in 'Another One Bites the Dust,'" and he'd play a passage of Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" in the forward direction. It'd sound perfectly fine to you—a famous song. Then he'd say, "Now here's the same section I'm going to play backwards, and I want you to listen for," in this particular example, "It's fun to smoke marijuana." He plays the passage for you backwards, and, sure enough, everybody starts laughing because everybody hears it. We use it as a classroom demonstration now. It's quite apparent. Yes, it sounds like that, sort of, but it's like visual illusions. You're also aware at the same time that it isn't really like that. It's got those two levels going on the same time, but you could go, "Yes, okay, I see what you mean. It does sound like, 'It's fun to smoke marijuana.'" And he has many other examples like that. That's his procedure, and he just comes in for about an hour, says, "Here's another passage I want you to listen for," and then plays it. By the time he's done, after about an hour, people were totally convinced. All these backward messages, I heard them all when he asked me to hear them. Okay, so every time he tells you what to listen for... What to listen for, yes. ...then you hear the tape. Then you hear the tape, yes, hear it backwards. So we thought, "Okay, he's got a theory. He's got an explanation of why he's concerned: that if it did manage to get in without you being aware of the source, that in fact could be of some concern." So we thought—and there was no research—so why don't we actually see if you can influence people's behavior by the meaning of the semantic content of the backward message when you're hearing the passage forward? Yes, so the semantic content—the words, right? Yes, yes, so that was something about their behavior was going to be influenced consistent with the meaning of the backward passage. Okay, cool, yes. But they're not hearing the backward passage. That's the point. They're going to hear it in the forward direction. Now what we didn't do was use rock music because we thought that just makes the task harder given all this other noise going on. We in fact didn't study anything satanic. All the headlines afterwards talked about us studying backward messages in rock music. We did nothing of the sort. What we did do is we took sentences, normal sentences that had various properties we were interested in investigating, English sentences, and then inverted them. So the logic, if you could follow me for a moment—so we played the message, the passage, backwards because we know what its—so the forward meaning is now the backward meaning, if you follow me. Yes. Okay. So in the forward direction, they're just hearing backward speech, which is... That's what it sounds like. Then we'd ask for these questions. I'll get back to Judas Priest shortly. This is good. We started with some really simple precautions. What can people do with backward speech? Some of the questions we asked came about because both Don and I, Don Read and I, when we first started playing with these sentences, were like, "Those are very speech-like." When you turn speech around, English in particular, what we were using, you turn that around, it still sounds like speech but it sounds like a foreign language you don't know. To us, and because "The Muppet Show" was on at that time, to us, it sounded like the Swedish Chef on "The Muppet Show," because neither of us know Swedish. That later came to bite us when a "Global Mail" reporter completely misinterpreted what I was saying and said that, "Vokey and Read claim that all rock music when played backwards sound Swedish," which is not quite what we were thinking. Anyway, we decided to explore that: because it's speech-like, maybe there's a bunch of things that you already have the skills, because most of us are well-skilled at language and speech, that we could still do. So the very first thing we asked is when we're playing the passage backwards—and we just had some recorded by women and some recorded by men—and we just asked them when they're hearing the backwards, "Is that a man or a woman?" They were virtually perfect in scoring that, so they could easily tell the gender of the speaker. It wasn't quite 100 percent because one person meant to tick one box and ticked the other box. Otherwise we have 100 percent. So clearly you can tell gender. That's not too surprising because women tend to have higher frequency voices than men, and played backwards the frequencies remain. So the next one we tried—well, we tried all sorts of things but had a few highlights—we then wanted to see if they could, for example, determine what language the person was speaking. We had a fluent trilingual in German, French, and English, who—we got all these passages and we had him translate them because I'm barely unilingual. He would just translate the English sentence into its equivalent in French and its equivalent in German. He'd read them all in the normal fashion, and then we turned them all backwards. The meaning hasn't changed. Just the language used changed. We asked them—we told people what we had done, and we said, "Now it's up for you to decide whether, when we play a passage to you, which of the three is it." For any given passage, by chance alone you'd expect him to hit it correctly a third of the time, and they were well over 60 percent, so not as well as they could do with the gender judgment, but still remarkably great. We thought it was remarkable, that they could do that well, in nailing what the language was even though they're hearing the backwards probably the first time. For many of these people, they've never heard anything backwards before, and yet they could still tell the language. We didn't explore the exact details as to why that's true, but if you just think about some of the sounds in the languages, you can probably in your head figure out, "Well that kind of guttural sound, backwards it would sound..." So we're probably going to link to that paper, but can you summarize what the—there may be four or five things that people could and couldn't pick up when they were backwards. That's about what they could do, and also that's about as far as you could get. Notice we're not even asking anything about the meaning. In this one, we're just asking physical properties of the tape. Got you. So people could detect male from female. They could detect language in some way. Is that it? Well, we tried some things we thought would work that were strictly physical, like a question or a declarative statement, because we thought, well, people would realize that normally when you hear a question, the end of the sentence goes up, as in Valleyspeak, and that therefore if you heard a sentence start by going down, sweeping downward, you should recognize it's probably a question. They couldn't do it. Can't do questions, okay. Couldn't even do that. Then we tried, again, something that should be relatively simple, something that moved toward meaning. We took sentences and read them as they were or read them scrambled, so one was meaningful; the other's not; the other's nonsense, and simply asked, "We're not asking at all what the meaning is. Just merely tell us if one was meaningful or nonsense," and they couldn't do that either. So then we started to move into more direct questions about the actual meaning. Can you get the meaning at all? If we asked direct questions, so, "What would that mean if you heard it in the forward direction?" Zip, even if we made it a two-alternative forced-choice task: it either means this or this; which of the two? They couldn't do it. We played the backward—we play it—so we knew what the forward meaning was. We had ones that were matched, so they had the same meaning but we changed how we expressed it—passive voice versus active voice, for example. They have exactly the same meaning, but their superficial structure changes. They couldn't even tell that when they did listen to the backwards. So the bottom line is people aren't very good at picking up the meaning or the words in very simple messages when they're played backwards. Backwards. Yes, when they're hearing them backward. No, this is difficult to do. Tell me what the bottom line is, yes. They're hearing the forward sentences backwards. The meaning they're going for is the meaning the forward sentence would have had. In fact, that's what they're told: "If you heard this in the forward direction, what would it mean," or other kinds of matching tasks. But, remember, none of those were in fact what Greenwald was arguing. He said it wasn't a conscious process. It wasn't conscious recollection of what was being heard or what was being played, but unconscious. In all our tasks, we were asking you directly, "What does that mean?" He made no statements about that. He didn't say people were conscious. In fact, his concern would be: had they been so, he wouldn't be concerned, if they could consciously experience it. So we then went to indirect tests, as they're called, or tests where it's not necessary that the person be consciously aware of what they're hearing but they can still be expressed in their behavior. We did a series of tasks like that, of varying sensitivity, according to the literature, for normal speech or normal tasks, and they couldn't do any of them. Even indirect measures of the content of the messages didn't come through. For example, simple things such as trying to influence their spelling by pre-exposing them to particular meanings of homophones, so we used homophone pairs that had a high frequency and low frequency interpretation. That means one of them, if I just said it to you, that's the only spelling you'd think of. If I said, "Read," to you, you don't think of marshes; you think of books. Yes, got you. So R-E-E-D is the low-frequency spelling. R-E-A-D is the high-frequency spelling. We actually copied an experiment that had been done with people suffering from a syndrome known as Korsakoff's Syndrome, in which they have great difficulty learning anything new. They're fine for the past, but they can't remember anything new. When they were exposed to sentences like, "Climbing a mountain is a remarkable feat," with F-E-A-T at the end—that's the low frequency interpretation—they'd have their conversation with the whole bunch of homophones included and a whole bunch of non-homophones as well to kind of disguise the task, and then they'd be asked the next day. The experimenter will come back the next day and say, "Okay, I'm going to give you a memory test for words I talked to you about yesterday." Of course their response was, "We talked to you yesterday," so they scored complete chance on the recognition test. But then she'd say, "Well, I'm going to give you a spelling test," not mentioning about the past, and the spelling test would have some of the homophones that have been biased towards the low-frequency interpretation, and others that hadn't, as controls. What they should do is the ones that were biased towards the low—frequency interpretation, if the memory was there, they should circle them; they should select them. Otherwise, they should select the high-frequency interpretation. That's exactly what was found with people with Korsakoff's. Korsakoffs, okay. We're probably going to go through the whole of the methodology of your experiment—but what did you find? Well, then we took that very basic idea and repeated it with backward messages. Otherwise it's identical, okay? Everything is the same except we just turned all the sentences backwards first; that's it. Yes, got you, okay. Then give them the spelling test—nothing. Completely a chance. They showed what it is in fact for all homophones, whether they were pre-exposed or not, backwards—they chose the high frequency spelling, as you would predict. So even something as subtle as that, which works with people who have no explicit memory for the task, they still showed this in their behavior. People given backward message as an exact same experiment, the same kind of paradigm, do not. People given backwards messages were or were not influenced by it? Completely uninfluenced. So if you were to put that—I don't want to put it in my words—what was the bottom line of that experiment? People given... We found no effect, either conscious or unconscious, direct or indirect, on their behavior from backward messages. As far as we could tell, none of the meaning of backward messages were getting through, none, even in very, very subtle experiments. So you've got an experiment with extreme amount of scientific rigor, you've found very little evidence for the fact that backwards messages... None. None, okay. You found no evidence for backwards messaging influencing people either consciously or unconsciously. So, presumably, people then just read your study and reacted positively to it and the court case was thrown out? Is that what happened? No. We haven't got to the court case yet. What happened is Don Read and I presented—because it had happened in our community—we asked to do a public presentation at the public library for the community to explain what we had found. The concern was still going on about this terrible thing about these insidious messages in rock music. Some states banned backward messages in rock music. The government was considering requiring stickers to be placed on all rock albums warning about backward subliminal content. You can imagine what happened at that point. If you were a rock band, wouldn't you want the sticker? What 14-year-old boy could resist? "Satanic messages, oh, boy!" So what happened after that point, of course, is that many rock bands started putting backward messages in their music, and they're easy to tell. Unlike the ones where it's kind of, you know, you barely get the message to work it out when you hear it backwards, these are very clean ones. They'd put in Satanic stories backwards. You would hear it on the record as the backwards speech, but if you turned it around and played it, it was very clear. Pink Floyd did it. The Beatles did it. Many, many bands started doing it precisely because you'd sell more records if you could claim you had backward messages in there. So the first effect of us presenting at the public library is it went over the wires—they had wires in those days; they're called the wires—and we got interviewed by everybody. We were on every talk show you could imagine right around North America and including Australia and the UK and so on for about a year. It was just everywhere. It was just constant. We eventually wrote it up, both the research and our experience with it, because virtually every report we read after we'd go for an interview or a reporter would call us up or we were on a talk show, the report of it would always get it all wrong. So we eventually published the paper in 1985 that explained our research and what had happened with the media, that they really couldn't understand these very simple messages. One of the biggest mistakes they would make is to say that we had found that you could have people hear anything you wanted to just by suggesting it. Now, in fact, we had conducted—one of the major pieces of our research was a set of experiments precisely to show that that wasn't true, that you can't make people hear or see whatever you want them to hear or see. The thing that you're hearing or seeing has to at least be consistent in some way. For example, I could point to a cloud out there and go, "Look, it's a bunny rabbit," and it was just a round cloud, you'd go, "Sorry, what, a bunny rabbit sleeping? I'm not sure what you're getting at," but you would have no question at all if it had two big protruberances at some point, right? Got you. The same thing has to happen with the backward messages. It has to at least be consistent. So we designed a series of experiments where we actually took passages and flipped them around, and then listened and listened and listened, much like Greenwald had done with his original demonstrations, and constructed little bits that fit certain passages of these particular tapes. We had two different passages. We had "Jabberwocky" because it makes no sense forward or backward. What's "Jabberwocky"? It was... Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe: ...and on, and then we also took the 23rd Psalm because Greenwald had claimed that no religious passages had backward messages in them. Okay. So Don Read and I got together in a good scientific fashion at his place because he had the better stereo. I recorded one of the passages and then flipped it backwards, and then Don Read recorded the other one and flipped it backwards, so we could control for voice, intonation. Then we just listened to them very creatively. To help that process, we used a case of beer and had to send out for more actually. Eventually, we managed to construct six messages, if you want, for—the six messages were for, say, the 23rd Psalm, and another completely independent six for "Jabberwocky." The base experiment then was this: if we could—so we always play the whole passage to—this was a class of introductory students and another class of Cognition students in the second year Cognition course. I would play the entire passage of either "Jabberwocky" or the 23rd Psalm to them, and then we'd ask them, "Okay, I want you to listen for..." and we then we'd choose something that we had constructed to be consistent with that passage, or we'd borrow a phrase from the other passage that wasn't consistent. That wasn't consistent, okay. We'd say, "Listen for..." and we give them the passage, and then they'd hear the whole, either 23rd Psalm or "Jabberwocky," and we'd record how often they actually said they thought they heard it. Basically, the results were almost perfect. They're not exactly perfect, but almost perfectly that if it was one that we had chosen—sorry—one we'd constructed for that particular passage, they then would say they heard it; if it was one that we borrowed from the alternative passage, they would say they didn't hear it—indicating that it has to at least be consistent to the extent that Don Read and I were able to construct semi-meaningful phrases. As I said, the scientific beer meant we were sometimes more creative than probably was good, so some of the passages—we just hear what we chose—don't make a lot of sense but they're consistent. One of the ones that we use in class all the time as a demonstration is, "Saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth." That's what Don Read and I came up with, and it does actually fit, but it doesn't make a lot of sense. You won't hear that if we played the 23rd Psalm backward. You won't hear that particular passage, but you will hear it if we played the "Jabberwocky" backwards. So that showed that it's not we can actually hear just anything; it has to at least be consistent with the passage, contrary to what media reports would conclude that we had found. That's the background. I published the paper in '85. Come the early '90s, I get the phone call from the lawyers for Judas Priest in Reno, Nevada, where the trial was going to take place. This is a civil suit. The plaintiffs have filed for millions of dollars, by the way, in damages. So she calls me up and says, "You're the only authorities on this. Nobody else has ever published a paper on backwards messages." They were claiming there were a number of backward subliminals in this particular album, the "Stained Class" album, by Judas Priest. I said, "Okay, that's fine. I'd be more than happy to serve as an expert for you. I'll provide you with all the research I can get for you and other kinds of things." She says, "Well, yes, thank you very much. It's very nice, but, no, we want you to come and testify for us." I said, "Well, there's a problem." She goes, "What problem?" I said, "You probably want my co-author to do this job. He's actually had experience in court as an expert witness, not on this domain but an eyewitness testimony." She said, "No, no, you're the first author. We have to have you." I said, "Well, I'll tell you what, I'll only agree to do all this and come to the trial if you bring my colleague with me." She said, "Yes, fine. No big deal." And so a year, or almost a year—she calls me once, twice a week. We talk about things, "How are things going," and so on. She says, "Okay, so are you ready? Did you get to think about your testimony," and those kind of stuff. Well, I said, "I think you really want my colleague." So here's what happens: the day of, we were flying down there for the first weekend meeting, an actual face-to-face meeting. Now the reason I was reticent, and I'd actually told her, is that I actually look like one of the band members—shaggy, long, blonde hair—and the judge is known for having somewhat a less-than-positive attitude toward people who look like me. She's all, "Not a problem. Don't worry about it." So the day we were to fly down to meet the team and Judas Priest, Don Read was leaving from I think it was Vancouver, and he got there earlier to Reno than I did from Lethbridge, so I'm the last to arrive. It was about five in the afternoon. I go to the cab, and a big law firm, and I go in there in this big meeting room with these big oak doors that open—very, very dramatic entry. I come walking in, and there's this woman I've been talking to for years. They had lawyers. All the other lawyers and Judas Priest are around the table. There's Don sitting there. I'm walking in, and she looks up at me, and she goes, "Oh, my God," and then says, "Now, Don, when you're on the stand..." So I actually didn't testify at the Judas Priest trial. Wow. Well, you want to. I mean, this is good. You had a good back-up plan. Yes, but I did get to meet various characters in this long story of subliminal messaging. Wilson Bryan Key, for example, was there to testify for the plaintiffs, so I got to meet him. We spent some time talking. We had a lot of fun actually speaking. ...not intentionally, I would say, but he's quite funny. He used to be professor at Western Ontario University, and then left in the 1970s because of all the books he'd been publishing on subliminal messaging. So what was there? What happened in the trial? What was the outcome? Well, the first outcome was—there was a pre-trial hearing—we, or Don Read, presented our evidence about backward messages. It was all we were going to comment on. The judge said, "Okay, the conclusion seems pretty clear," and threw that all out, so no longer did backward messages play any role. However, there had been one forward subliminal they had alleged. It was on one of the songs, "Better By You, Better Than Me," on the "Stained Class" album, that the engineers come in—because they had the original, 14-track original multitrack tapes for this song—and was able to isolate what this alleged formal subliminal was, if I'm remembering this correctly—I may not be—that it was just a passing light touch of a bass string that wasn't meant to be played at that moment, and then a fraction of a second later, a slight click on the drum kit, a kind of background noise that happens all the time when you're recording while the rest of the band is making a lot of noise. It gives a...which they interpreted as, "Do it." Not doing much for Nike stocks, I don't think, but... So the idea was that the plaintiffs alleged that the boys were borderline—drinking beer and smoking marijuana, all that kind of stuff—and they heard this message, and they're now making the argument that Greenwald had made or similar to Greenwald's argument about backward messages, and that is: it's that because you can't really hear it—it's subliminal, like a very low volume on the record—that when they appreciated what they were hearing, "Do it," they thought it was their own thought. That's what led them to pick up the rifle, go across the street, kill themselves. That's what the case came down to. At that point, I'm basically out of it because it was no longer about subliminal messages. It's about that one forward subliminal. After the testimony of the engineers about where they found these noises on the tape, the judge didn't dismiss the case because he thought the whole thing was nonsense. He'd already, remember, ruled that it would not be protected by the free speech amendment. He dismissed it because, as he argued, there was no evidence that Judas Priest and CBS Records had intended the message to be there, which is a bit dangerous, if you think about it. So that left open a sort of precedent for this not to be resolved? Right, so that if somebody, for example, put a low-level subliminal, forward subliminal, and intended it to be there—I don't know what the state of the law is now with respect to that ruling, but I thought it was unusual and somewhat scary ruling about that. However, Judas Priest and CBS Records in a sense won, except the judge awarded all the costs against them because, of course, the families had no money that they were suing. Wow. So they won and lost at the same time. Yes, I see. But at least they won in the technical sense. Like Ozzy Osbourne, they were at least not convicted of anything or didn't have to pay the lawsuit. That's the story of Judas Priest. Interesting. That's amazing. It seems that people are hearing things that aren't actually there. How was that possible? There's kind of a two-level answer to that one. The first one is that's all that ever happens. The world doesn't really look the way you think it looks. As you know, even what you call solid objects are just made up of molecules with big spaces between them, so it doesn't really look like that. There are no colors in the world. Color is something you bring to the processing of the information you receive. In some sense, what you just said is always true. You're never really seeing what's out there. That's one level of explanation. In fact, hearing things that most other people would argue are not there or seeing things that other people would argue are not there is not saying much because that's always true. What I think is meant is to try to dissociate, I think, what you're asking about from a straight hallucination, when there actually is no input source that should lead to that conclusion about something being out there, which is usually a result of a brain disease or probably induce it with some chemicals as well, where the brain's processing gets quite distorted and it's actually doing more than just trying to put together a reasonable construction—it actually creates a whole cloth, as, for example, in people who have had their eyes enucleated, so they're completely blind but claim they can see—and they're saying, "I'll drive," an interesting phenomenon. In one particular case, the individual who they knew could not see because he had no eyes but claimed he could—they'd ask him, "How many fingers am I holding up," and they wouldn't even hold up any fingers, and he'd go, "Three." Confidently? "What color is my tie?" "Yellow." No tie on. So there is that part of it, and there are people who suffer from various diseases that in fact lead them to really see things that aren't there in the sense that another person standing right there with them is just, "There's nothing there, nothing." Those are hallucinations, though. We're talking about in this particular case is whether we could lead people to think that they heard, "I saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth," something a bit different. We've given enough information, much like we do in the real world. These aren't threshold phenomena that either is or isn't. It's that your perceptional systems are accumulating evidence. Then you could also make use of all sorts of biases that you've developed over your lifetime to, at some point, say, "Yes, I'm confident enough to go with claiming I hear this or see this." Later it turns out it's just the way the blanket was folded. "I thought it was my dog in the bed, but it just turns out it was the blankets, but because I expected my dog there, that's what I saw." That would be not a hallucination. An illusion of the sense, of a type, I guess, the way you think about it. That's all we're really doing, and that's just standard normal processing. There's nothing unusual happening here. It's just what we're doing all the time. Is that what they call pareidolia? Yes. Yes, okay, but be careful to separate it from hallucinations. It's the big issue. Okay. I think the distinction is important. Oliver Sacks' latest book—he goes out of his way to convince people that it really is important to separate the two. The two are hallucination and pareidolia? Yes. Yes, too, that they're not—don't equate one phenomena with the other, and don't even think the mechanisms for one are necessarily the same as the other, as is often done where people are trying to blend the two issues. Yes, that's what I'd argue, but I would argue that all perception is pareidolia. That's what we're always doing. We're not really seeing the world as it is. We're just trying to create something that's reasonably predictive of allowing us to act in the world. It's just sometimes we're right in the sense that it matches up with... What others would say? Yes. With what others would say in the world, and they agree with you, versus not or did not intend to do it. Right. For example, if you take a normal scene in a room like this and pick out some color—so let's say the color on that wall there—and you might say, "It's beige," although I'm sure my wife would have some subtle distinctions attached to that—but it's also the shadows, so in fact even though you see that all as the same color, if we actually went up and looked at it very, very closely, we'd see, "Well, this is not beige at all. There's purple and blue over there." Think of somebody, an artist when he paints snow, a good artist, one that's trying to represent the natural world as they see it. There'll be no white where they painted snow. It will be blue, some purples and yellows and so on, yet you see it as white—snow. More than that, the impression a lot of people have is that we have color receptors at the back of our eye, and when red's in the world, the red receptor indicates that. When blue is in the world—we don't actually have blue receptors. But when green is in the world, the green receptor tells us. It's not a fact that we see color at all. There's some mechanism in our color vision, except for, under extreme circumstances, if I put you in a completely dark room and gave you a pure wavelength, then that's true. You'll see red when I show you red. That makes the red receptors go off. Generally speaking, the way you see color is in a color-constancy sense, so that we can all agree—I'll walk into this room and go, "Yes, that's beige," and yet if we measured it precisely, we might find that there's actually no browns coming off that surface at all. This was work that Edwin Land did in the early '60s, showing in fact that's quite true. Even if all of us agree, now is that pareidolia? Because in fact there is no brown there, and yet every single person who comes in says, "Yes, definitely." That's part of the reason I argued earlier that there is no color in the world. Colors are something we bring to our interpretation of things, but it's not to say that it's not. Why I say that is because, evolutionarily speaking, we look at things like berries—they go out of their way to make themselves a bright red to contrast with the green so you'll eat them—so it's to some sense in the world, too, but it's more of an act that you bring to the world. I think that's true for most perception. It's a mistake to put it in the world, as much as we all agree on it. Remember, the important thing is that you get through the world without falling into holes. Bumping into things, yes. Bumping into things and getting eaten by lions, but that's it. What you perceive, what you construct to perceive, just has to meet those criteria. It doesn't really matter that it actually matches the world in any other sense. It just has to match the world so you can maneuver your way through it, which might be good argument, when you think about it yourself, that there's a good chance that maybe the way you perceive the world is nothing like how your dog does. On the other hand, you could say, "Well, the tasks we have to solve are much the same, so maybe it would be the same." Okay, okay. So following from that, discourse is about the science of everyday thinking. There are people out there who want to make better decisions, think better, and do better. Based on your research, what advice would you give them? Based on my research, aside from the obvious—exercise, good diet, get a good sleep... Is that what you researched? I don't know what my research says about that. We do know that when you put yourself under conditions of sleep deprivation, ingesting certain chemicals and even common ones—alcohol and tobacco and the like—and put yourself in high-stress situations so your limbic system is going off, that we tend to increase the rate with which we're going to produce these errors. We're now becoming more likely to see blankets as dogs and shadows as things that might threaten us. It makes good sense evolutionarily that when in those situations you become much more—you're seeing the world as much more dangerous than it is. To make good decisions, don't make them under conditions of high stress, of lack of sleep, under high chemical arousal, and those kinds of things to make a better decision about things. Even my research was something like that. Okay, so if you're going around the world, when you're making your way through the world, be conscious of the fact that—I'm trying to rephrase what you said in terms of the person, in terms of what people can do. You touched on it in the end. So in order to make better decisions, be conscious of this, which will allow you to do that. Okay. I see what you're getting at. I guess, what I was talking about is that it's all an adjustable criterion that you use to decide that, "There's something there, I have to act." Clearly, you'd much better do to false alarm to tigers in the bush next to you than not to do so. Than to miss it, okay. In North America, here, they're bears, right? Therefore, if you're in a high-stress situation—it's late at night, and you're lost and so on—it makes good sense that you're going to see a lot other things as bears, even though they're not. It's not that you should come to the decision by stroking your chin going, "Okay, I think that's a bear." No, you see a bear. I mean, no question about that, even though someone says there's no bear there. It's giving off enough cues that are consistent with the interpretation that that's a bear—much like our backward messages, if they were consistent with the phrases that Don and I made up—leads you to that conclusion. It's not yes or no, although I'm just quite sure that with our backward messages experiments, had we put people on highly stressed situations, they would hear that even more. They would hear more, yes. If we put them on situations in which the cost went the other way, like, "If you get one of these wrong, you will not complete the course," then they might be a lot less liberal. Yes. So if you flipped the payoffs around, the threshold might be different? Yes, and make it so that, "No, no, you really have to control this stuff. Don't make these kinds of errors." Many, I suspect, would go, "No, I don't hear it as, 'I saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth,' which is a stupid phrase anyway." I mean, they would come up with... And that's the way things actually work. It's when you've accumulated, when the system has accumulated enough evidence to go and has good reasons to do that, it goes. This maybe makes some really good sense. In that sense, it's what I was getting at, if you want to make good decisions in that kind of rational sense, but it actually makes sense to go with it if you are in one of those situations: it's late at night; it's dark; you're lost. It does make good sense not to just assume there are no bears—I mean, seriously, right? If you're walking down the street, don't have 20-dollar bills hanging out of your pockets to attract muggers, even though you might do that anyway. Got you. Because those mechanisms actually are life-preserving and they have been selected for, I presume, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, that's why you're here and others aren't—because you chose your parents well. You did well, yes. So that—part of what it is. So if you're thinking about, say, Danny Kahneman's recent book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," there are certain situations he outlines where the thinking fast really gets you into trouble, but in also many, many situations where it gets you out of trouble, where thinking slow would not. There's not a simple panacea.