Idiot Brain (10 page)

This is just a brief overview of the many things that can go wrong with the brain's memory processes, via injury, surgery, disease, drink, or anything else. Very specific types of amnesia can occur (for example, forgetting memory for events but not for facts) and some memory deficits have no recogniz-able physical cause (some amnesias are believed to be purely psychological, stemming from denial or reaction to traumatic experiences).

How can such a convoluted, confusing, inconsistent, vulnerable and fragile system be of any use at all? Simply because, most of the time, it
does
work. It's still awesome, with a capacity and adaptability that puts even the most modern supercomputers to shame. The inherent flexibility and weird organization is something that's evolved over millions of years, so who am I to criticize? Human memory isn't perfect, but it's good enough.

_____________

*
Exactly
how
it does this is another matter altogether. It's not really established yet, and the details involving conscious influence over memory encoding and retrieval, self-oriented filtering of perception and numerous other relevant processes that may play a role probably warrant a book all of their own.

†
A lecturer once told me that one of the few things that HM did learn was where the cookies were stored. But he never had any memory of having just eaten any cookies, so he kept going back for more. He never gained memories, but he did gain weight. I can't confirm this; I haven't found any direct reports or evidence for it. However, there is a study where Jeffrey Brunstrom and his team, at the University of Bristol, told hungry subjects they'd be fed either 500 ml or 300 ml of soup. They were then fed these amounts. But an ingenious set-up using discreet pumps meant that some subjects who were given 300 ml had their bowls stealthily refilled so they actually consumed 500 ml, whereas some given 500 ml had their bowls stealthily drained so they only ended up eating 300 ml.
⁴⁰

The interesting finding was that the actual amount consumed was irrelevant; it was the amount the subject
remembered
eating (however wrongly) that dictated when they got hungry. Those who thought they had consumed 300 ml of soup but had consumed 500 ml reported getting hungry much earlier than those who thought they had consumed 500 ml but had eaten 300 ml. Clearly, memory can overrule actual physiological signals when it comes to determining appetite, so it looks as if serious memory disruption can have a marked effect on diet.

3

Fear: nothing to be scared of

The many ways in which the brain makes us constantly afraid

What are you worrying about right now? Loads of things, probably.

Have you got everything you need for your child's upcoming birthday party? Is the big work project going as well as it could be? Will your gas bill be more than you can afford? When did your mother last call; is she OK? That ache in your hip hasn't gone away; are you sure it's not arthritis? That leftover ground beef has been in the fridge for a week; what if someone eats it and gets food poisoning? Why is your foot itching? Remember when your pants fell down in school when you were nine; what if people still think about that? Does the car seem a bit sluggish to you? What's that noise? Is it a rat? What if it has the plague? Your boss will never believe you if you call in sick with that. On and on and on and on and on and on.

As we saw in the earlier fight-or-flight section, our brain is primed to think up potential threats. One arguable down side of our sophisticated intelligence is that the term “threat” is up for grabs. At one point in our dim evolutionary past, it focused only on actual, physical, life-endangering hazards, because the world was basically full of them, but those days are long gone. The world has changed, but our brains haven't caught up yet, and can find literally
anything
to fret about.
The extensive list above is just the smallest tip of the gargantuan neurotic iceberg created by our brains. Anything that might have a negative consequence, no matter how small or subjective, is logged as “worth worrying about.” And sometimes even that isn't needed. Have you ever avoided walking under ladders, or thrown salt over your shoulder, or stayed indoors on Friday the 13th? You have all the signs of being superstitious—you are genuinely stressing about situations or processes
that have no real basis in reality.
As a result, you then behave in ways that can't realistically have any effect on events, just to feel safer.

Equally, we can get sucked into conspiracy theories, getting worked up and paranoid about things that are technically possible but incredibly unlikely. Or the brain can create phobias—we get distressed about something that we understand is harmless but we are massively afraid of nonetheless. At other times, the brain doesn't even bother coming up with even the most tenuous reason for being worried and just worries about literally nothing. How many times have you heard people say it's “too quiet,” or that things have been uneventful so something bad is “due”? This sort of thing can afflict a person with chronic anxiety disorder. This is just one way in which the brain's tendency to worry can have actual physical effects on our bodies (high blood pressure, tension, trembling, weight loss/gain) and impact our general lives—in obsessing over harmless things, it actually causes us harm. Surveys by bodies including the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have reported that 1 in 10 adults in the UK will experience an anxiety-related disorder at some point in their lives,
¹
and in its 2009 report “In the Face of Fear,” UK Mental Health revealed a percentage rise of 12.8 in anxiety-related
conditions between 1993 and 2007.
²
That's nearly a million more UK adults who suffer from anxiety problems.

Who needs predators when we have our expanded craniums to drag us down with persistent stress?

What do four-leaf clovers and UFOs have in common?

(The connection between superstition, conspiracy theories and other bizarre beliefs)

Here's some interesting trivia for you: I'm involved in many shadowy conspiracies that are secretly controlling society. I'm in league with “Big Pharma” to suppress all natural remedies, alternative medicine and cancer cures for the sake of profit (nothing spells “big money” like potential consumers constantly dying). I'm part of a plot to ensure that the public never realizes that the moon landings were an elaborate sham. My day job in the field of mental healthcare and psychiatry is obviously a massive racket intended to crush free thinkers and to enforce conformity. I'm also part of the great conspiracy of global scientists to promote the myths of climate change, evolution, vaccination and a spherical earth. After all, there's nobody on earth wealthier and more powerful than scientists, and they can't risk losing this exalted position by people finding out how the world really works.

You may be surprised to hear of my involvement in so many conspiracies. It certainly stunned me. I found out only by accident thanks to the rigorous work of the commenters below many of my
Guardian
articles. Amid suggestions that
I am the worst writer in all of time, space and humanity, and I really should go and do unspeakable physical acts with my mother/pets/furniture, you will find “proof ” of my nefarious and manifold conspiracy involvement.

This is apparently to be expected when you contribute things to a major media platform, but I was still shocked. Some of the conspiracy theories didn't even make sense. When I wrote a piece to defend transgender people after a particularly vicious article attacking them (not one that I wrote, I hasten to add), I was accused of being part of an anti-transgender people conspiracy (because I didn't defend them aggressively enough) and a pro-transgender people conspiracy (because I defended them at all). Not only am I involved in many conspiracies, I'm also actively opposing myself in the process.

It's common for readers, seeing any article critical of their existing views or beliefs, to immediately conclude it's the work of a sinister power hell-bent on suppression, rather than a prematurely balding bloke sitting on a sofa in Cardiff.

The arrival of the Internet and an increasingly interconnected society has been a great boon to conspiracy theorists; people can more easily find “evidence” for their theories on 9/11 or share their wild conclusions regarding the CIA and AIDS with like-minded types, without ever leaving the house.

Conspiracy theories aren't a new phenomenon,
³
so perhaps it's a quirk of the brain that means people are so willing and able to be swallowed up by paranoid imaginings? In a way, it is. But, going back to the title, what's this got to do with superstition? Declaring that UFOs are real and trying to break into Area 51 is a far cry from thinking a four-leaf clover is good luck, so what's the connection?

An ironic question, as it's the tendency to see patterns in (often unrelated) things that links
both conspiracies and superstitions. There's actually a name for the experience of seeing connections in places where there actually aren't any: apophenia.
⁴
For example, if you accidentally wear your underpants inside out and then later win some money on a scratch card, and from then on you only ever wear your underpants inside out when buying scratch cards, that's apophenia; there's no possible way your underwear orientation can affect the value of a scratch card, but you've seen the pattern and are going with it. Similarly, if two unrelated but high-profile figures die of natural causes or in accidents within a month of each other, that's tragic. But if you look at the two individuals and find they were both critical of a certain political body or government and conclude that they were in fact assassinated as a result, that's apophenia. At their most basic levels, any conspiracy or superstition can likely be traced back to someone constructing a meaningful connection between unrelated occurrences.

It's not just the extremely paranoid or suspicious types who are prone to this, anyone can experience it. And it's pretty easy to see how this could come about.

The brain receives a constant stream of varied information and it has to make some sense of this. The world we perceive is the end result of all the processing the brain does with it. From the retina to the visual cortex to the hippocampus to the prefrontal cortex, the brain relies on many different areas to perform several different functions all working in tandem. (Those newspaper reports about neuroscientific “discoveries,” implying that a specific function of the brain has a specific region dedicated to it and it alone, are misleading. This is only a partial explanation at best.)

Despite numerous brain regions being involved in sensing
and perceiving the world around us, there are still major limitations; it's not that the brain is underpowered, it's just that we're bombarded by exceptionally dense information at all times, only some of which has any relevance to us, and the brain has barely a fraction of a second to process it for us to use. And because of this, the brain has numerous short cuts it employs to keep on top of things (more or less).

One of the ways the brain sorts out the important information from the unimportant is by recognizing and focusing on patterns. Direct examples of these can be observed in the visual system (see
Chapter 5
), but suffice it to say that the brain is constantly looking for links in the things we observe. This is undoubtedly a survival tactic, stemming from a time when our species faced constant danger—remember fight or flight?—and no doubt sets up a few false alarms. But what are a few false alarms if your survival is ensured?

But these false alarms are what cause problems. We end up with apophenia, and add to that the brain's fight-or-flight response and our tendency to leap to a worst-case-scenario conclusion and suddenly we have a lot on our minds. We see patterns in the world that don't exist, then attach serious significance to them on the off chance they may negatively affect us. Consider how many superstitions are based on avoiding bad luck or misfortune. You never hear about conspiracies that are intended to help people. The mysterious elite don't organize charity bake sales.

The brain also recognizes patterns and tendencies based on information stored in the memory. The things we experience inform our ways of thinking, which makes sense. However, our first experiences are during childhood, and this informs much about our later lives. The first time you attempt to
teach your parents how to use the latest video game is usually enough to dispel any remaining idea that they're all-knowing and omnipotent, but they can often seem like this during childhood. When we're growing up, much (if not all) of our environment is controlled; practically everything we know is told to us by adults we recognize and trust, everything that happens does so under their supervision. They are our primary reference points during the most formative years of our lives. So if your parents have superstitions, it's highly likely that you'll pick them up, without having to witness anything that would support them.
⁵

Crucially, this also means that many of our earliest memories are formed in a world that is seemingly organized and controlled by powerful figures who are hard to understand (rather than a world that is just random or chaotic). Such notions can be deeply entrenched, and that belief system can be carried into adulthood. It is more comforting for some adults to believe that the world is organized according to the plans of powerful authority figures, be they wealthy tycoons, alien lizards with a penchant for human flesh, or scientists.

The previous paragraph may suggest that people who believe in conspiracy theories are insecure, immature individuals, subconsciously yearning for parental approval that was never forthcoming as they grew up. And no doubt some of them are, but then so are countless people who aren't into conspiracy theories; I'm not going to ramble on for several paragraphs about the risks of making ill-founded connections between two unrelated things and then do exactly that myself. What's been said is just a way of suggesting means by which the development of the brain may make conspiracy theories more “plausible.”