A more scientific and intellectually honest approach would be to declare such phenomena as anomalous (although I don’t think that they are). Ghost cold would more properly be termed anomalous cold, or a regional cold anomaly, or something like that. One hypothesis for the alleged cold anomaly would be some sort of supernatural entity (call it a ghost) that acts as a heat sink generating cold spots. First, however, researchers should endeavor to find a mundane explanation for the cold. In fact before declaring it an anomaly they should thoroughly rule out any possible explanation. Only when that has been adequately done would they have a tentative anomaly.

It would then be reasonable to generate a hypothesis as to what is causing the anomalous cold, but such hypotheses are only useful if they lead to testable predictions. If the regional cold anomaly phenomenon is the result of “ghosts”, then what might we predict from that and how can we test it? I don’t know of any way to definitively test it, as ghosts are not a well-defined phenomenon, but perhaps there are some preliminary tests that could be done. For example, is there at least a correlation between cold spots and experiences often interpreted as ghosts or hauntings? Perhaps cold spots are just as likely in homes without other such “ghost phenomena.” Such a correlation would not prove the ghost hypothesis, of course, but it would at least be a start, and the lack of correlation would seriously jeopardize the hypothesis.

Ghost hunters, however, skip over all of this scientific methodology and reasoning and simply declare cold spots “ghost cold” and then use them as evidence for ghosts. They are then puzzled when scientists and skeptics don’t accept what they consider to be compelling evidence for ghosts, but what is really compelling evidence for the complete lack of scientific understanding on the part of ghost hunters.

All of the tools of the ghost hunting trade are the same as cold spots – they are common phenomena one might encounter in any location that are simply being declared ghost phenomena without ever a hypothesis being generated or tested. EMF meters, for example, simply detect the ubiquitous EMF in the modern world, which is then declared to be a ghost phenomenon. EMF is particularly satisfying because you can make the little needle move along the gauge, or (if you are digitally inclined) you can make numbers appear on the screen. You can wave around your EMF meter, without having the slightest idea how it works, and see stuff happen. Why are EMF associated with ghosts? There is no logical basis for this notion. It seems to be entirely based upon the fact that EMF is something you can encounter in alleged haunted locations, because you can encounter them almost anywhere.

We can now add the “ghost box” to the list of such equipment. This one is particularly humorous because it seems to be deliberately designed to generate false positive results. The inventor of the ghost box (sometimes called a spirit box) is Frank Sumption (who initially called it “Frank’s box). Here is his own description of the device.

The purpose of the ―box, as it is now referred to, is simply to provide a source of audio bits made up of fragments of human speech, music and noise. This noise is known as ―raw audio, it is the raw material out of which spirits of the deceased, and other entities use to create their own voices out of. ―Presumably by remodulating and remixing the raw audio to make the various noise fragments from words and voices of their choosing. In the box, the raw audio is created by sweeping the tuning of a radio electronically across it’s band, or tuning range, the resulting bits of speech music and noise are the raw audio. Radio is simply a convenient source of raw audio. However, that’s only a guess as to how the box works, there does seem be an RF component, or at times an actual signal received, or some other method of getting an external voice into the radio in the ―the box. Some of the manipulation of the raw audio seems to take place inside the electronics, again, presumably ―they can manipulate the electrical signals. I don’t have the equipment, or know how to be able to test these ideas.

What you hear, then, is what you would hear if you had an old radio with an analogue dial and you simply moved the dial quickly up and down the frequencies. You get a mix of static with snippets of speech or music. It is a perfect set up for generating audio pareidolia. The practice emerged out of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), in which ghost hunters listen to hours of audio recorded in an allegedly haunted locations and listen for noise that their brains can interpret as words. They then impose meaning on the random words. The ghost box just speeds up the process by generating “raw audio” for the pareidolia.

There are two layers of pattern recognition that are occurring when we have an eager ghost hunter sitting in front of a radio scanner (sorry, I mean “ghost box”) listening for the ghosts. The first layers is hearing words, names, or phrases. Sometimes the words are actual words coming through from a radio station. Sometimes, however, they are just noise that the brain tries to match to a word. Here is a great example - most of the words and phrases “heard” by the ghost hunter in this video are more imagination than anything else. I suggest you listen to the audio without the video and write down any words that you think you hear. Then watch the video and see if they match what the ghost hunter thought he heard.

On the video the alleged words flash up on the screen, so that suggestion will kick in. This is a well-known phenomenon – when a word or phrase is suggested to you, your brain will hear what is suggested. Here is a funny example  - the “O Fortuna” lyrics misinterpreted as funny phrases. (Perhaps ghosts are trying to communicate through the lyrics of foreign-language music.)

There is also a second layer of pattern recognition, however – the meaning of the words. People are very good at inferring meaning, which is a useful skill in a highly social species. Like many such things, we are too good in that we tend to over-infer meaning. I see people do this all the time with their pets. They assign very sophisticated human understanding and intent to behaviors that probably have a much simpler explanation. We saw this also when researchers tried to each apes to communicate with sign language. The researchers were very good at inferring what the apes meant even when signing essentially randomly. Sometimes, for example, the animal would try to be funny or playful by signing the opposite of what he meant.

We see the same thing in the ghost box video. The ghost hunter is good at taking the random words and phrases an inferring some meaning from them. He is then very impressed by the pattern of responses, concluding that there must be some intelligence behind them. Of course there is an intelligence at work, but it is at the receiving end of the words. Any apparent meaning to the alleged words  is coming from the minds of those making the connection. In this way it is similar to a cold reading. The person making all the connections in a cold reading is not the reader but the subject. They are finding meaning in the questions and fragments (I see a letter “J”) that the cold reader is throwing out.

This general phenomenon is very common – seeing patterns in randomness and then being overly impressed at the connections. The naive premise for the believer is that if there were not a real external phenomenon going on (in this case, ghosts) then the apparent connections would not be there. This premise, however, is false. Humans are good at finding connections anywhere, and in that way we often deceive ourselves into thinking there is something there when there isn’t.

Conclusion

The “ghost box” phenomenon is no different than the ghost hunting tools that have gone before it – it is a method for generating positive apparently anomalous findings that can then be assumed to be a ghost phenomenon by eager ghost hunters. At no point, however, is any actual scientific research going on. The obvious control experiments are never done – we can, for example, compare the noise generated by a radio scanner in allegedly haunted locations vs control locations. We can also have blinded evaluators listen the audio and see what they hear. We can then perform inter-rater reliability testing by having different people listen to the same audio and see if they hear the same thing.

If you read the comments to the ghost box video I linked to above you will see the occasional skeptic pointing all this out. You will see more true believers declaring this stunning “proof” of the paranormal. Right there is the disconnect between the various believer groups and skeptics. Ghost hunters simply do not understand scientific methodology, they do not understand the nature of scientific evidence nor the pitfalls of generating false positive results. This is, perhaps, an example of the failure of education to teach the fundamental of science. It is also an opportunity to do some remedial education. Understanding why these ghost hunters are not doing science is a great way to teach what science is, and is not.

While it may be difficult to tease out the contribution of genetic hard-wiring to things like belief in fairies, I think it remains an open question and it is not implausible that there is a significant contribution in some cases. Perhaps to some extent the conflict between skeptics and true believers is really a competition between different  versions of human brain wiring. Perhaps we will need to just accept this neurodiversity (its existence, if not its effect on our culture).

While this is a fascinating question, at the same time I feel there is a tendency in popular culture, especially among journalists and (ironically) some purveyors of dubious products and services, to reframe many phenomena with specific reference to the brain. Old fashioned learning is now “training your brain,” for example. While this is technically true, it makes it seem like a new, targeted, reductionist technology when in fact it’s just practice and learning.

A recent study explored one small aspect of the question of brain function and spirituality – researchers asked themselves if those healers and gurus who claim to be able to see a human aura are really synaesthetes, people with a hyperrobust connection among different brain regions that make them smell color, taste sound, feel numbers, or otherwise experience one sensation or experience with an overlay of another sensation. There is a form of synaethesia in which people experience the faces of those familiar to them as having a specific color.

This is a reasonable and interesting hypothesis. I generally try to avoid speculating about people’s motivations, but it I do often wonder what is going on in the minds of someone who claims to see something (like an aura) that is simply not there. I tend to chalk it up to the power of suggestion and self-deception, but perhaps in some cases the person really is seeing something. If true, the face-color synaesthesias hypothesis would bring aura reading in line with many other similar phenomena in which people are sincere, they are just misinterpreting a brain phenomenon as if it were an external phenomenon.

My favorite example of this is hypnagogia, or waking dreams. People have a real experience in which upon awakening they are paralyzed and feel a threatening presence. It is a real and scary experience, and is often interpreted as a demonic visit, alien abduction, or whatever is culturally appropriate. However it is really a well known neurological phenomenon, a parasomnia or abnormal sleep phenomenon. In other words – it is an internal brain experience, but can seem like a real external experience to the person having it.

It would be nice to have a similar explanation of something like seeing auras. It’s a tidy little explanation, and it is a bit easier to explain to people that they are experiencing a real brain phenomenon rather than that they are likely just self-deluded.

Unfortunately, the hypothesis seems to be wrong. The researchers analyzed the subjective reports of four people with face-color synaesthesia. They then compared this to reports and descriptions of people seeing alleged auras. They concluded:

“The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar.”

That means they are probably not the same thing. Of course this is a small study, and is therefore not the final word on this notion. However, there is no evidence for the synaesthesia-aura hypothesis. It is simply a new hypothesis without any evidence. The authors did a preliminary test of this hypothesis and found it to be lacking, so it is probably not worth pursuing further. Other researchers may decide to revisit the question, now that it has been raised, but until then all we have is a hypothesis that failed to get out of the gate.

Amazingly, the media has universally (as far as I have seen so far) misreported this item and have come to the opposite conclusion. Science Daily writes:”Synesthesia May Explain Healers Claims of Seeing People’s ‘Aura’”. Other outlets remove the “may”, and some even substitute the word “prove.”

This is an example of terrible science news reporting, and a major weakness of the current internet-based news infrastructure. It seems that the many news outlets reporting this story are mostly just reprinting one original source – a news report from the University of Granada. Somehow they got the story exactly wrong (erring on the side of sensationalism), and this error has been propagated throughout countless science news outlets and paranormal websites throughout the web. No one, apparently, clicked through to the original article. The article is behind a paywall, but the freely available abstract plainly states the phenomena are not the same.

Now a hypothesis that may be interesting but is without a shred of evidence, and in fact the one test of the hypothesis is negative, is being reported as if it were proven, and this meme-genie is out of the bottle.

Interestingly, this is also not the first time this hypothesis has been raised. In an article in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2011, Bridgette M. Perez and Terence Hines write about auras and bring up the synaesthesia hypothesis. They refer to prior case reports of color synaesthesia, such as the case of GW reported on in 2004. In this case GW sees color associated with people he has an emotional connection to, and even words or concepts that are emotional, such as love. This is one of those features that do not, however, fit well with seeing aura, which are not limited to people with a personal or emotional connection. While GW does not believe in mysticism, Perez and Hines report:

“It is especially interesting that in two separate samples, Zingrone, Alvarado, and Agee (2009) found that individuals who reported seeing auras were significantly more likely to report synesthetic events.”

Interesting, but circumstantial. Given the weight of the evidence it seems that the connection between auras and synaesthesia is speculative and based on superficial similarities that are likely coincidental. The new study, if anything, is a deeper look at the question, finding the hypothesis lacking.

You will learn none of this, unfortunately, reading the lay press, but instead will be led toward the exact opposite (but more headline worthy) conclusion.

As with any complex area of scientific research, perhaps the best way to evaluate the question is to put together a panel of experts to review all the existing evidence and then come up with a consensus opinion about that evidence. This is no guarantee of being right – the primary issue that tends to come up with such expert panels is that they were systematically biased toward one side of the debate. But assuming no major asymmetry in the constitution of an expert panel, they are an excellent way to evaluate the current state of the evidence on a specific question. Even better, of course, is when multiple independent panels all agree.

Recently an expert panel for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) reviewed the evidence for cell phone safety concluded that there is no clear evidence for any harm. This is good news. Their findings are similar to other reviews of the evidence, although often there is a difference in emphasis. For example, last year the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed the same evidence and concluded that:

 ”the evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification. The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”

They are not really saying anything different from the HPA – both groups concluded that there is no clear evidence of risk, but that further monitoring is prudent. The HPA, however, chose to emphasize that there is no conclusive evidence of risk, while the IARC chose to emphasize that there is no conclusive evidence that there is no risk. There  classification means that there may or may not be a risk, but further research is warranted. Meanwhile the FDA has concluded that: “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked cell phones with any health problems.” The Federal Communications Commission has this to say:

“There is no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer or a variety of other problems, including headaches, dizziness or memory loss. However, organizations in the United States and overseas are sponsoring research and investigating claims of possible health effects related to the use of wireless telephones.”

These all sound like variations of the same conclusion – there is no clear evidence of harm or risk, but we should continue to do research and monitor the results. Overall there is more caution when children are concerned, because there are fewer studies, children’s heads are smaller, and if cell phone use is started at a young age then lifetime use will be greater. Still there is no evidence of harm, but there are a priori reasons for greater caution.

Getting back to the new review by the HPA, here are their key conclusions:

• The evidence suggests that RF field exposure below guideline levels does not cause symptoms in humans and that the presence of RF fields cannot be detected by people, including those who report being sensitive to RF fields.
• A large number of studies have now been published on cancer risks in relation to mobile phone use. Overall, the results of studies have not demonstrated that the use of mobile phones causes brain tumours or any other type of cancer.
• As mobile phone technology has only been in widespread public use relatively recently, there is little information on risks beyond 15 years from first exposure. It is therefore important to continue to monitor the evidence, including that from national brain tumour trends. These have so far given no indication of any risk.
• Studies of other RF field exposures, such as those at work and from RF transmitters, have been more limited but have not given evidence that cancer is caused by these exposures.
• Research on other potential long-term effects of RF field exposures has been very limited, but the results provide no substantial evidence of adverse health effects; in particular for cardiovascular morbidity and reproductive function.

This is the fourth year of NECSS, and overall it was a very successful conference. We pretty much sold out our 400 seat venue. At the end of the conference Jamy Ian Swiss, our MC, polled the audience, asking if it was their first NECSS and also if it was their first skeptical conference. I was a bit surprised to see that most of the audience raised their hands to both questions. This is definitely a good thing – we appear to be bringing new people into the movement, as self-identified skeptics, and they are coming to our conferences. NECSS is also very much a science conference, and we market it that way, so it’s possible many of the attendees were there primarily for the science.

In my conversations with those attending, however, the prevailing sentiment was that NECSS was more than a science conference, but a cultural event for them. For those attending such a conference for the first time they felt it was almost a transformational experience. Many people have expressed this to me over the years of producing the SGU – they feel isolated in their family, their social circle, and their community. They feel they are the only one who thinks as they do – meaning skeptically. Being surrounded by 400 people who share a similar world view, all enjoying a shared experience of listening to presenters talk about science and celebrate rationalism was a new and profound experience for them.

We are all human and humans are intensely social creatures. Conferences such as NECSS are social events, and so they nurture this part of our human needs in addition to our intellectual curiosity.

A similar theme I hear from attendees is that, even as self-identified skeptics, nerds, and science enthusiasts, the conference reminds them of how much they have to learn. One attendee said to me that after the weekend he now knows less than he did at the beginning – meaning, of course, that he is now more aware of how much knowledge and information there is out there. His universe just became much bigger, and therefore his relative knowledge has shrunk. He said it with a smile and an excited tone in his voice.

That is perhaps a good way to view skepticism itself. Science is learning about the universe. Skepticism is learning how much you don’t know about the universe. The two things together are an intellectually potent combination – and that’s NECSS.

Walking around NECSS and talking to attendees also gives us a snapshot of the demographics of the skeptical movement. The age range of attendees is broad, from teens to retirees. The average age of attendees of skeptical conference has been decreasing over the last 5 or so years, and NECSS reflected that as well – while the range was broad, it definitely skewed young. Conventional wisdom among skeptical activists is that this this a result of social media. Much of our advertising for NECSS was through blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook. The young age of attendees should therefore not come as a surprise.

The possible downside to this is that we are missing older skeptics and science enthusiasts who would love to attend such a conference but simply aren’t plugged into the new social media. This is a dilemma for a relatively new and small conference. NECSS is run by two small non-profit organizations (New York City Skeptics and the New England Skeptical Society). While the conference is financially self-sustaining, we have to be frugal with our funds. We can get a lot of free advertising from social media – advertising that reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the sweet spot of our target demographic. We simply cannot afford traditional advertising that even approaches this reach.

I assume that many other organizations and events face the same choices – pick the low-hanging fruit, the cheap and easy networking and advertising vs time-consuming and expensive traditional media. Obviously big corporations and events can afford to do both, but even then it seems the return on investment is steadily shifting to the new media. I wonder if this reality is leaving behind those who are not keeping up with social media.

Ultimately I think this is a good thing. The internet and social media are great instruments of democracy. They level the playing field for smaller groups. It’s now possible for a small non-profit to run a conference on a shoestring budget and get the word out through existing and largely free social networks.  As we grow and have more resources we will probably reach into more traditional media. This means that the services offered by the internet can serve as a stepping stone to bigger things. They can help kick-start projects that would otherwise never get off the ground. (In fact, you may be aware of the site Kickstarter that literally does that.)

Getting back to demographics – I also noticed, as with past conferences, that women are about at parity with men. Twenty years ago skeptical conferences were mainly attended by men and occasionally their wives. Today the mix appears to be even. This, I think, is one great success of the movement. I attribute this to several factors – social media (again), a general trend in our culture to make science more open and welcoming to women, and groups dedicated to women in skepticism (like Skepchick). This progress has not always been smooth and frictionless, but overall has been positive.

I was also happy to see more minorities at NECSS than I think I have seen at any previous skeptical conference. This may be an artifact of the conference being held in New York City, which is very diverse, but hopefully is a more general trend.

Overall it was a great weekend. The speakers were wonderful, the attendees were enthusiastic, there were few technical glitches and the feedback has already been greatly positive. I always feel that my batteries are recharged at such conferences – it’s good to actually meet and speak with people who are at the other end of the intertubes. I even met a frequent commenter on this blog (CCbowers) but they had to tell me their commenter nym in order for me to recognize them. It is just one representation of the fact that, while social media is great, it can be a bit anonymous. Getting together in person still meets a basic social human need that the internet may facilitate but doesn’t fill by itself.

Researchers believe that there is a processing bottleneck in the brain. Essentially, we don’t have multi-core processors with multi-threading. In neurological terms, there are various functional components to consider. One is executive function, which is the “supervisor” function in the frontal lobes. Executive function includes the process of focusing attention, allocating resources, coordinating information, and scheduling cognitive tasks. Everything that the brain does is a finite resource, including executive function.

Attention itself is also limited. Our attention can be spread out so that we are taking in a lot of information at once, although very superficially. In this mode we may be scanning our environment for something interesting, or something in particular, but missing a lot of detail. Or we may focus our attention down on one thing, taking in greater detail but at the expense of ignoring everything else. This spreading out or narrowing down of our attention applies no only to sensory input but also ideas.

Some researchers believe that there are different information processing modes that we can engage in – either divergent or convergent. Divergent thinking allows us to look at the whole picture and integrate different pieces of information. Convergent thinking, however, is for deep systematic thinking on one topic.

So there are different ways in which we can focus our attention and different modes of information processing. There are also different specific pieces of information we can focus on, or sensory inputs, and of course there are different cognitive tasks to which we can turn our attention. I mention all of this because this is at the core of the difficulty with multitasking – switching among different types and targets of attention and information processing.

We cannot literally perform two cognitive tasks simultaneously. Rather, we switch between them (or among three or more tasks). Every time we switch our attention or our cognitive style that uses executive function resources (which are finite). Such tasks may also use resources of memory retrieval and other limited brain resources. Therefore some of our limited resources are being allocated just to switching tasks, and are therefore not available to engage in those tasks themselves.

This phenomenon is referred to as interference – one task interfering with performance on another. This interference can often be bidirectional – both tasks interfere with each other.

This definitely accords with my personal experience. If I am engaged in a mental task I prefer to have minimal distractions. If I am trying to also do something else at the same time (perhaps I am checking e-mail while writing a blog, for example) I waste time just just getting back mentally to where I was before I switched tasks. I end up taking more time to complete both tasks than if I did them separately, and the incidence of mistakes goes way up.

To use another computer analogy – sometimes, because I am impatient, if my computer is taking a long time to complete a task I may open another window and work on something else. Making the computer perform two processing-intensive tasks simulaneously takes more time than if both tasks were done alone, because the computer now has to expend resources loading information into memory and accessing the hard drive as it is switching resources from one task to the other (assuming you are using a computer that does not have true multitasking ability).

What I have summarized so far is all pretty basic. Researchers in this area are drilling down deeper to some interesting questions. For example, it is established that if we are performing a task that requires us to perceive certain information, that other information that is not related to the task will cause distraction and reduce performance (through interference). If, however, the task is using up all of our perceptual capacity (so-called high perceptual load), then there won’t be any perceptual capacity left over to notice the distracting events, and interference will paradoxically disappear. In every day terms – if you are fully engaged in a complex task you may “block out” distractions in your environment. Your brain simply won’t have the capacity to process those distractions.

This is only true, however, for tasks that are perceptually demanding. Tasks that are demanding in other ways, such as being memory intensive or involving stimuli that are at the edge of perception (things that are very small, for example) do not display this high-load phenomenon of causing interference to disappear.

There also appears to be an ongoing debate about perceptual interference being “early” or “late”. The early interference view is that distractions keep us from processing task-specific information at all – they interfere early in the process of perception. The late interference hypothesis is that the early processing of sensory stimuli is obligatory, and that distractions interfere with later processing of that perceived information. I haven’t read enough to have an opinion about which hypothesis is more likely to be true, and this appears to still be a point of controversy.

At this point you may be saying, “Wait a minute. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, and it doesn’t seem that my gum chewing suffers as a result.” This is due to what is called automaticity. Some tasks, like walking, inherently use little cognitive resources. This is because they utilize sub-cortical more primitive and subconscious parts of the brain. Our brain stems (the most primitive part of the brain) perform much of the processing necessary for simple walking. The brain stem also regulates other automatic functions, like breathing, which is why you don’t have to concentrate very hard in order to breath.

Learned tasks may also become more and more automatic over time. That is part of the benefit of practice. The cerebellum, for example, can learn coordinated motor actions, like shooting baskets, and can take over for our higher cognitive functions.

Automaticity, therefore, does not alter the reality of multitasking, but it does reduce the amount of cognitive resources that a task requires, and so the negative effects of multitasking are diminished. Both chewing gum and walking are tasks with high automaticity, which is the reason for the cliche insult in the first place.

The new study has to do with a special category of multitasking called media multitasking – looking at TV while texting a friend and watching a YouTube video on your iPad, for example. Research has shown consistent differences in information processing between high media multitaskers (HMMs) and low media multitaskers (LMMs). This research shows that HMMs perform worse on attentional tasks than LMMs. Specifically HMMs tend to maintain a wider attentional scope, even when instructed to focus on something specific, and therefore perform worse on tasks that require a narrow attentional scope.

This makes sense, although there does not appear to be any data that helps separate out cause and effect. Do HMMs learn to maintain a wider attentional scope, or are people who tend to have a wider attentional scope drawn to media multitasking? In fact, HMMs tend to be ironically worse at multitasking, because their wide attentional scope makes them more distractable and they suffer greater interference when task switching.

The new study is interesting because it set out to find if there is any task at which HMMs have an advantage. They separate subjects into groups of HMMs and LMMs and then gave them two different tasks. The subjects had to find a target shape on a computer screen among similar shapes. In one version of the task there was also a sound that drew attention to the target shape, in another version there was no sound. Similar to previous research, the HMMs did worse than the LMMs on the target finding task without the sound. They were worse at filtering out task-irrelevant stimuli. However, they performed better than the LMMs when the sound was present.

The thinking here is that HMMs are better at integrating multiple sensory inputs. This may be the first study to find a cognitive advantage to HMMs. It does make a certain superficial sense – media multitasking often involves paying attention to multiple difference kinds of sensory input at once.

Again – this study did not address cause and effect, so we are left not knowing if this potential advantage of integrating multiple sensory inputs is learned by HMMs or causes people to gravitate toward being an HMM. This is also (standard caveats) a single smallish study that needs to be replicated.

Conclusion

The human brain does not appear to be evolved for multitasking. Our brains have finite resources that have to be divided among the tasks in which we engage. Many societies, however, seem to be moving toward greater and greater multitasking demands. More and more people are becoming HMMs, whether they want to or not.

The unintended consequence of our information-heavy multimedia society is that we may be creating a generation of people who maintain a wide scope of attention so as to take in all of the sensory information with which they are bombarded. However, this comes at the expense of being able to focus attention on a single task and filter out distractions. The result is that most cognitive tasks suffer (including, ironically, multitasking itself).

If the results of the current study are reliable and hold up to replication, it seems there may be some advantages to media multitasking, specifically in the ability to integrate different streams of sensory input. The net effect of all this still needs to be sorted out. It seems, however, that if we want to mitigate the effects of heavy media multitasking we need to either reduce it, or design tasks that take advantage of the benefits and mitigate the weaknesses.

I do wonder if this is just a phase we are going through. Will future generations look back at the early 21st century and marvel at the ridiculous media multitasking. It may seem as if we are in the adolescence of using media technology, and later generations will be more mature and will understand the need to control our media exposure. We need to resist the temptation to extrapolate current trends indefinitely into the future – in other words, we should not assume that future generations will be even more heavily multimedia consumers. In addition to simply becoming more mature in this respect, technology may throw another curve ball in the mix and change the way we consume media in ways we cannot currently predict.

Either way, this is research worth following and a trend worth keeping one eye on – although not necessarily while engaging in other tasks.

The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.

To put the significance of such a find in perspective, the oldest human cities are about 7,000 years old, and the oldest Indian city is Harrappa, about 4,600 years old. If the Cambay ruins are genuine, then that would predate the oldest known human city by more than two thousand years and the oldest Indian city by 5,000 years. The implications of this, if true, would indeed be huge. The BBC article offers this quote:

“There’s a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilization with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch,” he said.

It doesn’t take long, however, for the entire story to begin to unravel, once a critical eye it turned toward the claims. I always like to consider the plausibility of such claims. In this case, finding a city older than any previously known city is not entirely implausible. It’s possible that a culture in one location developed a city which did not survive and was forgotten to history. The oldest example of anything is always only as old as the oldest example discovered, and so scientists are frequently pushing back the date of the “oldest” something as new discoveries are made.

I disagree with the quotation above – this would not cause archaeologists to rewrite ancient human history from scratch. Like most scientific discoveries made in a discipline that is already fairly well developed, new discovery tend to deepen knowledge or provide further context, but rarely overturn well-established facts. This would be an interesting new piece to the puzzle of ancient human history, but could be little more than a side note as far as other ancient civilizations are concerned.

However, the new find does stretch plausibility, as it seems unlikely that there would have been a civilization capable of building a massive city 5,000 years earlier than evidence suggests for that part of the world. It seems incongruous with existing evidence, and that is reason for skepticism (not a-priori rejection, but certainly a high level of scientific skepticism).

Regarding the story itself, I noted that it was published by the BBC in 2002 – a decade ago. That led to the question – well, why haven’t I heard of this before? I am a pretty avid reader of science news, and sure some things can slip beneath my notice, but this would be a huge science news story and I would be very likely to have seen it. Where is all the follow up research? Where is the Nova or National Geographic special? There seems to be a disconnect between the magnitude of this science story and the coverage it is getting – that is, if it were real.

So let’s take a closer look at that BBC article. The sensationalism in the article does not bode well, but that could simply be the result of bad reporting rather than a dubious story. One basic question to ask about any science news item is – who are the scientists involved. Hmmm… the article does not mention them by name. That is odd – I read many science news stories, and the names of the scientists and their institutions are almost always prominent – partly because the information likely came from a press release promoting the institution’s research. The scientists are described variously as “marine scientists,” “marine archaeologists,” and “oceanographers.” Again, that could be just bad reporting, but it all seems rather vague to me, and makes me really curious as to who these “marine scientists” are.

One expert named in the article is Graham Hancock, who is a known pseudoarchaeologist with many fanciful notions about ancient civilizations.  Hancock is the promoter of the  ”Orion correlation hypothesis” – that the pyramids of Gyza are arranged in the pattern of stars in Orion’s belt. He is also author of the “non-fiction” book, Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. The fact that he has his hand anywhere near this discovery is enough to cast significant doubt upon the finds. (Hancock, by the way, is the source of the above sensational quote.) Are there any legitimate scientists involved with this discovery at all?

The BBC articles quotes one real archaeologist:

However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum said more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilization.

While it may seem like good reporting to include a dissenting opinion from an expert, this kind of reporting is actually counterproductive. Naming a prestigious  institution, even in expressing skepticism, lends credibility to the whole story. The comments from Morris sound generic and vague, as if he was asked over the phone about the find and gave general comments, without have the opportunity to examine the claims in detail. The quote above also makes it sound like there is some real evidence, but of course we need to verify that evidence – as if this is all just part of the normal scientific process. This is the opposite of “damning with faint praise.” Morris is “promoting with faint criticism.”

I suspect he just wasn’t familiar enough with the specifics of the Cambay sunken city claims, or perhaps he was and this is simply how we was selectively quoted by the reporter. That is very likely – reporters often conduct interviews with experts not to find out what the story is, because they have already written it. Rather they are just mining for quotes they can plug into the story – “insert generic skepticism from expert here.” Given the overall terrible reporting on this story, this latter scenario seems very likely.

What about the carbon dating? First, where are the artifacts? Who has examined them, and who conducted the carbon dating? The mention of carbon dating also always raises a red flag for me. That is the dating method most in the public consciousness, and so it gets mentioned very often in dubious article or articles about dubious research. Other less-well-known dating methods usually crop up in legitimate articles. Carbon dating is used and will often be mentioned legitimately, but its mention does always prompt the question – is this a legitimate use of carbon dating. In this case the article mentions pottery and beads (also not verified), which cannot be carbon dated. Further the fact that the city is under the ocean makes it very unlikely that organic matter would have survived for thousands of years. It is very unlikely that such a find would contain anything that could be carbon dated.

Reports mention that the carbon dating was conducted on pieces of wood, but the source of the wood is questionable. Apparently in historic times that part of the gulf was covered with forest.

Finally, I like to go to official sources to see what the experts have to say about such things. I would think such a find would have many articles 10 years later in the published literature, or at least discussion on official archaeology cites. The only reference I could find, however, was on Bad Archaeology. Not surprisingly the author, Scott de Brestianat, trashed the claims and made many of the same points I did. Other articles simply mention that the archaeological community has disputed every aspect of the claims made for a sunken city.

Conclusion:

It seems that the claim of a sunken city in the  Gulf of Cambay is just another pseudoarchaeological claim made by dubious researchers and wholly rejected by the legitimate archaeological community. The BBC article is an excellent example of terrible science reporting, but unfortunately has lent credibility to the story in the eyes of the public.

This view touches our democratic and individualistic sensibilities and our sense of fairness. Further, the political process is often one of compromise. Creationists are happy to exploit these facts, and claim that they just want what’s fair, they want “equal time,” they want to “teach the controversy,” and they just don’t think evolution should get any special treatment. They use these strategies because they resonate with the American culture. Also it’s easy to portray egg-headed intellectual scientists as ivory tower elitists. This all may be effective politics, but it is bad science and bad for education.

A recent editorial in the Tennessean plays the “compatible” card – here it is in its entirety:

Science has proved the universe began with a collision of two specks moving in an oversize void a very long time ago, evolving into what we have today.

How did they get together? Where did they come from? That is where God came in.

What I don’t understand is, why argue over evolution and creation when both theories are true?

There is so much wrong with this brief editorial, but it’s worth breaking it down. I am not sure where the writer got his impression of the Big Bang, but it was not a collision of two specks moving in a void. I don’t know but I suspect the “void” comment is an attempt to mirror language from Genesis. Of course, we are a long way from fully understanding the nature of the Big Bang, but our best theory today does not resemble the above summary. A better description would be – the Big Bang was some sort of quantum singularity containing all of the energy of the universe, that rapidly expanded and cooled forming not only the stuff in the universe but the time and space of the universe. There was no void into which the universe expanded – space itself expanded. I could also add that both matter and anti-matter emerged from the Big Bang (just like matter and anti-matter virtual particles emerge from the quantum foam), and for some reason there was a tiny excess residue of matter. That left over matter residue is our universe.

The second sentence, “How did they get together? Where did they come from? That is where God came in,” is a god-of-the-gaps fallacy. This strategy attempts to insert God into any gap in our current understanding of the universe. This is a flawed strategy on many levels. First, it is a logical fallacy, an argument from ignorance. It also confuses unexplained with unexplainable. Over the last several centuries, since the application of scientific methods to our models of the world, we have been making steady progress in developing testable theories that explain how the world works. It is folly to assume that anything we cannot currently explain will remain forever unexplainable by science.

This is just a set up for future conflict. If you insert God into a current gap in our knowledge, then you will resist attempts to fill that gap with scientific explanations. That is creationism in a nut shell. Before we had any idea where humans and other life came from we filled in that gap in our knowledge with superstitions about an all-powerful creator. Today those superstitions are religious dogma, and there are those who vehemently resist scientific explanations of origins in order to preserve their creation myths.

I guess it is progress if more creationists acknowledge that the universe evolves in many ways, including organic evolution, but retreating to the origin of the universe itself is not really a solution. There will always be gaps in our knowledge into which one can insert  God – that strategy itself has to be exposed as fallacious and counterproductive.

The main problem with the final sentence is that it calls evolution and creationism both “theories.” This is a false equivalency, and explains why the writer feels the two can be compatible. Evolution is a scientific theory, in that it is a web of connected facts and explanations for a group of observable phenomena – namely life. Theory, in the scientific sense, does not mean “guess” and does not imply uncertainty. The term “hypothesis” is used to refer to a guess that has not yet survived systematic testings. Evolution actually contains many subtheories, such as natural selection, and common descent, which have been established to varying degrees. Common descent is the most solidly established part of evolutionary theory, and deserves to be treated as a confirmed scientific fact. All life on earth is related through common descent. There are multiple independent lines of evidence that all point to that conclusion, and there is no other viable theory that can account for those lines of evidence. Common descent is as well established as many other facts that we take for granted – the sun is the center of our solar system, the earth’s crust is divided into plates that move around, DNA is the molecule of inheritance, and gravity is a force that attracts all matter to all other matter, to give just a few examples. There is no more scientific controversy over the fact of evolution than there is about the fact of gravity or plate tectonics.

Creation, on the other hand, is not a theory at all. It fails at the first criterion of a scientific theory – it is not falsifiable. At least the form of creationist belief most commonly put forward today is not falsifiable. If stated in a falsifiable manner, then creation has already been falsified. In order to evade the overwhelming scientific evidence, however, creationists needs to state their belief in terms that are not falsifiable. This usually takes the form of, “well God could have created life to look like anything he wants.” In practice this means that whatever we find when we look at nature, that must be how God intended nature to be. Therefore there is no observation that can falsify creation, because that would be “constraining the mind of God.” God could have, for example, created life to appear exactly as if it had evolved through natural mechanisms. Stripped down, that is the essence of the creationist explanation for evidence that appears to support evolution.

This strategy is often exposed by taking it to the absurd extreme of stating that God created the entire universe 5 minutes ago, but simply made it look as if it is ancient and has a history, including all of your memories. If God is omnipotent then by definition he could do this. You cannot falsify this idea, that is why it is not a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Many creationist arguments (such as the notion that God created light already on its way to earth from distant stars) are functionally the same as the above statement.

Conclusion

Science is a meritocracy of ideas and evidence – not a democracy of opinions. All opinions are not considered equal. There is, rather, a hierarchy of ideas, theories, fact, and claims. The better established a theory is by observation and experiment, the more weight it is given by the scientific community. Some theories are so well established that we consider them laws of nature. Others are established to the point that they are treated as facts. Then there is a spectrum of theories from probably true, to genuinely controversial, to probably not true.

The point of using scientific methods is to figure out which theories are objectively better. Evolution is an established scientific fact. Creation is a pre-scientific myth that has already been discarded by science as completely wrong. They are not compatible.

I will add, however, that “creationism” actually encompasses a spectrum of belief. Most of that spectrum denies evolution to some degree. Young earth creationists deny evolution almost entirely (maybe they allow for some micro-evolution, whatever that is). At the other end of the spectrum are those who accept all of the scientific findings on origins, but argue that God set the universe in motion, or intended the universe to evolve the way it did. These are faith-based claims. If they are framed and acknowledged as personal choices of faith, without making any scientific claims or using dubious logic, then they can be compatible with evolution in that they are completely separate. This is not really creationism any more, but is closer to a deist position. This represents a retreat all the way outside of the realm of science. If one wishes to maintain faith but still be compatible with science, this is the only viable position. (Being compatible with materialist philosophy is a different issue.)

The deist position, however, appears to be a small minority. Creationists generally deny science to some degree, and it is that pseudoscientific denial that we are opposing. The pseudoscientific denial of science is not compatible with science.

One advantage of the skeptical world view is that it seeks to understand the weaknesses and biases of human cognition, and it respects accurate knowledge over our emotional desires and needs. Skeptics attempt to see the world as it actually is, not how they might want it to be. Examples of what can happen when you take an unskeptical view abound.

Take, for example, the people gathering at the small French village of Bugarach. In their attempts to understand the world and have a sense of control of their lives by predicting important events in the future, they have come to the come to the conclusion that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. The end of the world is a pretty big event, and if you truly believed this was going to happen that would be very disturbing. It is no surprise, therefore, that this commune of New Age believers gathering in Bugarach have a second belief that is their salvation.

They believe that a mountain near the village, Pic de Bugarach (pictured here) is a magical mountain. It’s part Roswell and part Shangri La. They believe that the mountain has magical energies, and is a focus of alien attention, sometimes called the “alien garage.”

The result is a confluence of superstitious belief – Mayan calendar end-of-the-world predictions, new age magical energy/mystical locations, and UFO religious cult. One of the new agers, who calls himself “Jean”, summarizes it nicely:

 ”The apocalypse we believe in is the end of a certain world and the beginning of another,” he offers. “A new spiritual world. The year 2012 is the end of a cycle of suffering. Bugarach is one of the major chakras of the earth, a place devoted to welcoming the energies of tomorrow.”

The UFO component appears to be plugged in directly from movies, showing how entertainment both reflects and influences culture. The fact that UFO’s like to visit mountains that peak up over their surroundings is right out of Close Encounters and the Devil’s Tower. The notion that aliens would come to the earth to save a select few from the end of the world is the plot of the 2009 film, Knowing.

Some local officials are apparently worried that the local hippie UFO commune will turn into another Heaven’s Gate. It is concerning that they believe they will be given a ride on a UFO and taken to a “spiritual world.” Perhaps they will reason that you have to shed your physical body in order to get to spirit land. This view may become more compelling when it is apparent that no physical flying saucer is arriving to take them away.  I hope not, and feel this is probably unlikely. It would probably require an influential cult leader to orchestrate a repeat of Heaven’s Gate, and this situation sounds more like a commune, but we will have to wait and see.

Of course the Mayan calendar nonsense has been deconstructed by skeptics many times. There is no reason to think that the end of a calendar means the literal end of the world. There is no evidence that the Mayans even believed this. Further, the Mayan calendar, while pretty accurate for its time, missed certain astronomical details like the need for leap years, and so the world should have ended last year if there were any truth to the Mayan prediction thing (or I guess next year, depending on how you look at it).

From a skeptical point of view the show affair is rather sad. These people are trying to understand their world and just have some sense of control over their lives, but their methods are hopelessly dysfunctional. They have been lead to the conclusion that the world is going to end but they, the enlightened few, will be saved by magical beings from the sky, only to enter a new spiritual age. The thematic resemblance to the Christian Rapture is probably not a coincidence.

What will happen when the world does not end on December 21, 2012? We have the past to help us predict what is likely to happen. True believers who predict a major event that does not come to pass generally do not experience a loss of faith, as you might predict. They do have a crisis which causes considerable cognitive dissonance, but they generally do not resolve that dissonance by concluding that they were wrong, their methods were therefore wrong, and that perhaps they should be more skeptical in the future. Rather they tend to double down, invest even more in their faith, and find some way to rationalize their apparent failure. Harold Camping, for example, when the apocalypse did not occur last Spring, concluded that it did occur, it was just an invisible apocalypse (he claimed it was a “spiritual” apocalypse not visibly apparent to anyone but him).

I therefore predict that those heavily invested in the 2012 end-of-the-world belief will conclude that we experienced some sort of spiritual transformation – an invisible end of the world. Can’t you feel it? I also predict that the failure of the end of the world to take place by the end of 2012 will not in the least dissuade the next apocalyptic prophet from predicting the end of the world.

This led to a discussion of Galileo. I believe I am one of the many scientists and skeptics who independently observed that cranks of various kinds have a tendency to compare themselves to the great Italian astronomer. Galileo Galilei was persecuted and his claims were dismissed out of hand, the logic goes, and so when the crank’s claims are likewise dismissed they feel that means they must be analogous to Galileo in other ways. There are multiple problems with the line of reasoning, however.

The definitive assessment of this comparison comes from the original version of the movie, Bedazzled (highly recommended). Dudley Moore’s character calls Satan a nutcase (for claiming to be Satan), and Satan replies, “They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud and Galileo.” Moore then replies, “They said it of a lot of nutcases too.”

For every visionary scientist whose claims are initially rejected because they are so radical, only to be later confirmed and change our view of the universe, there are uncountable wannabes whose ideas are rejected because they are hopelessly flawed. Being rejected is not the best manner in which to be compared to Galileo, and in itself does not imply that one is a visionary or that one’s ideas are correct. Making the comparison, however, does imply a distorted self-view, and a certain lack of humility that if anything is predictive of being cranky rather than a visionary scientist.

In any case, there is an even greater flaw in the comparison. Galileo was persecuted by the church for making statements that were heretical because they went against the authority and dogma of the time. Galileo had been ordered by the Pope not to defend Copernican heliocentrism, because it was felt to contradict the scriptures. Galileo promised he would not, and then in 1632 published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – written as a dialogue in which one character defends heliocentrism, and another, named Simplicio, defends geocentrism. It was widely believed that Simplicio was speaking the words of Pope Urban, who took exception to being called a simpleton. There are other political complexities to the story, but at its core Galileo was tried and convicted of heresy and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life.

Galileo’s persecution was at the hands of the church who based its beliefs on revelation and authority, not scientific investigation. There is therefore no meaningful analogy to be drawn to those whose ideas are criticized on scientific grounds. Before I discuss that further I will note that Galileo’s ideas were rejected by his fellow astronomers. Specifically it was believed that if the earth revolves about the sun then we should observe stellar parallax – a shifting in the relative position of stars caused by the changing position of the earth. Stellar parallax had not been observed, however. This is because the stars are a lot farther away than astronomers at the time imagined. There is stellar parallax, but it is a very small effect and even today can only be observed for the closest stars.

Scientific differences can be addressed by scientific evidence and arguments. Anyone hoping to change our view of reality must provide evidence to support the proposed change, and that evidence should be proportional to the evidence that is being overturned. Take the recent episode with the scientists who believed they clocked neutrinos travelling faster than light. This claim was put forward cautiously and was met with skepticism. The scientists involved and their colleagues then went to work making further observations and checking everything carefully. It now seems the original claim was in error, but still scientists will put this issue to bed with definitive observations.

Expanding on the notion that there is a big difference between rejecting a scientific claim because it violates current dogma, and meeting a claim with initial skepticism because it contradicts established science, we should also discuss the principle of exclusion. There are certain ideas in science that have been established to such a high degree that we can treat them as laws, in fact not to would be intellectually perverse. We always recognize that our knowledge is incomplete, but that does not add up to the notion that “anything is possible.” Certain things are impossible. Mark Crislip summarized the situation in a recent SBM post:

This iteration of the multiverse has what appear to be be rules that cannot be broken. There are real impossibilities. The circle cannot be squared. The Laws of Thermodynamics cannot be circumvented, and those who try to develop perpetual motion machines are bound to fail as it is impossible. The speed of light is as fast as one can go.

Thermodynamics is a good example. Many a crank has bashed their head endlessly against the laws of thermodynamics, all with the same predictable result. You cannot get energy from nothing. Scientists do not use the term “impossible” lightly, but there are certain things that are simply impossible.

Functionally “impossible” means that any claim to have performed the impossible will be assumed to be a mistake or error as the default rational position. This leaves open a crack the possibility of proving the impossible is real, but it will take an amount and quality of evidence that is on the same order of magnitude as all the evidence that tells us the thing is impossible in the first place. Only after surviving exhaustive attempts to demonstrate that the claim for the impossible is false have failed, and we are left with no other possibility, is it reasonable to entertain the idea that the impossible may be possible.

For some things that has never happened and probably never will. So far so one has violated the laws of thermodynamics, has broken the speed of light, or has violated the arrow of time. I have written about Daryl Bem’s research that claims to show the transfer of information into the past. Like all such research that purports to show the impossible, it is not faring well under close scrutiny and attempts at replication.

The chief problem, therefore, with the Galileo gambit is the failure to understand the difference between a well-established scientific law and religious dogma. Beware the person who claims they have fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe, but doesn’t seem to grasp this distinction, and further doesn’t understand the heavy burden of proof that rests upon their shoulders for claiming the impossible to be true.

The phenomenon is called autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). I have been reading about this for a short time, it seems to be a growing subculture on the internet and is just peaking through to mainstream awareness.

By the way – this is perhaps another phenomenon worth pointing out, the internet allowing for previously personal and hidden experiences to come to general awareness. Human communication has been increased to the point that people who have what they think are unique personal experiences can find each other, eventually bringing the phenomenon to general awareness, giving it a name and an internet footprint. Of course, such phenomena are not always real – sometimes a real pattern emerges from the internet, sometimes illusory or misidentified patterns, the cultural equivalent of pareidolia.

But I have left you waiting long enough – what is ASMR? It is described as a pleasurable and calming tingling sensation in the back of the head. It is often called a brain orgasm, or braingasm (which I think is a bit misleading, since the regular kind of orgasm occurs in the brain with some peripheral manifestations). This experience can be triggered by a variety of odd sensations. The ASMR Research and Support website (you knew that had to exist) gives a list:

- Exposure to slow, accented, or unique speech patterns
- Viewing educational or instructive videos or lectures
- Experiencing a high empathetic or sympathetic reaction to an event
- Enjoying a piece of art or music
- Watching another person complete a task, often in a diligent, attentive manner – examples would be filling out a form, writing a check, going through a purse or bag, inspecting an item closely, etc.
- Close, personal attention from another person
- Haircuts, or other touch from another on head or back

This is a diverse list of triggers, but I can see what they all have in common. They all seem to engage the same networks of the brain – that part of us that interacts carefully and thoughtfully with our environment or with other people. There is something calmly satisfying about such things. (Total aside – this reminds me of an episode of Spongebob in which he confessed he loves the sound that two pickles make when you rub them together.)

But of course not everyone gets a definite tingling sensation in their head and spine as a result of this soft satisfaction. I always start my investigations of such phenomena by asking the most basic question – is it real? In this case, I don’t think there is a definitive answer, but I am inclined to believe that it is. There are a number of people who seem to have independently (that is always the key, but it is a recent enough phenomenon that this appears to be true) experienced and described the same syndrome with some fairly specific details. In this way it’s similar to migraine headaches – we know they exist as a syndrome primarily because many different people report the same constellation of symptoms and natural history.

Another way to address this question is to ask how plausible the phenomenon is. For reasons I will get into below, I think it is entirely plausible, or at least this is no obstacle to acceptance of ASMR as real.

So, with the small caveat that we are not completely sure at this time, it seems reasonable to proceed with the working assumption that ASMR is a real thing. If it is, then what’s going on. That is a matter for research. While there are references to research on the internet, it seems if any is happening at this time it is entirely descriptive. A PubMed search for ASMR (the full name, not the acronym) yielded exactly zero results. This could mean that there is a more technical term for ASMR and I need to find out what that is, but I have not been able to find any other terms for ASMR. So if there is real research going on nothing has been published in the peer-reviewed literature so far.

Nicholas Tufnell wrote about his own experience with ASMR at the Huffington Post, and his description seems typical. I have never experienced this myself. I listened to the whispering in Latin video, which was eerily intimate at first, and then just a bit weird, although I always love listening to Latin. But I experienced no tingling or euphoria. The only thing in my life that I can relate to this is when I was a child very occasionally listening to a certain frequency of tapping, just about two per second, like a relentless monotonous beat, would “resonate” in my brain. I basically grew out of these experiences and have not had them for decades.

Looking back as a neurologist I have wondered what they were. They could even have been little seizures. Seizures can be triggered by auditory stimuli. Perhaps ASMR is a type of seizure. Seizures can sometime be pleasurable, and can be triggered by these sorts of things.

Or, ASMR could just be a way of activating the pleasure response. Vertebrate brains are fundamentally hardwired for pleasure and pain – for positive and negative behavioral feedback. We are rewarded with a pleasurable sensation for doing things and experiencing things that increase our survival probability, and have a negative or painful experience to make us avoid harmful behavior or warn us about potential danger or injury. Over evolutionary time a complex set of reward and aversion feedbacks have developed.

Add to this the notion of neurodiversity – the fact that all of our human brains are not clones or copy cats, but vary in every possible way they can vary. We have a range of likes and dislikes, and there are individuals and even subcultures that seem to have a different pattern of pleasure stimulation than what is typical. (Perhaps in some cases this is largely cultural, not neurotypical.) S&M comes to mind. If reports are accurate, there are some people who experience pain as pleasurable and erotic.

Admittedly it gets very difficult teasing out learned associations and behaviors from innate hardwired ones, and all this applies to ASMR as well.

In any case it is plausible that a subset of the population has a particular pattern of neural hard wiring so that when they experience certain things that are typically quietly satisfying they get a little extra shot to their pleasure center. Once they experience this then they seek out greater and greater triggers of this response, and perhaps then a learning or conditioning component kicks in. Tufnell even describes getting a little addicted to seeking out ASMR stimuli.

What we need at this point are functional MRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies that look at what is happening in the brains of people while experiencing ASMR, vs typical controls. Are their brains really different, and in what way? I also wonder if the same or similar experience can be artificially induced in typical (non-ASMR) people.

This is just another example of how our brains are fantastically complex and weird. How else can you explain the existence of videos of whispering Latin and wrapping paper noise on YouTube.