by Dean Burnett
5 E. R. Kandel and C. Pittenger, ‘The past, the future and the biology of memory storage’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 1999, 354(1392), pp. 2027–52
6 D. R. Godden and A.D. Baddeley, ‘Context‐dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater’, British Journal of Psychology, 1975, 66(3), pp. 325–31
7 R. Blair, ‘Facial expressions, their communicatory functions and neuro-cognitive substrates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2003, 358(1431), pp. 561–72
8 R. N. Henson, ‘Short-term memory for serial order: The start-end model’, Cognitive Psychology, 1998, 36(2), pp. 73–137
9 W. Klimesch, The Structure of Long-term Memory: A Connectivity Model of Semantic Processing, Psychology Press, 2013
10 K. Okada, K. L. Vilberg and M. D. Rugg, ‘Comparison of the neural correlates of retrieval success in tests of cued recall and recognition memory’, Human Brain Mapping, 2012, 33(3), pp. 523–33
11 H. Eichenbaum, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2011
12 E. E. Bouchery et al., ‘Economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in the US, 2006’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2011, 41(5), pp. 516–24
13 A. Ameer and R. R. Watson, ‘The Psychological Synergistic Effects of Alcohol and Caffeine’, in R. R. Watson et al., Alcohol, Nutrition, and Health Consequences, Springer, 2013, pp. 265–70
14 L. E. McGuigan, Cognitive Effects of Alcohol Abuse: Awareness by Students and Practicing Speech-language Pathologists, Wichita State University, 2013
15 T. R. McGee et al., ‘Alcohol consumption by university students: Engagement in hazardous and delinquent behaviours and experiences of harm’, in The Stockholm Criminology Symposium 2012, Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, 2012
16 K. Poikolainen, K. Leppänen and E. Vuori, ‘Alcohol sales and fatal alcohol poisonings: A time series analysis’, Addiction, 2002, 97(8), pp. 1037–40
17 B. M. Jones and M. K. Jones, ‘Alcohol and memory impairment in male and female social drinkers’, in I. M. Bimbaum and E. S. Parker (eds) Alcohol and Human Memory (PLE: Memory), 2014, 2, pp. 127–40
18 D. W. Goodwin, ‘The alcoholic blackout and how to prevent it’, in I. M. Bimbaum and E. S. Parker (eds) Alcohol and Human Memory, 2014, 2, pp. 177–83
19 H. Weingartner and D. L. Murphy, ‘State-dependent storage and retrieval of experience while intoxicated’, in I. M. Bimbaum and E. S. Parker (eds) Alcohol and Human Memory (PLE: Memory), 2014, 2, pp. 159–75
20 J. Longrigg, Greek Rational Medicine: Philosophy and Medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians, Routledge, 2013
21 A. G. Greenwald, ‘The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history’, American Psychologist, 1980, 35(7), p. 603
22 U. Neisser, ‘John Dean’s memory: A case study’, Cognition, 1981, 9(1), pp. 1–22
23 M. Mather and M. K. Johnson, ‘Choice-supportive source monitoring: Do our decisions seem better to us as we age?’, Psychology and Aging, 2000, 15(4), p. 596
24 Learning and Motivation, 2004, 45, pp. 175–214
25 C. A. Meissner and J. C. Brigham, ‘Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: A meta-analytic review’, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2001, 7(1), p. 3
26 U. Hoffrage, R. Hertwig and G. Gigerenzer, ‘Hindsight bias: A by-product of knowledge updating?’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2000, 26(3), p. 566
27 W. R. Walker and J. J. Skowronski, ‘The fading affect bias: But what the hell is it for?’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2009, 23(8), pp. 1122–36
28 J. Dębiec, D. E. Bush and J. E. LeDoux, ‘Noradrenergic enhancement of reconsolidation in the amygdala impairs extinction of conditioned fear in rats – a possible mechanism for the persistence of traumatic memories in PTSD’, Depression and Anxiety, 2011, 28(3), pp. 186–93
29 N. J. Roese and J. M. Olson, What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, Psychology Press, 2014
30 A. E. Wilson and M. Ross, ‘From chump to champ: people’s appraisals of their earlier and present selves’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001, 80(4), pp. 572–84
31 S. M. Kassin et al., ‘On the “general acceptance” of eyewitness testimony research: A new survey of the experts’, American Psychologist, 2001, 56(5), pp. 405–16
32 http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/eloftus/ (accessed September 2015)
33 E. F. Loftus, ‘The price of bad memories’, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 1998
34 C. A. Morgan et al., ‘Misinformation can influence memory for recently experienced, highly stressful events’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2013, 36(1), pp. 11–17
35 B. P. Lucke-Wold et al., ‘Linking traumatic brain injury to chronic traumatic encephalopathy: Identification of potential mechanisms leading to neurofibrillary tangle development’, Journal of Neurotrauma, 2014, 31(13), pp. 1129–38
36 S. Blum et al., ‘Memory after silent stroke: Hippocampus and infarcts both matter’, Neurology, 2012, 78(1), pp. 38–46
37 R. Hoare, ‘The role of diencephalic pathology in human memory disorder’, Brain, 1990, 113, pp. 1695–706
38 L. R. Squire, ‘The legacy of patient HM for neuroscience’, Neuron, 2009, 61(1), pp. 6–9
39 M. C. Duff et al., ‘Hippocampal amnesia disrupts creative thinking’, Hippocampus, 2013, 23(12), pp. 1143–9
40 P. S. Hogenkamp et al., ‘Expected satiation after repeated consumption of low- or high-energy-dense soup’, British Journal of Nutrition, 2012, 108(01), pp. 182–90
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42 E. Day et al., ‘Thiamine for Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome in people at risk from alcohol abuse’, Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews, 2004, vol. 1
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* 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 biscuits were stored. But he never had any memory of having just eaten any biscuits, so he kept going back for more. He never gained memories, but he did gain weight. I can’t confirm this; I’ve not 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.
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Fear: nothing to be scared of
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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 mince has been in the fridge for a week; what if someone eats it and gets food poisoning? Why is my 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 realises 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 theories; 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, onl
y 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 recognising 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’s 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 organise charity bake sales.
The brain also recognises 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 recognise 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
