December 23, 2024 • 36 mins
What do charlatans have to understand about human perception? Why are you so bad at recognizing a real penny among fakes? What did Eagleman have to do with the redesign of the Euro, and why did he campaign to the European Central Bank that all their bills should be blank with a single hologram in the middle? In this episode, explore the crossroads of perception and deception. Brief appearance from special guest Adam Savage.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, this is David Eagleman. I want to wish you
a very happy holidays. We're going to take a break
for a couple of weeks, and then we're back in
January with new episodes on emotion intelligence, time perception, smell
and taste, brain, computer interfaces, and much more. In the meantime,
we're going to replay one of our favorite episodes from
the past year, and I'll look forward to seeing you
(00:21):
in January. What do counterfeit bills have to do with brains?
And why is it so hard for you to recognize
a real penny? And what does this have to do
with the building on the fifty euro bill recently getting
(00:42):
replaced with the face of the goddess Europa And what
did I have to do with that? And why did
I campaign to the European Central Bank that all bills
should be blank with a single hologram in the middle.
Welcome to intercouse with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist,
(01:03):
and you might wonder how a neuroscientist got involved in
studying counterfeit money. Well, hangtight, because in this episode we're
going to see how all these issues intersect. One of
the most pervasive mistakes that we make is believing that
(01:26):
our visual systems give us a faithful representation of what's
out there. We think of our vision the way we
think of a movie camera, like it's just capturing the
information from the world. But there are a whole bunch
of simple demonstrations that can quickly disabuse you of this notion.
For example, imagine that I show you two pictures. I
(01:50):
flash one, then it goes off, Then the second one
comes on, then it goes off, then the first one
comes back on, and so on. So it alternates between
pictures A and B, and it looks like it's the
same picture. But let's say I let you know that
there is a difference between the pictures, and your job
is simply to spot the difference. Well, if you've ever
(02:10):
played these sorts of games before, you know how surprisingly
difficult it can be to tell the difference between them.
It turns out that we are really blind to changes
in the scene, and these can be quite large changes.
So you might have a big statue that's present in
the background of one photo and not the other, or
(02:32):
a jeep or an airplane, and the difference goes unseen.
You can see some demos of this at Eagleman dot
com Slash podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So what happens is.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
That your attention slowly crawls over the photograph and you
analyze the interesting landmarks until you finally detect what is changing.
And once your brain has latched on to the appropriate object,
then the change is trivial to see. But this happens
only after a pretty exhaustive inspection. This is what's known
(03:06):
as change blindness, and it highlights the importance of attention,
which is to say, to see an object change, you
have to attend to it. And what an experiment like
this surface is is that you're not actually seeing the
world with the rich detail that you implicitly believed you were.
(03:29):
In fact, you're not aware of most of what's hitting
your eyes. So imagine you're watching a short film with
a single actor in it.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
He's cooking an omelet.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And the camera cuts to a different angle as the
actor continues his cooking. Surely you would notice if the
actor changed into a different person, right, But in studies,
two thirds of observers don't. In one really astonishing demonstration
of change blindness, random pedestrians in a courtyard were stopped
(04:02):
by an experimenter, and they were asked for directions, so
they start giving directions, and at some point, as the
unsuspecting person is in the middle of explaining this, workmen
carrying a door walk right in between the two people,
and unbeknownst to the pedestrian, the experimenter is stealthily replaced
(04:25):
by a confederate who's been hiding behind the door. So
the people are swapped, and after the door passes, a
new person is standing there, and the majority of subjects
continue giving directions without noticing that the person they were
talking to is not the same one that they were
talking to. In other words, they were only encoding small
(04:48):
amounts of the information that was hitting their eyes. The
rest was assumption. Now, neuroscientists weren't the first to discover
that placing your eyes on something is no guarantee of
seeing it. Magicians figured this out long ago, and they
perfected ways of leveraging this knowledge. So by directing your attention,
(05:11):
magicians perform sleight of hand in full view. Their actions.
Their hand motions should give away the game, but they
can rest assured that your brain processes only small bits
of the visual scene. It's not everything that's hitting your retinas.
And by the way, this limitation of our vision helps
(05:32):
to explain the colossal number of traffic accidents in which
drivers will hit pedestrians who are in plane view, or
they'll collide with cars that are right in front of them.
Sometimes you'll even see stories where a car intersects with
a train on the track. In some of these cases,
the eyes are in the right place, but the brain
(05:54):
isn't registering the stimulus. Vision is more than looking now.
This is all an example of a larger point, which
is that we're not generally aware of what's going on
until we ask the question. So, for example, what is
the position of your tongue in your mouth right now?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Once you're asked the question, you can answer it, but.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Presumably you weren't aware of the answer until I asked
the question. Why does the brain work this way because
your brain generally doesn't need to know most things. It
simply needs to know how to go out and retrieve
the data when it needs it. It perceives things on
a need to know basis. You don't continuously track the
(06:42):
position of your tongue in your consciousness because that knowledge
is only useful in rare circumstances. So again, you're not
aware of much of anything until you ask yourself about it.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
What does your left shoe feel like on your foot
right now? Pit?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Which is the hum of the air conditioner in the background.
Just like with change blindness, we are unaware of most
of what should be obvious to our senses. It's only
after we deploy our attention onto small bits of the
scene that we become aware of what we were missing,
And before we engage our attention, we're typically not aware
(07:24):
that we're not aware of those details. So not only
is our perception of the world a construction that doesn't
accurately represent the outside, it's weirder than that because we
have the false impression of a full, rich picture, when
in fact, we only see what we need to know
and what we ask questions about, and we don't see
(07:46):
anything more than that. Now, this is a topic I'm
going to return to in many episodes, but for now
I want to ask what this has to do with
the economic currencies on this planet. So the scene is Lima, Peru,
a little before dawn. There's a bunch of houses and buildings,
(08:09):
and suddenly fifteen hundred Peruvian police officers and US Secret
Service agents stormed the doors. This was called Operation Sunset,
and it was the finale of a long running investigation
aimed at reducing the flow of counterfeit US dollars from Peru.
They brought down six plants that had presses and plates
(08:32):
and negatives and piles of fake one hundred dollars bills.
And in just the past few years, counterfeit notes worth
more than seventy five million dollars have been confiscated in Peru.
And this is just one of lots of countries where
you have fraudsters who are cooking up fake dollars. And
it's essentially impossible to estimate the volume of counterfeit banknotes
(08:56):
passing through the US economy.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
What you find is that the alreadies claim they've.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Captured most of the fakes, and the counterfeitters claim exactly
the opposite. Anyhow, counterfeiting is a problem that faces every
major player in the currency game. Russia seizes counterfeits in
the range of two hundred million rubles per year. China
captures five hundred million fake yuan. A few years ago,
(09:23):
India terminated their five hundred and one thousand rupee notes,
and this was at least partially because of the rising
concern about forgeries and their inability to stem that. In Venezuela,
the inflation was so bad that it became worthwhile for
fraudsters to bleach the ten bole of our bill and
(09:44):
use the paper to forge notes in other currencies. So
(10:06):
it turns out there are counterfeiters everywhere, and they're busy
pushing fake banknotes into streets and squares in every major city.
You may wonder how I came to care about counterfeits,
given that I'm a neuroscientist. Well, what happened is some
years ago I was giving a presentation at a brain
(10:26):
science conference, and afterwards I was approached by this guy
and we started talking, and I was surprised to learn
that he was working for the European Central Bank. And
I was surprised because it wasn't clear to me why
someone like that would be at a highly academic neuroscience conference.
As it turns out, his job was to find a
(10:46):
solution to Europe's counterfeiting problem. Their problem was that the
EU comes across hundreds of thousands of fake euro banknotes
every year, mostly in the form of twenties and fifties.
At the heart of the issue is the fact that
governments spend millions creating security features. So while we're talking,
(11:10):
take out a twenty dollars bill, or whatever country you're in,
take out a high value bill.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
They all have similar security features.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Now, if you look at it, you'll see that as
you tilt the note slightly back and forth, there's color
changing ink. So the color changes here of let's say
the twenty and now if you hold this up to
the light, what you'll see is a water mark that's
otherwise invisible to you. You can't see it normally, and
(11:38):
it's not printed on the front or the back, but
it's printed on an intermediate layer and on euros, and
actually on the one hundred dollars bill, what you see
are holograms. So when you angle this and change this,
it moves around slightly and appears to be three D.
And you'll also see colored strips that display the value.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Of the note.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And if you happen to have an ultraviolet light, turn
that on and hold the bill under it, and you'll
see that the bill turns very colorful. You've got all
these invisible fibers in it that fluoresce under ultraviolet. So
a piece of currency is a bustling collection of security devices.
The problem is that no one pays attention to these
(12:23):
security devices. People who pass notes around in daily transactions
don't typically pause to examine them carefully. The special ink,
the watermark, the strip, the fibers, the hologram. These are
very expensive security features and they are a totally wasted
(12:44):
effort because counterfeit bills get passed from person to person
and no one ever notices these or notices if they
are badly rendered. Do you know how counterfeit bills almost
always are found at the bank And that's because real
notes have one more feature. They have machine readable code
(13:05):
in the bill. Counterfeitters can do a good job making
a counterfeit, but they can't make the machine readable code,
and that's why the bank catches those. But the counterfeitters
don't need to do that because their bills get passed
around and no one ever notices. And this problem of
inattention led the European Central Bank to explore a simple question,
(13:27):
could banknotes be better designed so that the person on
the street would be more likely to notice when something
was a miss? And for that they finally started to
think about neuroscience, and that's how I got involved because
as our understanding of the brain has developed over recent decades,
neuroscience has forged insights into a range of fields, from
(13:49):
early education to consumer behavior to government policy, and modern
brain science has wide ranging applications, particularly when it comes
to under standing the ways in which our perceptions of.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
The world are inaccurate.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
In the case of banknotes, the questions were straightforward, what
details do we notice or not notice? And why? What
features could be better designed to be brain compatible. Of
all the anti counterfeiting measures that the government takes, which ones.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Work and how could their efforts be better spent.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
So the man at the conference eventually contracted with me
to help them figure out the question how should Europe
redesign their bills? So we signed a bunch of security
documents and then I flew to the headquarters of the
European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Now this was very
cool because although the building was just a boring government building, I.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Was beeped through a badge protected.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Door, and then another, and then another, and we finally
arrived at this small inner room at the heart of
the building, and there were all these piles of money
of euros, mostly twenties and fifties, and.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
They were all counterfeit.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Each pile had some feature that distinguished it, whether that
was the way they had done the shiny foil or
the way they had done the watermarks or whatever. And
this is how the bank arranged them. Now, many of
these forgeries were quite good. If you weren't paying super
close attention, the kind of attention no one ever really
(15:26):
pays to money, you couldn't tell there was anything amiss
with most of these forgeries. You could tell under ultraviolet light.
But if you didn't have that, there was really nothing
that would even make you think to pay extra attention.
And here's a weird fact that I learned there in
the vaults, these really good forgeries, they always have a
(15:48):
slight error in them.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
And think about why this is weird.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
You've got a otherwise amazingly well done counterfeit bill, but
it's got an error. For example, there are essentially perfect
counterfeits of the American twenty dollars bill. But if you
look at the number two, the way that the bottom
of the two spreads out what's called the trumpeting in
(16:13):
font language. It's just slightly wider than it is on
a real bill, So what's going on with that? How
can you get the whole bill right but not get
that little detail right? And there's actually one more part
to this mystery. There's only one mistake on a bill
and no more than that. And the answer is it's
not a mistake. It's on purpose, and it's because counterfeitters
(16:36):
need a way to distinguish their own bills from.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
The real ones.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
This is so they don't spend their real money accidentally. Okay,
so some of these bills were almost perfect with this
single tiny change, but that's not the part that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
What's interesting is.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That most of the counterfeits were not as expertly done
as you might expect. On almost all of them, the
part where the color changing ink normally is didn't actually
change color, and on others the water mark had been
hand drawn really poorly, and in one pile of notes,
(17:13):
the silver hologram had been impersonated with a glued piece
of shiny material from the seal of a compact disc case.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Many of the.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Notes had essentially none of the actual security features. But
the surprising thing is this, To get a counterfeit into circulation,
most counterfeiters don't bother to go through the trouble of
making an almost perfect one. Why because it makes almost
no difference. Almost no one in the general public notices
(17:45):
a bad forgery. People will stuff the notes into their
wallets and they'll pass them on, and the notes spread
like a virus through the population. Because as banknote users,
we are surprisingly unobservant. We just don't pay it tension
to the bills in our hand. The government spends an
incredible amount on security features, and we.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Don't even look at it now.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
The ECB tried to tackle this problem by hosting public
awareness campaigns where they encouraged people to stop and look
carefully at what they were holding. But the approach failed.
People wouldn't put in the effort. Governments carry enormously about
security features and the population doesn't. So the Central Bank
(18:33):
now wanted to try a different tack. They wanted to
work out what the human visual system actually notices and
why there was no point spending a massive amount on
security features that are only noticed by security experts. And
that was the beginning of a long relationship I had
with the ECB. For legal reasons, they couldn't manufacture or
(18:56):
mail to me counterfeit bills and so I had to
figure out how to make pseudo bills myself. First I
had to get approval from my university for this very
unusual study, and then my students that I set to work.
As it turns out, it's not that difficult to make
a rough counterfeit. Now, it happens that I was recently
(19:18):
talking with my friend Adam Savage of Mythbuster's fame, and
it turned out that he also has done lots of
forgeries of things, not illegally but legal versions of making
replicas of all kinds of wonderful things. So before I
tell you about my experiences, I wanted to ring up
Adam to hear about his. So, Adam, you've done some counterfeiting,
(19:43):
tell me about that.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
I don't want to brag that I've done some counterfeiting,
but I'm obsessed with the idea of replication. That's one
of my main practices here in the cave, and so like.
Just for instance, recently I obtained a really lovely replica
of one of Leonardo da Vinci's coticies. This is known
as the Paris manuscript A, and I've been slowly spending
(20:09):
a couple of weeks making a completely accurate cover for
it based on the information from the collection that it's
since So I've been printing up the cover full size
of and having the collection stamps made, and I'm gonna
slowly make this thing indistinguishable from the original. So that's
the kind of counterfeiting I really dig is the experiential counterfeit.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Oh that's amazing. Now let me ask you this.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Do you find that if there are changes, things you
don't get perfect?
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Do you find that people don't notice those.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
People's threshold for what they notice is it's an interesting
mixture because you can kind of bypass some of their
filters with the right amount of aging, or even sometimes
a smell will just have someone bypass all their filters
for what they can see. So it's really different object
(21:01):
by object about what the threshold is for what lends
what feels like an experience of veracity.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Have you ever tried counterfeiting money? Is that something you've
ever tried? I have made.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
So behind me here on my desk is one of
my favorite pieces in my collection, and it's the bank
box from the Bourne identity. And this is the actual
bank box from the Borne identity. I bought it empty,
but one of my long term plans is to actually
fill it full of original bills or correct bills. And
this is made easier by the fact that a lot
(21:36):
of the bills that were in the Borne Identity bank
box are now euros, and so those original currencies, the
real it's, the frank, et cetera, are no longer extant,
and so I get suitably and appropriately nervous even doing
Google searches about replicating money. But to me, your job
of actually trying some counterfeits to see what works sounds
(21:59):
like an absolute dream come true.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
For me. I was like I was born to be
a pen tester.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Okay, so back to my counterfeiting contract. So the notes
that we made in the lab had no security features
like holograms or color changing ink, because that wasn't precisely
what we were studying. We were studying how much somebody
would notice if we presented them with a bill with
a particular design, and we let them examine it and
(22:38):
turn it around in their hands, and then we took
it back and we handed them another note, and that
other note might have some change that was made to it,
and we asked them, is this the same bill or
a different one? In other words, how much do they
remember about the note that they just examined. Now, you
might expect that if you get to examine a note carefully,
(23:01):
it's not going to be any problem to see when
something changes. But you'd be shocked at the limits of
our observation and our memory. Take a simple experiment run
by the psychologists Raymond Nickerson and Marilyn Adams in nineteen
seventy nine. What they did is they showed people fifteen
different drawings of the US penny, and one was the
(23:25):
actual penny, while the other drawings were manipulated versions where
you had the date in a different place, or you
had the slogan changed, for example, United States of America
instead of in God we Trust. And fewer than half
the participants could identify which one was the correct penny.
(23:46):
Although the participants handled pennies almost every day of their lives,
they hadn't paid attention in the way they thought they had.
Experience doesn't translate into expertise.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Why not.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
It's because we only see what we closely attend to.
So imagine you catch a glimpse of a man and
a woman having a picnic in a park, all you
actually see is something like man woman food. With time,
as you crawl the scene with your attentional systems, you'll
incorporate more details.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Oh they've got.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Bowls of soup. It's a checkered blanket. That's a little unusual.
There are hills in the background. And with more time
you'll notice, Oh, his spoon is slightly bent, or she's
wearing a silver necklace, or the encircling trees are buckthorn.
But we incorporate more detail into a scene only if
(24:42):
we pay more attention and we ask more questions. And
as I said before, it's like this with all of
our senses. What is the feeling of your pants on
your left knee cap right now?
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Or the feeling of your shirt on your shoulders.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
As soon as you ask these questions, you can become
aware of the answer, but you didn't know until you queried.
So our visual sense is not like a camera that's
taking in the complete scene. Instead, we see only the
details that we go out to seek. And this is
the issue with the banknotes. We may glance at one
(25:19):
to verify that it matches the general template we're expecting,
but we don't scrutinize the details. And that's why the
European Central banks campaign to stop and pay attention to money.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
It just didn't work.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
We don't attend to things that sufficiently fit our assumptions.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
We believe we already know the note in our hands.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I recently had a fake built passed to me in
New York City. I was getting a hot dog, which
was four bucks, and I gave him a ten, and
he gave me what looked like a one in a five,
except the five was And I'm on the street, right,
I'm just I put it in my pocket.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
I get back to my room.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
The five is actually a discontinued old five thousand yen
Japanese note.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
Ha ha.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
They exactually had Matt respects for him for handing that
directly to me.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Ha. That's amazing, because you're a guy who paid so
much attention to what's there, and even for you, you
expect you're getting a five back, and so your brain
fills in all the blanks and you just take it
and you go, well.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
I mean, you know, it's a difficult problem to solve
when you realize that we regularly interact with bills that
are ancient and are filthy and like soft leather and
brand new and they're crisp and smell totally differently and
look totally different.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
When you hold those two up against each other and
you think, I've got to get someone to be able
to parse that both of these are real, that's that's
a complicated problem to solve.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
What ther opinion Union does is they have all these
security features in their bills. They spend so much money
for these security features, and no one ever notices. So
my job is to figure out which elements of the
banknotes were noticed and which weren't, and to make recommendations
for next step. We performed a series of experiments for
(27:17):
over a year and in the end it became obvious
to me what needed to be done. So in my
final presentation to the European Central Bank, I put forward
evidence that the watermark on the euro should be a
face instead of a building. Why it's because the human
brain is massively specialized to recognizing faces, but it has
(27:42):
little neural real estate devoted to buildings. You can see
a building and then you can see a building that
looks sort of like it, and you really can't tell
the difference. Maybe you can't if you're an architect, but
the rest of us just wouldn't notice. And forged water
marks are generally hand drawn, and that's because it's this
(28:02):
intermediate layer and you need to do that by hand.
And it turns out that if you draw a building,
even if you do a really lousy job, no one's
going to catch the difference. Your brain just doesn't care
that much about the exact details of a building. But
contrast this with faces. We have a ton of brain
(28:22):
territory devoted to faces. Think about the difference in the
faces of the people you see every day, the length
of the nose, the distance between.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
The eyes, the shape of the lips.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
These are really subtle details, but we're super sensitive to
picking up on these.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Now, this is of course for human faces.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
You presumably couldn't tell that much difference between the faces
of twenty different German shepherd dogs. They all sort of
look alike to you. But now put yourself in the
position of the dog. Presumably humans look mostly alike to it.
But the details we are so sensitive to, like the
hairline and the cheek and the length of the nose
and the exact position of the ears and all that
(29:03):
stuff would mean nothing to the dog. But we are
incredibly sensitive to these tiny tiny differences, and this is
why it's so much easier to spot an imperfect face
than an imperfect building. And this is why the ECB
decided to change the watermark on the fifty year h
bill from a building to a face. Now, unfortunately, they
(29:28):
had an implementation challenge, a political one, which is, how
could they get all the different countries to agree on
one person's face. What nationality were they going to choose?
The Italians were going to want Michelangelo, the British would
want Shakespeare, the French would want Napoleon, and so on.
That's why they had originally chosen a building, because that
(29:49):
circumvented the argument.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
But now there was a reason to choose a face.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
So finally someone suggested that instead of fighting it out
between historical hero they should just settle on the mythological
Princess Europa, after whom Europe is named, and so the
new fifty dollars note with her face rolled out in
twenty seventeen. Now that move is a step in the
(30:15):
right direction, but since they chose a mythological face with
no single correct version, it's slightly less useful than a
face everyone would recognize, like if they'd used Juliette Bnotia's
face or Benedict Cumberbatch's face. But anyway, it was a
good start. But that was only my first recommendation. I
(30:36):
then recommended that all euro banknotes should be the same size,
the way that American bills are. Why because that would
at least get people to look at them a bit
longer to see what they're dealing with. Right if you're
handing someone an American bill, they have to stare at
it for some hundreds of milliseconds longer just to register
(30:57):
what in the heck they're holding, because there aren't other
clues from size, Whereas in Europe you grab a bill
and you know much faster if it's a twenty or
a fifty or whatever, and as a result, you pay
even less attention to what is written on it. Now,
there are advantages to the blind community in having bills
of different sizes, but now you can do three D
(31:20):
printing on bills, and so the blind community no longer
needs different sizes to be able to tell what bill
they're holding.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Now.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
The Council told me that while they took my point,
there was no way they were going to make all
the bills the same size. Why it wasn't just because
they'd have to retool the mints where they print the bills,
but more importantly, they'd have to retool all the vending
machines in Europe, and this was an impossible amount of work,
which got me thinking about the way that things get ensconced.
(31:51):
They get calcified into place by some historical trajectory, and
then it becomes too hard to change it, like the
way that we use the imperial measuring system in America,
where it's not based on tens, and therefore it's very
difficult to convert between different units, like we have twelve
inches equaling a foot, or sixteen ounces is a pound.
(32:14):
And when I was a kid, there was a big
push to teach both the imperial and the metric systems
at the same time so that we could slowly make
the transition into something that made more sense. But it
just proved too hard to change because the imperial measurement
system got calcified into place and then you can't get
(32:34):
rid of it. So anyway, the European Central Bank acknowledge
that I had a point about the bill size, but
they concluded it would just be too much work to
retool everything so they asked for my next recommendation, and
here was my chance to deliver my clincher.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
This was a sense that had been.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Creeping up on me for the entire year that I'd
been studying the problem of counterfeiting. The heart of the
problem is that notes are jam packed with decorative features
that have nothing to do with the security. So you
have pictures of trees and patriots and birds and flags,
you have swirling colors, and no one notices the security
(33:16):
features because of all these distractions. So I told them
that a piece of currency, a bill, should be a blank,
white piece of paper with a single hologram in the middle.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
That's it, nothing else on it.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
A counterfeiter wouldn't be able to replicate that without serious
specialized equipment, and the person in the street wouldn't be
distracted by all the detailing that has nothing.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
To do with the security.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
So they agreed with my recommendation in theory, but they
rejected it on the grounds that there's too much cultural
momentum in the design of banknotes. In other words, people
expect notes to look a certain way. Currencies are supposed
to impress the viewer with the regal power and artistic
(34:08):
talents of the ruling body, and apparently no government wants
to appear unregal and unartistic when compared to another government,
And so the experiment came to a close. The building
got changed to a face, which was a good start,
but so much about the rest of currencies is stuck
in place. So we'll see what happens with the future
(34:31):
of digital exchanges like paypalor Venmo, and the future of crypto,
but it appears that for now paper money is sticking
around almost everywhere on the planet. So it's still my
general hope that some government somewhere will get this straight,
and the advantage for them is they'll have massively less
counterfeiting to drag on their economy. So if you're going
(34:54):
to start a new country, take this podcast as my
free advice for how to do your bills. Effective solution
from science can sometimes bump up against tradition, but if
we really care about tackling a problem, we have to
move beyond adherence to custom. The human visual system is
never going to notice security features that are buried in
(35:14):
other details, and if you give your brain any excuse
to believe it knows what's out there, it will take
shortcuts and make extra assumptions.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
So this episode repeats.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
A theme that you're going to hear many times on
this show. Whenever you want to improve society, you have
to do your best to understand the details of the
brains that comprise that society.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
That's all for this week.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
To find out more and to share your thoughts, head
over to eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can
also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Subscribe to my channel so you can follow along each
week for new updates until next time. I'm David Eagleman
and this is in Her Cosmos.
Hi, this is David Eagleman. I want to wish you
a very happy holidays. We're going to take a break
for a couple of weeks, and then we're back in
January with new episodes on emotion intelligence, time perception, smell
and taste, brain, computer interfaces, and much more. In the meantime,
we're going to replay one of our favorite episodes from
the past year, and I'll look forward to seeing you
(00:21):
in January. What do counterfeit bills have to do with brains?
And why is it so hard for you to recognize
a real penny? And what does this have to do
with the building on the fifty euro bill recently getting
(00:42):
replaced with the face of the goddess Europa And what
did I have to do with that? And why did
I campaign to the European Central Bank that all bills
should be blank with a single hologram in the middle.
Welcome to intercouse with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist,
(01:03):
and you might wonder how a neuroscientist got involved in
studying counterfeit money. Well, hangtight, because in this episode we're
going to see how all these issues intersect. One of
the most pervasive mistakes that we make is believing that
(01:26):
our visual systems give us a faithful representation of what's
out there. We think of our vision the way we
think of a movie camera, like it's just capturing the
information from the world. But there are a whole bunch
of simple demonstrations that can quickly disabuse you of this notion.
For example, imagine that I show you two pictures. I
(01:50):
flash one, then it goes off, Then the second one
comes on, then it goes off, then the first one
comes back on, and so on. So it alternates between
pictures A and B, and it looks like it's the
same picture. But let's say I let you know that
there is a difference between the pictures, and your job
is simply to spot the difference. Well, if you've ever
(02:10):
played these sorts of games before, you know how surprisingly
difficult it can be to tell the difference between them.
It turns out that we are really blind to changes
in the scene, and these can be quite large changes.
So you might have a big statue that's present in
the background of one photo and not the other, or
(02:32):
a jeep or an airplane, and the difference goes unseen.
You can see some demos of this at Eagleman dot
com Slash podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So what happens is.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
That your attention slowly crawls over the photograph and you
analyze the interesting landmarks until you finally detect what is changing.
And once your brain has latched on to the appropriate object,
then the change is trivial to see. But this happens
only after a pretty exhaustive inspection. This is what's known
(03:06):
as change blindness, and it highlights the importance of attention,
which is to say, to see an object change, you
have to attend to it. And what an experiment like
this surface is is that you're not actually seeing the
world with the rich detail that you implicitly believed you were.
(03:29):
In fact, you're not aware of most of what's hitting
your eyes. So imagine you're watching a short film with
a single actor in it.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
He's cooking an omelet.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
And the camera cuts to a different angle as the
actor continues his cooking. Surely you would notice if the
actor changed into a different person, right, But in studies,
two thirds of observers don't. In one really astonishing demonstration
of change blindness, random pedestrians in a courtyard were stopped
(04:02):
by an experimenter, and they were asked for directions, so
they start giving directions, and at some point, as the
unsuspecting person is in the middle of explaining this, workmen
carrying a door walk right in between the two people,
and unbeknownst to the pedestrian, the experimenter is stealthily replaced
(04:25):
by a confederate who's been hiding behind the door. So
the people are swapped, and after the door passes, a
new person is standing there, and the majority of subjects
continue giving directions without noticing that the person they were
talking to is not the same one that they were
talking to. In other words, they were only encoding small
(04:48):
amounts of the information that was hitting their eyes. The
rest was assumption. Now, neuroscientists weren't the first to discover
that placing your eyes on something is no guarantee of
seeing it. Magicians figured this out long ago, and they
perfected ways of leveraging this knowledge. So by directing your attention,
(05:11):
magicians perform sleight of hand in full view. Their actions.
Their hand motions should give away the game, but they
can rest assured that your brain processes only small bits
of the visual scene. It's not everything that's hitting your retinas.
And by the way, this limitation of our vision helps
(05:32):
to explain the colossal number of traffic accidents in which
drivers will hit pedestrians who are in plane view, or
they'll collide with cars that are right in front of them.
Sometimes you'll even see stories where a car intersects with
a train on the track. In some of these cases,
the eyes are in the right place, but the brain
(05:54):
isn't registering the stimulus. Vision is more than looking now.
This is all an example of a larger point, which
is that we're not generally aware of what's going on
until we ask the question. So, for example, what is
the position of your tongue in your mouth right now?
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Once you're asked the question, you can answer it, but.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Presumably you weren't aware of the answer until I asked
the question. Why does the brain work this way because
your brain generally doesn't need to know most things. It
simply needs to know how to go out and retrieve
the data when it needs it. It perceives things on
a need to know basis. You don't continuously track the
(06:42):
position of your tongue in your consciousness because that knowledge
is only useful in rare circumstances. So again, you're not
aware of much of anything until you ask yourself about it.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
What does your left shoe feel like on your foot
right now? Pit?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Which is the hum of the air conditioner in the background.
Just like with change blindness, we are unaware of most
of what should be obvious to our senses. It's only
after we deploy our attention onto small bits of the
scene that we become aware of what we were missing,
And before we engage our attention, we're typically not aware
(07:24):
that we're not aware of those details. So not only
is our perception of the world a construction that doesn't
accurately represent the outside, it's weirder than that because we
have the false impression of a full, rich picture, when
in fact, we only see what we need to know
and what we ask questions about, and we don't see
(07:46):
anything more than that. Now, this is a topic I'm
going to return to in many episodes, but for now
I want to ask what this has to do with
the economic currencies on this planet. So the scene is Lima, Peru,
a little before dawn. There's a bunch of houses and buildings,
(08:09):
and suddenly fifteen hundred Peruvian police officers and US Secret
Service agents stormed the doors. This was called Operation Sunset,
and it was the finale of a long running investigation
aimed at reducing the flow of counterfeit US dollars from Peru.
They brought down six plants that had presses and plates
(08:32):
and negatives and piles of fake one hundred dollars bills.
And in just the past few years, counterfeit notes worth
more than seventy five million dollars have been confiscated in Peru.
And this is just one of lots of countries where
you have fraudsters who are cooking up fake dollars. And
it's essentially impossible to estimate the volume of counterfeit banknotes
(08:56):
passing through the US economy.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
What you find is that the alreadies claim they've.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Captured most of the fakes, and the counterfeitters claim exactly
the opposite. Anyhow, counterfeiting is a problem that faces every
major player in the currency game. Russia seizes counterfeits in
the range of two hundred million rubles per year. China
captures five hundred million fake yuan. A few years ago,
(09:23):
India terminated their five hundred and one thousand rupee notes,
and this was at least partially because of the rising
concern about forgeries and their inability to stem that. In Venezuela,
the inflation was so bad that it became worthwhile for
fraudsters to bleach the ten bole of our bill and
(09:44):
use the paper to forge notes in other currencies. So
(10:06):
it turns out there are counterfeiters everywhere, and they're busy
pushing fake banknotes into streets and squares in every major city.
You may wonder how I came to care about counterfeits,
given that I'm a neuroscientist. Well, what happened is some
years ago I was giving a presentation at a brain
(10:26):
science conference, and afterwards I was approached by this guy
and we started talking, and I was surprised to learn
that he was working for the European Central Bank. And
I was surprised because it wasn't clear to me why
someone like that would be at a highly academic neuroscience conference.
As it turns out, his job was to find a
(10:46):
solution to Europe's counterfeiting problem. Their problem was that the
EU comes across hundreds of thousands of fake euro banknotes
every year, mostly in the form of twenties and fifties.
At the heart of the issue is the fact that
governments spend millions creating security features. So while we're talking,
(11:10):
take out a twenty dollars bill, or whatever country you're in,
take out a high value bill.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
They all have similar security features.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Now, if you look at it, you'll see that as
you tilt the note slightly back and forth, there's color
changing ink. So the color changes here of let's say
the twenty and now if you hold this up to
the light, what you'll see is a water mark that's
otherwise invisible to you. You can't see it normally, and
(11:38):
it's not printed on the front or the back, but
it's printed on an intermediate layer and on euros, and
actually on the one hundred dollars bill, what you see
are holograms. So when you angle this and change this,
it moves around slightly and appears to be three D.
And you'll also see colored strips that display the value.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Of the note.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And if you happen to have an ultraviolet light, turn
that on and hold the bill under it, and you'll
see that the bill turns very colorful. You've got all
these invisible fibers in it that fluoresce under ultraviolet. So
a piece of currency is a bustling collection of security devices.
The problem is that no one pays attention to these
(12:23):
security devices. People who pass notes around in daily transactions
don't typically pause to examine them carefully. The special ink,
the watermark, the strip, the fibers, the hologram. These are
very expensive security features and they are a totally wasted
(12:44):
effort because counterfeit bills get passed from person to person
and no one ever notices these or notices if they
are badly rendered. Do you know how counterfeit bills almost
always are found at the bank And that's because real
notes have one more feature. They have machine readable code
(13:05):
in the bill. Counterfeitters can do a good job making
a counterfeit, but they can't make the machine readable code,
and that's why the bank catches those. But the counterfeitters
don't need to do that because their bills get passed
around and no one ever notices. And this problem of
inattention led the European Central Bank to explore a simple question,
(13:27):
could banknotes be better designed so that the person on
the street would be more likely to notice when something
was a miss? And for that they finally started to
think about neuroscience, and that's how I got involved because
as our understanding of the brain has developed over recent decades,
neuroscience has forged insights into a range of fields, from
(13:49):
early education to consumer behavior to government policy, and modern
brain science has wide ranging applications, particularly when it comes
to under standing the ways in which our perceptions of.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
The world are inaccurate.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
In the case of banknotes, the questions were straightforward, what
details do we notice or not notice? And why? What
features could be better designed to be brain compatible. Of
all the anti counterfeiting measures that the government takes, which ones.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Work and how could their efforts be better spent.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
So the man at the conference eventually contracted with me
to help them figure out the question how should Europe
redesign their bills? So we signed a bunch of security
documents and then I flew to the headquarters of the
European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Now this was very
cool because although the building was just a boring government building, I.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Was beeped through a badge protected.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Door, and then another, and then another, and we finally
arrived at this small inner room at the heart of
the building, and there were all these piles of money
of euros, mostly twenties and fifties, and.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
They were all counterfeit.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Each pile had some feature that distinguished it, whether that
was the way they had done the shiny foil or
the way they had done the watermarks or whatever. And
this is how the bank arranged them. Now, many of
these forgeries were quite good. If you weren't paying super
close attention, the kind of attention no one ever really
(15:26):
pays to money, you couldn't tell there was anything amiss
with most of these forgeries. You could tell under ultraviolet light.
But if you didn't have that, there was really nothing
that would even make you think to pay extra attention.
And here's a weird fact that I learned there in
the vaults, these really good forgeries, they always have a
(15:48):
slight error in them.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
And think about why this is weird.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
You've got a otherwise amazingly well done counterfeit bill, but
it's got an error. For example, there are essentially perfect
counterfeits of the American twenty dollars bill. But if you
look at the number two, the way that the bottom
of the two spreads out what's called the trumpeting in
(16:13):
font language. It's just slightly wider than it is on
a real bill, So what's going on with that? How
can you get the whole bill right but not get
that little detail right? And there's actually one more part
to this mystery. There's only one mistake on a bill
and no more than that. And the answer is it's
not a mistake. It's on purpose, and it's because counterfeitters
(16:36):
need a way to distinguish their own bills from.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
The real ones.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
This is so they don't spend their real money accidentally. Okay,
so some of these bills were almost perfect with this
single tiny change, but that's not the part that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
What's interesting is.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
That most of the counterfeits were not as expertly done
as you might expect. On almost all of them, the
part where the color changing ink normally is didn't actually
change color, and on others the water mark had been
hand drawn really poorly, and in one pile of notes,
(17:13):
the silver hologram had been impersonated with a glued piece
of shiny material from the seal of a compact disc case.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Many of the.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
Notes had essentially none of the actual security features. But
the surprising thing is this, To get a counterfeit into circulation,
most counterfeiters don't bother to go through the trouble of
making an almost perfect one. Why because it makes almost
no difference. Almost no one in the general public notices
(17:45):
a bad forgery. People will stuff the notes into their
wallets and they'll pass them on, and the notes spread
like a virus through the population. Because as banknote users,
we are surprisingly unobservant. We just don't pay it tension
to the bills in our hand. The government spends an
incredible amount on security features, and we.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Don't even look at it now.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
The ECB tried to tackle this problem by hosting public
awareness campaigns where they encouraged people to stop and look
carefully at what they were holding. But the approach failed.
People wouldn't put in the effort. Governments carry enormously about
security features and the population doesn't. So the Central Bank
(18:33):
now wanted to try a different tack. They wanted to
work out what the human visual system actually notices and
why there was no point spending a massive amount on
security features that are only noticed by security experts. And
that was the beginning of a long relationship I had
with the ECB. For legal reasons, they couldn't manufacture or
(18:56):
mail to me counterfeit bills and so I had to
figure out how to make pseudo bills myself. First I
had to get approval from my university for this very
unusual study, and then my students that I set to work.
As it turns out, it's not that difficult to make
a rough counterfeit. Now, it happens that I was recently
(19:18):
talking with my friend Adam Savage of Mythbuster's fame, and
it turned out that he also has done lots of
forgeries of things, not illegally but legal versions of making
replicas of all kinds of wonderful things. So before I
tell you about my experiences, I wanted to ring up
Adam to hear about his. So, Adam, you've done some counterfeiting,
(19:43):
tell me about that.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
I don't want to brag that I've done some counterfeiting,
but I'm obsessed with the idea of replication. That's one
of my main practices here in the cave, and so like.
Just for instance, recently I obtained a really lovely replica
of one of Leonardo da Vinci's coticies. This is known
as the Paris manuscript A, and I've been slowly spending
(20:09):
a couple of weeks making a completely accurate cover for
it based on the information from the collection that it's
since So I've been printing up the cover full size
of and having the collection stamps made, and I'm gonna
slowly make this thing indistinguishable from the original. So that's
the kind of counterfeiting I really dig is the experiential counterfeit.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Oh that's amazing. Now let me ask you this.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Do you find that if there are changes, things you
don't get perfect?
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Do you find that people don't notice those.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
People's threshold for what they notice is it's an interesting
mixture because you can kind of bypass some of their
filters with the right amount of aging, or even sometimes
a smell will just have someone bypass all their filters
for what they can see. So it's really different object
(21:01):
by object about what the threshold is for what lends
what feels like an experience of veracity.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Have you ever tried counterfeiting money? Is that something you've
ever tried? I have made.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
So behind me here on my desk is one of
my favorite pieces in my collection, and it's the bank
box from the Bourne identity. And this is the actual
bank box from the Borne identity. I bought it empty,
but one of my long term plans is to actually
fill it full of original bills or correct bills. And
this is made easier by the fact that a lot
(21:36):
of the bills that were in the Borne Identity bank
box are now euros, and so those original currencies, the
real it's, the frank, et cetera, are no longer extant,
and so I get suitably and appropriately nervous even doing
Google searches about replicating money. But to me, your job
of actually trying some counterfeits to see what works sounds
(21:59):
like an absolute dream come true.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
For me. I was like I was born to be
a pen tester.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Okay, so back to my counterfeiting contract. So the notes
that we made in the lab had no security features
like holograms or color changing ink, because that wasn't precisely
what we were studying. We were studying how much somebody
would notice if we presented them with a bill with
a particular design, and we let them examine it and
(22:38):
turn it around in their hands, and then we took
it back and we handed them another note, and that
other note might have some change that was made to it,
and we asked them, is this the same bill or
a different one? In other words, how much do they
remember about the note that they just examined. Now, you
might expect that if you get to examine a note carefully,
(23:01):
it's not going to be any problem to see when
something changes. But you'd be shocked at the limits of
our observation and our memory. Take a simple experiment run
by the psychologists Raymond Nickerson and Marilyn Adams in nineteen
seventy nine. What they did is they showed people fifteen
different drawings of the US penny, and one was the
(23:25):
actual penny, while the other drawings were manipulated versions where
you had the date in a different place, or you
had the slogan changed, for example, United States of America
instead of in God we Trust. And fewer than half
the participants could identify which one was the correct penny.
(23:46):
Although the participants handled pennies almost every day of their lives,
they hadn't paid attention in the way they thought they had.
Experience doesn't translate into expertise.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Why not.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
It's because we only see what we closely attend to.
So imagine you catch a glimpse of a man and
a woman having a picnic in a park, all you
actually see is something like man woman food. With time,
as you crawl the scene with your attentional systems, you'll
incorporate more details.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Oh they've got.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Bowls of soup. It's a checkered blanket. That's a little unusual.
There are hills in the background. And with more time
you'll notice, Oh, his spoon is slightly bent, or she's
wearing a silver necklace, or the encircling trees are buckthorn.
But we incorporate more detail into a scene only if
(24:42):
we pay more attention and we ask more questions. And
as I said before, it's like this with all of
our senses. What is the feeling of your pants on
your left knee cap right now?
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Or the feeling of your shirt on your shoulders.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
As soon as you ask these questions, you can become
aware of the answer, but you didn't know until you queried.
So our visual sense is not like a camera that's
taking in the complete scene. Instead, we see only the
details that we go out to seek. And this is
the issue with the banknotes. We may glance at one
(25:19):
to verify that it matches the general template we're expecting,
but we don't scrutinize the details. And that's why the
European Central banks campaign to stop and pay attention to money.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
It just didn't work.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
We don't attend to things that sufficiently fit our assumptions.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
We believe we already know the note in our hands.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I recently had a fake built passed to me in
New York City. I was getting a hot dog, which
was four bucks, and I gave him a ten, and
he gave me what looked like a one in a five,
except the five was And I'm on the street, right,
I'm just I put it in my pocket.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
I get back to my room.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
The five is actually a discontinued old five thousand yen
Japanese note.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
Ha ha.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
They exactually had Matt respects for him for handing that
directly to me.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Ha. That's amazing, because you're a guy who paid so
much attention to what's there, and even for you, you
expect you're getting a five back, and so your brain
fills in all the blanks and you just take it
and you go, well.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
I mean, you know, it's a difficult problem to solve
when you realize that we regularly interact with bills that
are ancient and are filthy and like soft leather and
brand new and they're crisp and smell totally differently and
look totally different.
Speaker 3 (26:44):
When you hold those two up against each other and
you think, I've got to get someone to be able
to parse that both of these are real, that's that's
a complicated problem to solve.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
What ther opinion Union does is they have all these
security features in their bills. They spend so much money
for these security features, and no one ever notices. So
my job is to figure out which elements of the
banknotes were noticed and which weren't, and to make recommendations
for next step. We performed a series of experiments for
(27:17):
over a year and in the end it became obvious
to me what needed to be done. So in my
final presentation to the European Central Bank, I put forward
evidence that the watermark on the euro should be a
face instead of a building. Why it's because the human
brain is massively specialized to recognizing faces, but it has
(27:42):
little neural real estate devoted to buildings. You can see
a building and then you can see a building that
looks sort of like it, and you really can't tell
the difference. Maybe you can't if you're an architect, but
the rest of us just wouldn't notice. And forged water
marks are generally hand drawn, and that's because it's this
(28:02):
intermediate layer and you need to do that by hand.
And it turns out that if you draw a building,
even if you do a really lousy job, no one's
going to catch the difference. Your brain just doesn't care
that much about the exact details of a building. But
contrast this with faces. We have a ton of brain
(28:22):
territory devoted to faces. Think about the difference in the
faces of the people you see every day, the length
of the nose, the distance between.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
The eyes, the shape of the lips.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
These are really subtle details, but we're super sensitive to
picking up on these.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Now, this is of course for human faces.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
You presumably couldn't tell that much difference between the faces
of twenty different German shepherd dogs. They all sort of
look alike to you. But now put yourself in the
position of the dog. Presumably humans look mostly alike to it.
But the details we are so sensitive to, like the
hairline and the cheek and the length of the nose
and the exact position of the ears and all that
(29:03):
stuff would mean nothing to the dog. But we are
incredibly sensitive to these tiny tiny differences, and this is
why it's so much easier to spot an imperfect face
than an imperfect building. And this is why the ECB
decided to change the watermark on the fifty year h
bill from a building to a face. Now, unfortunately, they
(29:28):
had an implementation challenge, a political one, which is, how
could they get all the different countries to agree on
one person's face. What nationality were they going to choose?
The Italians were going to want Michelangelo, the British would
want Shakespeare, the French would want Napoleon, and so on.
That's why they had originally chosen a building, because that
(29:49):
circumvented the argument.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
But now there was a reason to choose a face.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
So finally someone suggested that instead of fighting it out
between historical hero they should just settle on the mythological
Princess Europa, after whom Europe is named, and so the
new fifty dollars note with her face rolled out in
twenty seventeen. Now that move is a step in the
(30:15):
right direction, but since they chose a mythological face with
no single correct version, it's slightly less useful than a
face everyone would recognize, like if they'd used Juliette Bnotia's
face or Benedict Cumberbatch's face. But anyway, it was a
good start. But that was only my first recommendation. I
(30:36):
then recommended that all euro banknotes should be the same size,
the way that American bills are. Why because that would
at least get people to look at them a bit
longer to see what they're dealing with. Right if you're
handing someone an American bill, they have to stare at
it for some hundreds of milliseconds longer just to register
(30:57):
what in the heck they're holding, because there aren't other
clues from size, Whereas in Europe you grab a bill
and you know much faster if it's a twenty or
a fifty or whatever, and as a result, you pay
even less attention to what is written on it. Now,
there are advantages to the blind community in having bills
of different sizes, but now you can do three D
(31:20):
printing on bills, and so the blind community no longer
needs different sizes to be able to tell what bill
they're holding.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Now.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
The Council told me that while they took my point,
there was no way they were going to make all
the bills the same size. Why it wasn't just because
they'd have to retool the mints where they print the bills,
but more importantly, they'd have to retool all the vending
machines in Europe, and this was an impossible amount of work,
which got me thinking about the way that things get ensconced.
(31:51):
They get calcified into place by some historical trajectory, and
then it becomes too hard to change it, like the
way that we use the imperial measuring system in America,
where it's not based on tens, and therefore it's very
difficult to convert between different units, like we have twelve
inches equaling a foot, or sixteen ounces is a pound.
(32:14):
And when I was a kid, there was a big
push to teach both the imperial and the metric systems
at the same time so that we could slowly make
the transition into something that made more sense. But it
just proved too hard to change because the imperial measurement
system got calcified into place and then you can't get
(32:34):
rid of it. So anyway, the European Central Bank acknowledge
that I had a point about the bill size, but
they concluded it would just be too much work to
retool everything so they asked for my next recommendation, and
here was my chance to deliver my clincher.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
This was a sense that had been.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Creeping up on me for the entire year that I'd
been studying the problem of counterfeiting. The heart of the
problem is that notes are jam packed with decorative features
that have nothing to do with the security. So you
have pictures of trees and patriots and birds and flags,
you have swirling colors, and no one notices the security
(33:16):
features because of all these distractions. So I told them
that a piece of currency, a bill, should be a blank,
white piece of paper with a single hologram in the middle.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
That's it, nothing else on it.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
A counterfeiter wouldn't be able to replicate that without serious
specialized equipment, and the person in the street wouldn't be
distracted by all the detailing that has nothing.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
To do with the security.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
So they agreed with my recommendation in theory, but they
rejected it on the grounds that there's too much cultural
momentum in the design of banknotes. In other words, people
expect notes to look a certain way. Currencies are supposed
to impress the viewer with the regal power and artistic
(34:08):
talents of the ruling body, and apparently no government wants
to appear unregal and unartistic when compared to another government,
And so the experiment came to a close. The building
got changed to a face, which was a good start,
but so much about the rest of currencies is stuck
in place. So we'll see what happens with the future
(34:31):
of digital exchanges like paypalor Venmo, and the future of crypto,
but it appears that for now paper money is sticking
around almost everywhere on the planet. So it's still my
general hope that some government somewhere will get this straight,
and the advantage for them is they'll have massively less
counterfeiting to drag on their economy. So if you're going
(34:54):
to start a new country, take this podcast as my
free advice for how to do your bills. Effective solution
from science can sometimes bump up against tradition, but if
we really care about tackling a problem, we have to
move beyond adherence to custom. The human visual system is
never going to notice security features that are buried in
(35:14):
other details, and if you give your brain any excuse
to believe it knows what's out there, it will take
shortcuts and make extra assumptions.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
So this episode repeats.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
A theme that you're going to hear many times on
this show. Whenever you want to improve society, you have
to do your best to understand the details of the
brains that comprise that society.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
That's all for this week.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
To find out more and to share your thoughts, head
over to eagleman dot com, slash Podcasts, and you can
also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Subscribe to my channel so you can follow along each
week for new updates until next time. I'm David Eagleman
and this is in Her Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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