The Invisible Gorilla (Part 1) - Where Did The Road Go? - Fringe Radio Network

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
the Fringe Radio Network. I know I was gonna tell him, Hey,
do you.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
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radionetwork dot com right at the top of the page.

(00:37):
I know, slippers, we gotta keep cleaning these chimneys.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Warning this show may contain mention of the Invisible Gorilla.
This month's Where Did the Road Go? Is sponsored by
the following awesome individuals, Greg Ross, Ellison Cook, Super Inframan,
thirty six Dingo and Michael Friske. Thank you so much

(01:05):
for helping make this show possible.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
Transmissions start Welcome to Where Did the Road Go? Join
us as we wander off the path and explore lost history, consciousness,
the paranormal, unexplained mysteries, alternative thought, and much more. We
are present on the web at Where to Theroadgo dot com.

(01:29):
Now Here is your host, Soriah.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Welcome to this edition of Where Did the Road Go?
And tonight I have for the first time in a while, Saxon.

Speaker 5 (01:52):
Hello, Hello, it's good to be back.

Speaker 6 (01:55):
And Christopher Ernst Hello, everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Chris has been on a few times with sex and
it's been a while.

Speaker 6 (02:01):
I have I know, I've.

Speaker 5 (02:03):
Had fomo seeing you guys hang out and have fun
without me around.

Speaker 6 (02:06):
To be honest, wish you were here, man, Oh me too,
me too.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
You were the one going all over doing martial arts stuff.

Speaker 7 (02:14):
I was. I was.

Speaker 5 (02:15):
It was stuff I had to do some of the
uh kind of kind of you know, uh the stuff.

Speaker 7 (02:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:25):
Yeah, Dan's got certain times of year that he does
some of the like instructor retreats that I go to
and things like that, and so it's it's his schedule.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
You know, how many times did you get hit in
the head? Oh, I have no idea?

Speaker 7 (02:39):
Is that?

Speaker 3 (02:39):
Because you got hit in the head A lot, A
fair amount.

Speaker 6 (02:43):
You know.

Speaker 5 (02:43):
The funny thing that a lot of the JKD stuff
I do the g Kundo they pulled a lot from
Savat when they put that together. So there's a lot
of lead kicks off the left leg and I miming
those a lot with one of my partners because he's
quite old and so I probably did like three or
four thousand left leg lifts.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Wow, that was just been like so much.

Speaker 6 (03:05):
Name Ever, I bet not to steer this into a
martial arts podcast, but I am really curious about Savat,
which if people don't know, it's the French martial art.

Speaker 5 (03:15):
Yeah, it's it's French kickboxing and they wear shoes historically,
so it's right, that's what.

Speaker 6 (03:22):
Yeah, that's cool. I don't know.

Speaker 5 (03:24):
It's just it's pretty neat because when they kick, they'll
kick with the toes because they got shoe on. Yeah,
and the lead kick they kind of fence with it almost,
and they'll kick you in the liver and things. Man,
it doesn't look like it should hurt that much, but
when they do it, you know, oh yeah, yeah, it
can drop you on the ground. It's not fun.

Speaker 6 (03:45):
That's one of the things that I do miss about
like kung fu and like fight culture movies of the
eighties and early nineties is the like the street fighter
phenomena where like every you'd have like a fighter from
you know, France doing savat, a fighter from you know
doing taekwon do Okanawa doing you know, I'll wait Cubru

(04:07):
and you know it's yeah, that's sort of like international
Mortal Kombat street fighter type thing, but seeing all the
different styles.

Speaker 7 (04:15):
Yeah, one of the best.

Speaker 5 (04:17):
I'm sorry, I'll stop doing martial arts too, but one
of my favorite band Am movies that most people probably
didn't give much time was The Quest.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (04:26):
I remember that one.

Speaker 5 (04:26):
Yeah, you know, and it was kind of like a
period remake of blood Sport, but they do a big
thing about you know, everybody's from a different part of
the world and they've got their fighting style from where
they're from, so it's it's almost like a street fighter
like the video game.

Speaker 6 (04:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I do remember liking that. Yeah,
I'm sorry, I didn't you mean to steer us into
trying to like come from Action Boys or something like that.
You know, that's day arlane.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Tonight. Tonight, we're finally going to be doing the Invisible
Guerrilla episode. Now, people have obviously heard me men reference
the Invisible Guerrilla, you know, like half a million times,
But there's good reason for that. And I think there's
three three to four primary things about this book that

(05:11):
really I think are incredibly important. One, we do not
all share the same reality. And that's in a very
basic sense. I'm not saying we're living in alternate dimensions
from one another, although we can't say we're not. But
the way our brains work, and we'll get to this,
we do not share the same reality. We do not
all see the same stuff. Two on a more like

(05:35):
a more widespread thing. It shows how commercialization can sell
to us, how politicians can count us, how con men
work all this stuff. It shows those illusions that they
know how to capitalize on it. If you know what
they're doing, you're having much better chance of realizing what

(05:56):
they're doing and not falling for it. And the third
thing is how much this stuff. And they never touched
the paranormal in this book. It's written. I'll tell you
about who wrote it in a minute. But they never
touched the paranormal in this book. But there's so many
implications for paranormal overlap of like how this affects how
we view the paranormal, that you could easily write a

(06:18):
second book just on that. Now, these guys. This came
out in two thousand and nine. It's called The Invisible Guerrilla.
How our intuitions deceive us and it's a Christopher. I
think it's chab Reis and Daniel Simons. They're both psychology professors.
Christopher's out of Union College, which it doesn't say where
it is, but you looked it up as in Schenectoty,

(06:38):
not far from me, so I might go, I'm going
to see if I can get either of these guys
to talk to me, because being psychology professors and obviously
not being interested in this type of fringe stuff, they
may not, but who knows. And Daniel Simons is a
professor at the University of Illinois. And it starts with
they have a webs to it's the Invisiblegerilla dot com.

(07:02):
So it starts with this invisible gorilla experiment, which a
lot of people have seen because it kind of went viral,
and the original experiment had people counting how many times
they show a video how many times the players dressed
in white past the basketball, while ignoring how many times
the people in black shirts past the basketball. And while

(07:22):
this happens, a gorilla walks into the middle of the scene,
does a little dance, beats its chest, and walks off.
The gorilla is on the scene nine seconds and fifty
percent of the people who watch this never see the gorilla.
They had people accusing them when they showed them the
video afterwards and said you missed the gorilla. They said,
this is not the same video. One of the things
I noticed, and they don't really bring this up, but

(07:44):
they're telling people to ignore the people in black shirts.
And I'm wondering if the number of people who would
see the gorilla would go up if it was the opposite,
because the gorilla is basically black. He's in a black
gorilla suit, so it matches the shirts. I'm watched because
I was just watching one of their TED talks. Well
only one guy did. He did Ted X talks, so

(08:06):
not a normal TED talk. Daniel Simons did. You can
find it on YouTube, and they're showing video examples. But
when they're talking about that video, and I'm going, you know,
the gorilla is the same color as the people in
black shirts, so they're telling people to ignore the people
in black shirts.

Speaker 6 (08:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, So I'm wondering if they did it the other way,
if more people would have seen the gorilla.

Speaker 6 (08:26):
Yeah sure, but I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
Yeah. So the point is, and then the thing he
said that I had to take down because it pretty
much sums it up. Looking isn't the same as seeing.
You have to focus attention on something to see it.

Speaker 6 (08:42):
It sounds like a line from a Castanada book.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Yes, but our brains don't just take in and we
I've known this for a very long time, since long
before I read this book, that our brains are filters.
You know, our census pick up this inf tons of information,
and then our brain filtered down what it thinks is important.
So in the case of the basketball players, you're focusing

(09:05):
on what you're told is important, which is how many
times the people in white shirts are passing the basketball.
So that's why you miss the gorilla because people believe,
oh they couldn't possibly miss a gorilla walking out into
the middle of the screen. But if you're not focused
on look at the whole scene, you're just focused on
follow the passes, your brain just goes that's not important.

(09:26):
I'm not even going to.

Speaker 6 (09:27):
Tell you about it, right right, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
It's And when you realize that, this is why I
say we do not share the same realities because we
focus in on different things. Someone and I.

Speaker 6 (09:40):
Think, yeah, and I think our senses are limited in
more limited than we think.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yes, that's also true. I mean, primarily we're focused on survival.
I think we still have that as the primary thing
that our sensors alert us to is danger. And I
mean there's been plenty of people who talk about now
we're in a essentially a where we're not fighting to
survive every minute of our life in the way like

(10:05):
primitive people might have. But now we're stressed out in
a different way, and it's causing us damage because that
that fight or flight instinct never quite kicks in and
it just kind of festers, you know, because we're dealing
with a completely different type of stress than our bodies
are used to or we're built for basically, you know,
it's built for Okay, there's a there's an animal rushing

(10:26):
at you. You need to get away or fight it,
and once that's done, the stress releases. But when you're
in a stressful office job, for instance, or a stressful
retail job, that fight or flight never gets like you
never do it, and it just kind of builds up
in your system. And that's extremely unhealthy. Yeah, to say the.

Speaker 5 (10:46):
Least, where lots of chronic stress comes from me, right, Yeah, Yeah,
it's chronic stress and it'll yeah you'll build up so
much quarters all, you'll damage your brain. Yeah, you know, uh,
you know the gorilla and perceptions and interesting thing when
you really think about like how our brains even as
symbol information because you know, I don't even know how

(11:11):
Chris sees what people look like exactly. Sure, his brain
tells him what that information looks like. My brain tells
me what that information looks like. Yeah, And so I'm
always amazed that we can communicate at all. Yeah, because
you know, if you think we're all kind of like operating,

(11:31):
you know, on a perception of the world that's a
recreation of what you're talking about, you know, for survival,
and none of us know we're we're seeing the exact
same thing or not. I mean, it seems to me
that we wouldn't actually probably be seeing the same things
just because of experiences and biases and all that to
begin with, much less how the hardware as symbols the

(11:53):
information into images for you, right, or our words or
you know whatever.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
And there's that old like thing that I think most
kids come up with. And then stoners will kind of
focus in on, like is your color red the same
as my color red?

Speaker 6 (12:08):
Right?

Speaker 7 (12:09):
Right?

Speaker 5 (12:10):
I mean you think about people that are colorblind. Yeah, yeah,
you know, and they don't know they are for a
really long time too.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
Sometimes that's true.

Speaker 6 (12:18):
Or go ahead's right, no, go ahead.

Speaker 5 (12:20):
Just like people with the synesthesia, yes, yes, you know
that have an internal monologue. Some people see images, some
people feel things for everything, that's a word they hear
instead of a cognitive definition. I mean, just all of
these different ways or see colors in the air when
people talk. And you'll have people to do that their
whole lives and don't realize it's strange until they're like

(12:43):
in their thirties yeaheah, because they just assume everybody did that.

Speaker 6 (12:47):
Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
And I feel like this book should be taught in
like high school, Like this should be a required class
so that we can understand that. You know, when people,
you know, look at other people and don't understand why
they don't see the world the same way. Well, there's
a lot of reasons people don't see the world the
same way, you know, And part of it's our perception,
part of it's our life experiences and stuff like that.

(13:09):
I mean, when I talk to someone who has a
different view on things than I do, I don't tell
them they're wrong because I don't know. I mean, I
don't assume I'm right about anything in particular. I have
reasons I believe certain things though right, But I'm also
open to being shown that, oh I'm incorrect about this.
You know, I made a wrong assumption. I interpreted something wrong.
It happens. It happens to all of us. But like

(13:32):
if I talk to someone who has a very different viewpoint,
I'll ask them to explain to me why they think that.
Not because I'm trying to prove them wrong, but because
I want to see what they're seeing. Oh yeah, absolutely,
And people don't do that. They just want to force
their views nowadays down everyone else's throats.

Speaker 5 (13:50):
Yeah yeah, you know, I had a friend making an answer.
Excuse me. Words are hard. Interesting observation about all of this,
But you know, the way our even our entertainment is
set up. Now, We've got so many options out there,
but there's no commonality even in like a show that's

(14:11):
a hit that everybody's watching and they can talk about,
and so all of these things that build community even
at the you know, very capitalistic, you know, macro level
of just like entertainment is not nearly as universal as
it was before.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Oh no, no.

Speaker 5 (14:28):
Which I thought was kind of fascinating. But anyway, that
for me ties into how we see the world and
how we relate to each other and creates further, you know,
gaps between us.

Speaker 6 (14:38):
I think it's really important to think about, especially since
you know, these days, I think a lot of the
world spends its time consuming basically doing the same thing,
which is consuming a disparate amount of water down sort
of media across you know, different platforms that are similar,
but you know have different you know bent depending on

(15:01):
the you know, the country it's coming out of, you know,
the culture that it's based in, and it is it's.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
What propaganda they want to sell you.

Speaker 6 (15:11):
Right, sure, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
So I did make a note about this. So as
mentioned when I mentioned the if the gorilla was or
if they were told to count the black shirt passes
instead of the white shirt passes. It says that a
psychology department in Yale created a computerized version of the
Gorilla video in which the players were replaced by letters

(15:34):
and the gorilla was placed replaced by a red cross
like a plus side that unexpectedly traverses the display. Subjects
counted how many times the white letters touched the sides
of the display window while ignoring the black letters. Even
jaded researchers were surprised by the result. Thirty percent of
viewers missed the bright red cross, even though it was

(15:55):
the only cross, the only colored object, and the only
object that moved in a straight path through the display.
We thought the gorilla had undergone unnoticed, at least in
part because it didn't really stand out. It was dark colored,
like the players wearing black. Our belief that a distinctive
object should pop out overwrote our knowledge of the phenomena

(16:16):
of inattentional blindness was what they call it. This red
gorilla experiment shows that when something is unexpected, unexpected distinctiveness
does not at all guarantee that we will notice it.
So it's thirty percent. A few more people did notice
it when it was a red plus sign versus a
black gorilla, but they still a large number of people

(16:39):
did not see it because they were not looking for it.
And of course, when you look at the paranormal, I mean,
we have many encounters where people, you know, some people
have never seen anything paranormal and they're like, well, it
doesn't exist. You're just hallucinating, but it maybe that they're
shut off to that. You know, they're not seeing the
gorilla because they're not looking for it. They don't want

(16:59):
to look for it. So I jumped ahead of my
notes here a little bit. So, yeah, in intentional in
attentional blindness or inattentional blindness, is that what it is?
I've completely lost the where it says that, But anyway,
is the idea that we're blind to things we're not

(17:20):
paying attention to. And they talk a lot about motorcycles
in here, because motorcycle and bicycle accidents. Many times someone
will say, well, I looked, but I didn't see them.
And they said that unless you're in an area with
a lot of bicyclists or something, you tend to look
for cars. Your mind without you realizing it is looking

(17:41):
for cars, it's not looking for motorcycles. So you can
look right at the motorcycle not see it go, and
then you know you just cut someone off on a motorcycle.
But areas where there is where there's a lot more
motorcycles or bicyclists or whatever, accidents are less frequent. You
would think they'd be more frequent because there's more bicycles, right,
but it's less frequent because people are used to them

(18:03):
being there and look for them, so they talk about
like advertising campaigns for like you, says, reflective clothing helps
increase visibility for motorcyclists, but it doesn't override our expectation.
Motorcyclists are analogous to the cross of this experiment. People
fail to see them, but not just because they are
smaller or less distinctive than other vehicles on the road.

(18:26):
They fail to see motorcycles precisely because they stand out.
Wearing highly visible clothing is better than wearing invisible clothing
and less of a technological challenge, but increasing the visual
distinctiveness of a rider might be limited in helping drivers
notice motorcyclists. Ironically, what would what likely would work to
increase detection of motorcycles is to make them look more

(18:49):
like cars. For example, giving motorcycles two headlights separated as
much as possible to resemble the visual pattern of a
car's headlights could well increase their detectability.

Speaker 6 (19:00):
Go ahead, right, right, yeah, yeah, sorry, I thought so.
It makes me think of something, and I'm curious as
if if the same experiment, like the Invisible Guerrilla experiment
We're done to a series of people who are trained
or who's like pastime is looking at things, and I

(19:22):
say this, you know, I think this could come from
a variety of different places, not just like pilots. But
you know, and I'm certainly not tooting my own horn
as being special. It's just something that's been part of
my job. Like, you know, I'm a filmmaker that primarily
works as a cinematographer, so I'm always looking at stuff. Yeah,
and I do notice things more than other people. It's

(19:44):
something you know, I also teach this, so it's something
that I know trying to teach my students to like,
you know, gather this visual attention. You know, I will
see things like I'll look at in a room and
I'll see something on the floor something you know, they're
that my wife for you know, kid won't see you
know there. I remember there was a like an activity

(20:06):
that we were doing at work the other day and
it was you know, me and my department were all
if filmmakers or graphic designers, and then there was a
you know another group that was like physicists and we
were doing an exercise where we were looking as a
teaching exercise where we were looking at an image on
the screen and we were writing down all of the
facts that we see visible from that image. And you know,

(20:31):
all of us that are trained in our job is
to look at things visually and break them down and
scrutinize them. We all had like, I don't know fifty
things we wrote down, and the physicists had like five.
And they're not smart, they're physicists, right, Yeah, they would
think in a different way. Yeah, I'd be just very curious,

(20:53):
you know. And this goes back to I guess my thinking.
This other question that follows that is, you know, the
conversation about UFOs and you know, experts, pilots seeing them,
whether or not that there's any validity to that. It
also makes me think of people who are artists, you know,
people who are thinking visually being more prone to seeing things,

(21:16):
you know, kind of I guess. I don't know if
there's any data to back that up, but it does
seem that creative types and artists are more prone to
have experience as they notice.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
Well, that is what George Hansen says. That's right. Roderick
Core came up with that, Yeah, I mean, Jeff Ritzman
would constantly talk about ask people who had experiences, are
you an artist?

Speaker 6 (21:36):
Right?

Speaker 3 (21:36):
You know, because yeah, that is very common. But you
make a good point. Like I have a friend who's
a carpenter, and I'll look at something and be like,
this looks fine. He'll be like, no, if this is
not fine, look at this, look at this, look at this,
look at this, because he has that knowledge base to
recognize that this this thing is not as stable as
I think it is because I'm looking at it like now,
this looks fine, but he's looking at those details he

(21:58):
can see, knows what to look for, or he has
that attention to those specific details that I don't even
know are there. Or one of the things that drives
me crazy to the guy who does the Metallic Onslaught
record companies will sometimes send really low bitrate files. I'm
talking sixty four bit files. Oh gosh, and they just

(22:19):
they sound like they're underwater. And I have no idea
what's wrong with these companies because they're sending them for airplay.
And he'll put it in his show and I put
his show together and I'm going, dude, this is a
sixty four bit file, and he's like, oh, I didn't notice,
and he listened to it yeah, and I'm like, Okay,
he's not someone who really focus. You know, he's listening
to it on his laptop kind of in the background.

(22:39):
I'm listening to it on big speakers, and I'm very
focused on production and sound quality because I do music
mastering and stuff like that.

Speaker 6 (22:47):
Exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (22:49):
I remember when MP three's came out. I had a
friend who was like, I can't hear any difference between
like a wavefile and a one twenty eight bit file,
And I'm like really, And I had to sit there
and point it out to him and then he's like, oh,
now I can't unhear it.

Speaker 6 (23:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, yeah, because you start losing the high end. You
only have so many bits to work with, so especially
like if it's an acoustic singer songwriter, You're probably not
going to notice that much of a difference. But if
you're listening to a band with a lot going on, yeah,
you start losing that high end. It's starts sounding like
it's underwater.

Speaker 6 (23:19):
Yeah, yep, totally.

Speaker 3 (23:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (23:22):
You know, the I think pilots would some pilots would
do better at it than others, But I think that
prime of what to look for at the beginning of
the video, you know, look for every time somebody in
white passes the ball. Uh is still going to have
a pretty big effect.

Speaker 6 (23:41):
Yeah, it's not just saying it's asking you to count. Yeah,
it's not just having you to notice. So you know,
I did the video here while we were silently, while
we were talking, and yeah, of course I noticed the
gorilla because I know to look for it. But I
definitely can see, especially if you know you are with

(24:02):
other people or this, I don't know, any kind of distraction,
the need to focus on counting, and the fact that
you have this really strong contrast between black and white,
like I don't know if they were rainbow colored, it
might be different or something. You know, well what I do.
That's not to say I don't think it proves a point.
It's just I think there are a lot of things

(24:23):
in there that are factors.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yes, and that's why I read the part about the
red gorilla, which was the red ex I mean, yes,
it wasn't a fifty percent, but still thirty percent of
people didn't see it.

Speaker 5 (24:35):
Ye's still significant, yeeah yeh.

Speaker 6 (24:38):
And I think it raises this larger you know, conversation.
That's very very important. That has to do with, yes,
selective attention, and the idea that selective attention is you know,
a lot broader and has a lot you know more.
You know, it has to do yeah, not only with
your expertise and with you know what tasks you have,

(24:58):
but there are all these other factors that you know
be in there, and then you start thinking about it
in terms of, you know, how does this work on
sort of a broader philosophical level. And you know, the
thing that I've mentioned a bunch of times that you
know has come up in the research that I've done,
is this idea that you have, you know, your organs
of sense in this body that we have that allows

(25:20):
us to see a very particular thing, which is the
gross world, the sort of you know world that exists
on this you know some people say vibrational level or
you know whatever, but on a particular plane of existence,
we have this these senses, these you know, five senses
that allow us to see and taste and hear and
smell things. But you know, there is this interpenetrating other

(25:44):
world or many worlds that you know, the afterlife, the
subtle sphere, whatever you want to call it, or different
people call it that are actually here and we're in
the middle of it right now, but we just can't
sense it because we're not using our you know, spiritual
organs that develop. And it's you know, not only something

(26:05):
you hear in you know, Eastern religions, Buddhism, Vedic religions
and stuff like that, but you know, it's one of
those things that I think even some of the more
recent like SI experiments point towards true.

Speaker 5 (26:18):
You know, I'd add to that too, Chris. I mean,
as an example, you know, you think about people that
react to things that are a danger that they're not
quite seeing, you know, reflexively, like somebody pulling out front
of them, or something on the corner of their eye
or what have you that keeps them from getting hurt
versus you know, you're watching a video and yeah, the

(26:40):
gorilla is going by in the background, but it is
that there's no threat from the gorilla, you know, yeah, yeah,
or anything like that. So you know, your your other
senses or your intuition or anything like that that's going
to pick up on something, but also just it's not
going to be engaged there if you've got a strong
one to begin with.

Speaker 6 (27:01):
Yeah, I mean, if I were a mad scientist, I'd
want to do, you know, experiments where we do the
same thing, but have you know the person being dangled over,
you know, a pit of alligators? See what they notice.

Speaker 8 (27:12):
Then, right right, So one of the things if the
gorilla was a real gorilla, yeah, you know, we put
a bunch of like food on, you know, put food
in your pockets or something.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
So a few of the things they point out, they
just kind of sum it up, is that we don't
see notice, or we think that we see notice and
remember far more than we actually do. We don't see things,
we don't focus our attention on. We experience far less
of the visual world than we think we do. Our
brains are built to detect patterns automatically. The pattern we

(27:49):
experience when driving features a preponderance of cars and a
dearth of motorcycles. In other words, the ad campaign itself
to make people aware of motorcycles falls prey to the
illusion of attention that we just let me see. I
could pull up a whole quote there because I just
had part of it there. But yeah, a lot of
in the beginning they focus on the whole motorcycle thing

(28:11):
because it is a serious issue. So how can we
remedy the situation? Motorcycles save safety advocates propose a number
of solutions, most of which we think are doomed to fail.
Posting signs that implore people look for motorcycles might lead
drivers to adjust their expectations and become more likely to
notice a motorcycle appearing shortly after the sign. Yet after

(28:33):
a few minutes of not seeing any motorcycles, their visual
expectations will reset, leading them to again expect what they
most commonly see cars. So advertising campaigns assume that the
mechanisms of attention are permanent suggest what does that say,
are permeable sorry, subject to influence from our intentions and thoughts.

(28:56):
Yet the wire of our visual expectations almost entirely insulated
from our conscious control. And that's really important. We're not
fully in control of what our brain decides to tell
us about. And it works for all senses. Yeah, our
brains are detected, are there to detect patterns, and they

(29:17):
expect things they've experienced before, which is why I say,
when you get these like weird monster encounters, if you
do happen to notice if it somehow makes itself noticeable.
Our brain is looking for a pattern that it can
recognize out of this, yes, like flipping through it, like
I've described almost flipping through a rolodex.

Speaker 6 (29:38):
What is this?

Speaker 3 (29:39):
I don't know what it is. Well, things I don't
know are scary. What else are scary? Monsters are scary.
This is a monster. And then they go running and
they did, you know, and they may not have seen
what they think they saw, but they definitely encountered something.

Speaker 6 (29:51):
Right now, I feel like in one of the books
that Michio Kaku wrote, and you know, I know some
you know, valid criticism maybe of Michio Kaku, but I
do think that some of the things he says are
really interesting. And one of the books, he talks a
lot about consciousness, that's the theory of the mind or

(30:12):
something the future of the mind, and he talks about
it in terms of feedback loops and that you know,
the at least how the brain works, you know, or
I hope I'm remembering this right, or that there is
some fundamental structure to how a human develops that is
based around this, you know, like aggregate of clusters of

(30:36):
feedback loops that develop and develop and that I don't know.
For me at least, I found that pretty interesting, and
I think it certainly has resonated with stuff like this
that you know we're talking.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
About there was and when we're talking about like monsters
and stuff. I think I have it down here, but
I'm not finding it directly online. The Olympic Project, which
is a bigfoot research project, did a test and I
can't find the exact data on it right this minute,
but basically they went drove people through like this wooded area,

(31:11):
and I do believe they were specifically looking for bigfoot,
and or maybe maybe they weren't looking for big Maybe
they just drove people through the area to see if
they would notice these bigfoots hiding slightly in the woods,
and the majority of people did.

Speaker 6 (31:24):
Not see them.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
So I'm thinking it wasn't people looking for bigfoot, because
it doesn't make as much sense if they were specifically looking.
They just like, oh, tell us about your surroundings, tell
us if you see anything weird type of thing. And
they drove people through the area with these cutouts of
bigfoot and almost nobody saw them. So what that What
does that tell us about bigfoot? I don't know.

Speaker 6 (31:46):
Exactly.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
But again, you know, we miss a lot of what's
going on around us. And I don't think a lot
of people want to hear that. They want to believe
that their memories and they're what they experienced, they're getting
one hundred percent.

Speaker 6 (32:01):
Yeah, yeah, oh completely. I think a lot of people have,
you know, a main character syndrome too true, which ebates.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
So I pulled this off of the Ted Talk and
they're dealing with like they showed a video of a
guy giving directions and this person walks between them with
a like a door, you know, like they're carrying a
big door, and they switch out the person he's giving
directions to, and the guy just doesn't even blink. He

(32:31):
just continues giving directions. And they're talking about that, and
they said that some people did notice the person was different,
but they kept giving directions anyway. And he says, we
didn't ask why, And I'm thinking that should have been
your first question. Yeah, but he says, uh and and
I just like screen recorded the text of reasoning of

(32:55):
reasoning about intuition. So these cases in which people think
they understand how their mind works and actually don't have
a good idea about how their minds work. And what's
interesting about this is in some cases intuitions are fine,
but our reasoning about them is lousy. There was a
study from Lars Hall and Perry Johansson which was a

(33:17):
very simple task. They showed people two pictures and they
just had to say which one was more attractive. And
on occasion they would hand them a picture and ask
them to explain their judgment, and then at some point,
like they would pick, say the one on the left,
and they would hand them the one on the left,
but they would they would they would shift it so
it's actually the one on the right. So they actually

(33:37):
handed them they handed them what looked like the correct
picture because they put them face down and they'd slide
it over and a little slight of hand they switched
the picture and then the person picked it up and
they said they most people didn't notice they were looking
at a different picture. And not only that, but they
gave the same kind of explanation that they gave for
the faces they had picked. Like if you try to

(34:00):
analyze the reasons people gave they were identical to the
ones they had picked for the actual picture, Like they
would kind of justify like they not only would they
not realize that they were looking at the other picture,
but they would then justify why they picked this picture,
and they called it this phenomenon has noticed choice blindness. See,

(34:23):
it didn't get all the wording right. He said he
picked this. One of the guy said I prefer blondes,
when they'd actually picked the brunette. And that's the thing,
like he didn't realize he did that. He said, if
you ask people, would you notice if I switched to face,
eighty five percent said that yes they would notice. Yeah,

(34:45):
I didn't get all of this, damn it, but they
would make up reasons to match their confidence that they
would notice. So basically, after the fact, the brain will
will rewire that and kind of look like I said,
you look up the Ted Talk Ted House Talk. It
wasn't whatever the independent one is with Daniel Simon's. You

(35:06):
could see the videos. It's only like twenty minutes long,
but it gives you all of.

Speaker 6 (35:10):
The more intense version of when you're at a restaurant
and you get the wrong thing and then for a
second you're like, wait, did I order this?

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Well no, because these people weren't even questioning it.

Speaker 6 (35:22):
That's right, Yeah, you know they because.

Speaker 3 (35:24):
They saw them pass them the correct picture, but with
you using a little bit of slighter hand, they passed
them the other, you know. They like, I'm guessing they
had both pictures stacked and then they dropped them face
down and slide it face down to the person. So
I'm guessing he's palming the top picture and giving you know,
and sending him the other one, and uh, you know,
the person's like, yeah, this is the picture. And they

(35:45):
looked completely different.

Speaker 6 (35:47):
So weird.

Speaker 5 (35:48):
But you know what, I wonder how much of that
is some kind of like you know, ego overriding guessing,
you know, where I wonder how many of them actually
noticed it was not what they picked but went with
it anyway, And then how many should have noticed but
instead of it being a survival thing, it was an
ego like short circuit, you know kind of thing where

(36:11):
this was like, yeah, this is when I picked, and
they believe it, you know, And.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
That gets into movie flubs, you know, like when you
have errors in movies. Nine percent of people do not notice. Yes, sure,
I think more people notice now because you can stream
something and watch it fifty times exactly. And yes, because
I mean there are plenty of times, And because I've
put together movies, I can like I always try to

(36:39):
make mine not be off, you know what I mean,
Like even down to little hand movements and stuff. I
want to edit it so it looks like everything's going.
But looking at all this stuff, I realize most people
don't even pay attention to that. I'll watch a TV
show and like the person will be in a completely
different position from the camera angle you just had, and
I'm like, you just let that go, all right?

Speaker 6 (37:00):
They do a lot Yeah, no, no, no, And that's late.
That is absolutely you know, is it there laziness? It's
a lot of times laziness or it's an experience or
budget or and usually that has to do with budget. Yeah, yeah,
those those are results of budget.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
But it's also the fact that somewhere in this book
they talk about I don't know if I took notes
from it, but they made of a movie that is
just completely inconsistent. It was like five minutes long, and
most people saw no inconsistencies in it, right, So I
mean that's yeah.

Speaker 6 (37:32):
There are a lot of things you know that I
think you know go into that too, like the like
pattern us trying to make patterns out of things. I
wonder if the film that they had had music in it.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
M Yeah, because music definitely can make something seem like
it's flowing even when it's not right, you know.

Speaker 5 (37:53):
And I would even throw out there, like, because we
watch filmed media all the time, we even reinforced not
noticing those types of changes.

Speaker 6 (38:05):
You know, there's small errors and things. Yeah, there's this
thing called the Kushlav effect that comes from film editing,
and it was you know, came from these like Russian
filmmakers in the like tens and twenties. There's this particular guy,
love Kushlav, and it's this you know, they were all
really into sort of the psychology of film and it

(38:26):
being this like relue. It was like ai you know,
but you know at the time, people were like freaking
out about it, and these guys thought it was this
revolutionary thing that would change the world. I mean, I
guess it did, but they did a lot of like
experiments with it there. It's basically this experiments they did
where that just you know, discover discovered or you know,
remarked upon this mental phenomenon where people who are watching

(38:50):
a film get more meaning from the basically the interaction
of two shots that come one after another, and you
might got I remember this is the beginning of editing.
We take this all completely for granted now, but this
you know, idea, and this ended up going on to
Eisenstinian Montage and all this film theory stuff, similar experiments

(39:12):
to you know, the stuff that they were doing for
Invisible Gorilla that you know talked about. Yeah, you put
like shot A and shot B together and they don't equal,
you know A, then B they equal something new, which
is shot C. And people will do this no matter
what you put next to one another, and they'll make

(39:33):
different meanings out of these combinations. And then they'll especially
do this if there's music under it. And we all
know the phenomenon of you know, you show a horror
scene and you put a comedy soundtrack underneath it, it completely
takes away this meaning. So you know, I'm just curious
about the film.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
Okay, Yeah, so this was done at Cornell Dan and
his friend Dan Daniel Levin. I don't know who Dan was.
I have to go back and for you that, but anyway,
they made a film with this project, The Two Dance
began a long, productive and ongoing collaboration for the first study,
they made a brief movie of a conversation between two friends,

(40:11):
Sabrina and Andrea, about a surprise party for their mutual
friend Jerome. Sabrina sat at a table when Andrea entered
the scene. As they talked about a party, the camera
cut back and forth between them, sometimes showing a close
up of one of them and another time showing both
of them. After about a minute, the conversation ended and
the screen faded the black. Imagine being a subject in

(40:33):
their experiment. You come to a laboratory room and you're
told that before you do another task, the experimenters would
like you to watch a brief movie and then answer
some detailed questions about it. They advised you to pay
close attention, and they start a movie. As soon as
the movie ends, they hand you a piece of paper
that asked, did you notice any unusual differences from one
shot to the next where object's body positions or clothing

(40:55):
suddenly changed. If you are like almost all of the
subjects in the part, you would answer no. You would
not have noticed any of the nine editing mistakes the
tu Dans intentionally made. Huh these errors?

Speaker 6 (41:08):
Okay, so yeah, I see what they did.

Speaker 7 (41:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
These errors, which were the same type that end up
in books and websites and film flubs, included plates on
the table changing color, the scarf disappearing and reappearing. They
were much more obvious than the ones Josh Mankowitz, I
think it is disparaged, Joe Well, josh It says, I was.

Speaker 6 (41:30):
A Josh, I think they mean Joel Macowitz.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
That could be, yeah, disparaged in his dateline report. Yet
even when subjects that was something they talked about earlier
watched the film a second time now looking for the changes,
they still noticed, on average, just two of the deliberate errors.
This phenomena, the surprising failure to notice seemingly obvious changes
from one moment to the next, is now known as

(41:53):
change blindness. People are blind to the changes between what
was in view moments before and what is in view now. Well.
The phenomena is related to the inattentional blindness we discussed,
but it is not the same. Inattentional blindness happens because
we failed to notice the appearance of something we weren't
expecting to see, and that that resonates with the paranormal

(42:14):
so strongly. The things we miss, such as a gorilla
is fully visible right in front of us the entire time.
For change blindness, unless we remember that Julia Roberts was
eating a croissant, the fact that she is now eating
a pancake is unremarkable. Change blindness occurs when we failed
to compare what's there now was which with what was

(42:34):
there before. Of course, in the real world, objects don't
abruptly change into other objects, so checking all the visual
details from moment to moment to make sure they haven't
changed would be a spectacular waste of brain power.

Speaker 6 (42:46):
Right, I see, Yeah, so yeah, I mean that's you know,
that's a lot of time, you know, when in the
films you do have the specifically what they're talking about
is what are called continuity errors.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (43:00):
Continuity errors you know, are based around both like the language,
this visual language of cinema, but then also yeah, things
like props, you know, moving and things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
And you're right if it has a musical if it
has music playing under it, whether it be a song
or anything like that, it just makes everything feel like
it flows better.

Speaker 6 (43:20):
It does. But yeah, they're not talking about what I
was talking, not specifically what I was talking about this
is really this is you know, specific to I think
that change blindness, you know, and you know, having to
do with continuity, and you know, oftentimes you know, when
you know, or sometimes in the movies, when they're left
in there, like by really good, reputable filmmakers that are
not lazy, it's because you know, oftentimes it was the

(43:43):
best performance even though there was that. And the hope
is that the performance will you know, engage your suspension
of disbelief so much that you will not worry about
you'll basically have change blindness.

Speaker 5 (43:57):
Yeah, there's this rate kind of I guess moment of
that I just found about recently an Abyss and they're
filming two of the actors. I forget the particular scene,
but you can look it up and there's, you know,
the part of the underground facility they're in is filling
with water and they're in the corner and there's water

(44:19):
pouring on the camera lens and the cameraman actually reaches
his finger in there with a towel that wipes off
the lens and then pulls it back out. Yeah, and
it's in the theatrical print. You know, if you go
look at it online anywhere it's there. It doesn't read
like his finger is cleaning it off. But once you're

(44:42):
told that you never see it, you can't not see it.
And it was you know exactly what you're talking about,
where like James Cameron was like, uh, this is the
best one. We're just gonna go with.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
It, right.

Speaker 5 (44:56):
It's fascinating because like I've seen that scene a thousand
times times and it never stuck out to me till
it was pointed out, and now I see it every time.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, the paragraph after this said, what is
in some ways even more important than a failure to
notice changes is the mistaken belief that we should notice them.
Daniel Levin cheekingly named this misbelief change blindness blindness because
people are blind to the extent of their own change
blindness and one experiment, Levin showed photographs from the Sabina

(45:25):
Andrea Conversation to a group of undergraduates, described the film
and pointed out that the plates were red in one
shot and white in another. That is, Rather than run
the change blindness experiment, he explained everything about it, including
the intentional flub. He then asked these subjects to describe
whether or not they would have noticed the change if
they had watched the film without being alerted to its presence.

(45:49):
More than seventy percent confidently said that they would have
spotted the change, even though in the original study no
one actually did. For the disappearing scarf, more than ninety
percent said they would have noticed, when again in the
original experiment no one actually did. This is the illusion
of memory at work. People firmly believe that they will
notice unexpected changes when in fact almost nobody does, you know.

Speaker 5 (46:15):
It always makes me think, obviously, this is pretty close
to us talking about seeing, you know, cryptids and having
paranormal experiences. But even like eyewitness accounts of something and
everybody reporting something different. And then you think about the
fact that you could sneak things in on people like
this and they don't notice. Yeah, it just tells you

(46:38):
how unreliable as narrators we are.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
Yes, yeah, yes. In the Ted talk, he was talking
about our inability to actually like like with the guy
walking getting directions and the switching out people, and he
said a lot of people who are on death row
have now gotten off because of DNA testing and such.
And he said, if you look, almost everyone one of
them was confidently and definitely identified by a witness. Yes,

(47:05):
And he's like, and they were sure it was that person,
It wasn't that person. And he wasn't saying that they
were lying. He was saying they just didn't realize it.
They were so confident in their memory. So this is
the actual one I was looking for, it says. Now,
imagine you're in another experiment conducted by the two Dan's.
You come to the lab again and ask to watch

(47:25):
a brief, silent movie. You are warned that it is
really short. You should pay close attention. The movie shows
a person sitting at a desk who gets up and
walks around toward the camera. The shot then cuts to
the hallway and shows a person exiting the door and
answering the phone on the wall. He stands still, holding
the phone to his ear and facing the camera about

(47:46):
five seconds before the scene fades to black. As as
soon as the movie ends, you're asked to write a
detailed description of what you saw. Having just read about
the Sabina Andrea film, you've probably guessed that there's more
to this one than a simple action of answering a phone.
When the camera cut from a view of the actor
walking toward the doorway to the shot of the actor
entering the hall and answering the phone. The original actor

(48:08):
was replaced by a different person. Wouldn't you notice the
only actor in a scene being replaced by a different
pairing person wearing different clothes, parting his hair on the
opposite side, and wearing different glasses. If you answered yes,
you're under the illusion of memory. Here is what two
subjects wrote after seeing the film. Subject one, a young

(48:29):
man with slightly long blonde hair and long and large glasses,
turned around from a chair to desk, got up, walked
past the camera to a phone in the hallway, spoken
to the phone, and listened and looked at the camera.
Subject two, there was a blond guy with glasses sitting
in a desk, not too cluttered, but not exactly neat.
He looked at the camera, rose and walked out to
the front right of the screen, his blue shirt billowing

(48:52):
out a bit on his right on his right over
his white so it says a bit on his right
over his white with light patterns and T shirt okay.
Went to the hallway, picked up phone, said something that
didn't seem to be hello, and then stood there looking
kind of foolish for a bit. Not a single subject
who viewed this video spontaneously reported anything different before and

(49:13):
after the change, even when prompted more specifically with the
question did you notice anything unusual about the video? No
subjects reported the change in the actor's identity or even
as clothes from the first shot to the second. In
a second second experiment, subjects watched the same video, but
with the person change pointed out to them. They were

(49:35):
then asked if they would have noticed the change had
they viewed the video without warning. Seventy percent said they would,
compared to zero percent who actually did. In this case,
people who know about the change in advance, it becomes
obvious and they all see it. But when they don't
expect the change, they completely miss it. And then they
go into a bunch about different movies and stuff they've done. Yeah,

(49:57):
and just like continuality and how it doesn't really matter
because we don't notice them. And obviously some people do.
I mean, because there's whole websites, especially for popular movies,
talking about all the continuality errors. Yeah, and I'll notice
them sometimes because, like I said, I've edited movies before,

(50:17):
and I try to make everything flow exactly like it
Should's not always possible, but I try to get it
as close as possible.

Speaker 6 (50:23):
The more you work with it, the more you notice.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
It exactly exactly. Again, that's the attention thing. But I'm
still gonna miss stuff. If someone's shirt changes work and
I'm not really paying that close attention to their shirt,
their shirt's not important. I mean, unless they're suddenly wearing
a heavy metal T shirt of a band that's really
obscure and I'm like, whoa wait, did they have that

(50:46):
on a minute?

Speaker 6 (50:46):
Right? Yeah, yeah, Well I think there's that specialized attention, you.

Speaker 3 (50:51):
Know, yeah, yeah, And it even says script supervisors and
I'm not immune to change blindness, but yeah.

Speaker 6 (51:00):
No they're not. Oh absolutely, no, no, no, no, it's something
that continuity is a very difficult thing because oftentimes you know,
it's it's yeah, it's not yeah, it's it's it's different
than you know, having to uh, it's like a different
type of attentions. It's almost like not important. It's you
have to realize how important it is in order to

(51:21):
keep it up. And the script supervisor, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
And they're also so this is actually before that part
of the book, because I had a skip I had
to find that. But in a section entitled at Tension
writ large, it says, the illusion of attention affects us
all mundane and potentially life threatening ways. It is truly
an everyday illusion. It contributes to everything from traffic accidents
to airplane cockpit displays to cell phones. They talk about like,

(51:47):
if you're talking on a cell phone, you may think
you're watching the road while you're driving, but your attention
is on the conversation even if you're not looking at it.
And I mean that's the same as talking to someone
in the car. You're paying a lot less attention to
what's going on, even though you think you're paying attention
because you're looking. You know, you're looking out the front
of the window, but your focus is on the conversation.

(52:08):
So it says, as the grilla experiment has become more
widely known, it has been used to explain countless failures
of awareness, from the concrete to the abstract in diverse domains.
It is not limited to visual attention, but applies equally
well to all of our senses and even broader patterns
in the world around us. The gorilla experiment is powerful
because it forces people to confront the illusion of attention.

(52:31):
It provides an effective metaphor precisely because the illusion of
attention has such a broad reach. Here are some examples.
A trainer uses it to show people how they can
miss safety infractions that are right in front of them.
A Harvard professor uses it to explain how discriminatory discriminary
practices in the workplace can go unnoticed even by intelligent,

(52:51):
fair minded individuals. Anti terrorism experts cited it to explain
how Australian intelligence officers could have missed the presence in
their own country of the Jamaiya is Malaya group, which
was responsible for the two thousand and two Bolli bombings
that kill two hundred and two people. A weight loss

(53:12):
website compares the unseen gorilla to its unplanns to an
unplanned snack that can ruin your diet. Promoter of the Paranormal,
Dean Rayden, which is one of the few times I
mentioned the paranormal, likens the inattentional blindness of our subjects
to the failure of scientists to see the reality of

(53:33):
esp and extrasensory phenomena. A high school principle uses inattentional
blindness to explain how teachers and administration often fail to
notice bullying. An episcopal priest used it in a sermon
to explain how easily people can miss evidence of God
all around them, and a British ad campaign encouraged drivers
to watch for bicyclists by creating a television and viral

(53:56):
web advertisement based on our video with the chest thumping
gorilla replaced by a moonwalking bear.

Speaker 5 (54:02):
That was actually the version I saw.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Oh okay, all right, yeah, I saw.

Speaker 6 (54:06):
That before I saw the invisible guerrilla version. I probably
i'd have to to to, you know, disagree with the
you know, some of those examples which I think are
completely different, like you're talking about like look, seeing a
motorcyclist or a bicyclist is completely different than like our

(54:27):
faith article, you know, like well.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
True, but I mean.

Speaker 6 (54:32):
I don't yeah, yeah, And that's certain, that's not their problem.
That's you know. I think it's one of those situations
where you take one thing and you there's like this
loose association that you have with something else that really
isn't there.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
But they're they're using. This is where people have used
the example of the beautiful visible right, And.

Speaker 6 (54:51):
I think that's the difference. Yeah, that's what. Yeah, they
look out for is people using it in a way
that I think is you know, it's you're using it.
I think it's being used incorrectly. I'll just let's just
be pointing that out.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Yeah, No, that's and and I see what you're saying,
but I read that as you know, there's a lot
of wondersful ful stuff around you, even in the midst
of bad stuff going on.

Speaker 6 (55:13):
Sure, but I guess I might. What I would say
is I feel like that is not that's not necessarily
a sensory attention thing like that. There could there's something
there's other things going that could be going on there.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
You know.

Speaker 6 (55:25):
I don't. I'm not I'm not arguing that that's not
the case. I just I don't know. I guess that's
more of an emotional thing, if I you know, or
it could be more of an emotional thing for some people.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
That's true. That's true, I mean, and sometimes it's perspective too. Sure,
but I think the intentional blindness there is that you're
only focusing on the bad. So you know, this preacher saying, well, God,
God's doing all these wonderful things around you, but you're
not looking for an analogy.

Speaker 5 (55:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't have a blind spot to
any of the snacks I eat in the middle of
the night.

Speaker 6 (55:55):
Just no, I'm completely aware. Yeah, I enjoy every minute,
completely aware of that ice cream sandwich.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
Yes, all right, let's take a quick break and we'll
come right back quick mid show break. Here contact info
and a recommendation. So contact info is always Where Did
the Roadgo dot com, where you can find links to everything.
You can find all the shows, you can find some

(56:23):
I used to do book reviews on the show when
I had time, and so there's some book reviews up there.
There's links. There's a whole link tree to all the
other stuff I do as well, including the last eggs
of the loss. There's all our social media, from Facebook
to x to Reddit to discord everything. Everything is linked
up there. So if you want to make a donation,

(56:44):
you can do that too, right on Where the Roadgo
dot com. And you can become a patron, which helps
an enormous amount. So it's only three dollars a month.
It's always been three dollars a month. I have never
raised that price. I want people to get the extra
and you get a lot of it. You get the
shows early, you get them commercial free, you get extra
content with almost every show, plus extra stuff on top

(57:07):
of that, for just three dollars a month, a month,
just three bucks. All right, recommendation. So here's the thing.
I haven't actually seen or listened to anything all that
new recently, so I'm kind of not having a good
list of recommendations, and I feel bad about that. So

(57:29):
I figured maybe i'd run through some of the older
ones that people might have missed. Red Valley, which just
finished its i think second to last season. That's kind
of interesting, humorous, and it's about cryogenics. Yeah. Among the
Stars and Bones is a really good sci fi one.

(57:49):
Two Flat Earthers, Kidnap a Freemason. That one's fun. That's
also made by the same people who do The Subjective Truth,
which is another fun podcast, is excellent. Mirrors is fantastic,
Mirrors is uh and the ideas about the paranormal and
mirrors are just incredible. Love that one. Vast Horizon is

(58:13):
really really good. King falls Am is another fun one
based around a radio station, and it starts off a
little weak, but then it gets really strong, and then
in mid stride where it's just getting to be amazing,
they stop doing it, It's still worth a listen Wolf
three point fifty nine starts off a little weak, gets
super strong, and ends amazingly Ours Paradoxica. If you can

(58:38):
follow it, it's awesome. The Bridge, The Bridge, I wish
they didn't discontinue. It had some really cool stuff. They're
very artistic about a bridge that crossed the Atlantic Ocean
and the weird, haunted stuff that would happen on it.
Mabel mostly done through a series of voice messages and

(58:59):
very folk related. Uh. And Malevolent, which is still going,
very lovecrafty, and I think it was sort of a
true role playing type of thing at first, where you
know they were they were it was someone actually playing.
Every once in a while you'd hear dice roll. But
they gave up on that. Now it's just full out
audio fiction and it's it's dark, and it's really freaking good.

(59:23):
So there's a bunch of uh, you know, I'm gonna
throw two more in there. The Black Tapes and Tannis,
both done by the same company. I forget what it is,
North Northwest something they haven't done anything at ages, but
the Black Tapes. Black Tapes was a really cool paranormal one.
They ended with a very unsatisfactory ending. Tannis is a

(59:47):
fun meander. It has some really cool stuff in it,
and then they just kind of, I think, didn't know
where to go with it. It's again still worth listen. All right,
back to the show. So we are talking about the
Invisible Gorilla, which we're not getting it all in this
one episode. There's no way. We're just at the very

(01:00:09):
beginning of my notes. But one of the important parts
in here, and that's will give me a chance too.
I had wanted to watch it before I did this show.
But there's a I've been trying to dig into how
memory is different for people with idetic memory versus regular memory,
because they don't touch on it in here, and the
memory stuff is very important and very interesting, but I

(01:00:31):
want to see someone had actually pointed me to a
report that was done, I think on sixty minutes about
idetic memory and another one that a speaker did on
idetic memory and how it differs from regular memory. But
I didn't have the time to watch them. So I'm
going to try and watch them before the next part,
because we're not going to get through all of this.

(01:00:52):
But let's see what else I'm trying to figure out
which notes we've gone through expectations are based Steah, Okay,
I talked about that, so, I said, page forty eight,
second paragraph on how we form memories. I have the
book right here. Okay. When we perceive something, we extract

(01:01:13):
the meaning from what we see here or smell, rather
than encode something in perfect detail. It would be an
uncharacteristic waste of energy and other resources for evolution to
have designed to brain that took in every possible stimuli
with equal fidelity, when there is little for an organism
to gain from such a strategy. Likewise, memory doesn't store

(01:01:36):
everything we perceive, but instead takes what we have seen
or heard and associates it with what we already know.
These associations help us discern what is important and to
recall details about what we've seen. They provide retrieval cues
that make our memory more fluent. In most cases, such
cues are helpful, but these associations can also lead us astray.

(01:01:59):
Precisely be because they lead to an inflated sense of
the precision of memory. We cannot easily distinguish what we
recall verbatim and what we construct based on associations and knowledge.
The word list example, which they talked about earlier that
I didn't read, originally devised in the nineteen fifties by
psychologist James Deese and then studied extensively by some other people.

(01:02:22):
It's a simple way to demonstrate this principle, which is
not useful because I didn't read the word example and
I don't know.

Speaker 6 (01:02:31):
Where it is.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
So but anyway, Yeah, it's just the idea of how
we make associations, how it's a variety of things that
create memories. It's not a recording like a VCR, right,
and I think we know that, but not like this
is something more people need to know.

Speaker 6 (01:02:52):
Well, it goes against a popular science fiction trope, which
is that whole black mirror recording your memory thing, right yeah, yeah,
which is very much like based on the idea of video.
This like isomorphit you know, this like photographic you know, recreation.

Speaker 5 (01:03:09):
Yeah, and you know, I think the idea is a
little hard to accept for some people too, are unsettling
because you know, when you realize that your memory is
not precise, and then every time you recall a memory,
it's a new recording of that memory. That's overwritten a
previous version. You know, you're kind of dealing with a
sense of like self being erased. You know, when you

(01:03:31):
think all of your memories are copies of the memories
that you had, there are copies of the memories that
you had, you know, so it's always a little different.
And so I think that is a difficult concept to
accept if you really.

Speaker 6 (01:03:45):
Think about it.

Speaker 5 (01:03:46):
And I think that may be the reason people avoided.

Speaker 3 (01:03:48):
And it's also why you should write stuff, especially weird stuff, down,
and why I started recording dreams because I'm like, Okay,
if I'm actually having these prophetic dreams, I can't know
unless I've written down the details and can go back.

Speaker 5 (01:04:03):
And look, Oh, that's a That's a great point.

Speaker 3 (01:04:06):
Because it's very easy to be like, oh no, I
completely dreamed this exact thing, but you know, your memories
just can't be trusted that much.

Speaker 7 (01:04:13):
Yeah, but if.

Speaker 3 (01:04:13):
You wrote it down, there you go. So this this
part says I sat next to Captain Picard, and it
says about ten years ago at a party Dan hosted,
a colleague of our's name Ken Norman told us a
funny story about sitting next to the actor Patrick Stewart
and at a Legal Seafood restaurant in Cambridge, mass Massachusetts.

(01:04:36):
The story was prompted when Chris noticed that Dan had
a small figureine a Captain Picard, perched next to his
television screen. Can I buy your Captain, Picard, asked Chris.
Dan said it wasn't for sale. Chris offered five, then
ten dollars. Dan refused. Chris eventually raised his bid to
fifty dollars for reasons that escape him now, but Dan
still refused. Neither of us remembers why Dan refused, but

(01:04:59):
to this day Picard has not left the place. On
Den's electronics. At this point, Ken told us that at
the Legal Seafood, which I guess is the name of
a restaurant's a weird name for a restaurant.

Speaker 6 (01:05:10):
Patrick sit is a famous restaurant, Is it okay?

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
Patrick Stewart had been dining with an attractive younger woman, who,
based on snippets of overheard conversation, appeared to be a
publicist or agent. For dessert, Stuart ordered baked Alaska, a
choice which stood out in memory because it appears rarely
on restaurant menus. Toward the end of his meal, another
distinctive event happened. Two members of the kitchen staff came

(01:05:34):
out to Stuart's table and asked for his autograph, which
he readily granted. Moments later, a manager appeared and apologized,
explaining that the trekky cook's action was against a restaurant policy.
Stuart shrugged it off. Shrugged off the supposed offense, and
he and his companion were soon on their way. The
only problem with the story was that it had actually happened,

(01:05:55):
not to Ken, but to Chris. Ken had heard Chris
tell the story numerous sciences before and had incorporated it
into his own memory. In fact, Ken felt so strongly
that the memory was his, and had so completely forgotten
that Chris was the original rack and Toeur that even
Chris's presence when Ken retold the story did not jog

(01:06:17):
his memory of a way in which he actually which
he had actually encountered Captain Picard. But when Chris pointed
out the error, Ken quickly realized that the memory was
not his own. This antidote antidote illustrates another aspect of
the illusion of memory. When we retrieve a memory, we
can falsely believe that we are fetching a record of

(01:06:39):
something that happened to us rather than someone else.

Speaker 6 (01:06:42):
Yeah, that's totally happened to me. You know, with my
friend who has my best friend from like way way
back when we were kids, he has like not an
identic memory, but adetic memory. But he's really, really you know,
sharp memory, one of those guys who remembers like date
and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:01):
Yeah, And he.

Speaker 6 (01:07:02):
Tells stories all the time because of this. And there's
at least one time I know that I've been with him,
and you know, we've been with like another friend. I've
started to tell a story and he's been like, Chris,
that was that happened to me? Like you weren't there?

Speaker 5 (01:07:15):
Yeah, you know I've done that with a story or
two Chris, you know, where I can't quite remember which
one of us had the experience too, and the friend
hasn't quite remembered either.

Speaker 7 (01:07:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:07:28):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:07:29):
Of course alcohol is involved, probably of course in my
younger days. But you know, the one of the interesting
things I've seen with my mom as she's gotten older
is she'll read about something and think that she had
a conversation with whoever the person had written that or

(01:07:49):
had seen it or something like that. Yeah, you know,
and that's just part of age. But it is interesting
how like the recall gets sort of corrupted in yeah,
you know.

Speaker 6 (01:08:01):
Well you got to think too. But what that means for,
you know, not only like hypnosis that we've talked about
a lot of times, but you know, if there's co
creation going on, or if you reach that point where
your brain searching for something to you know, put on
an experience, the sensory experience that you're having that you
can't reconcile, you know, digging back into what you know absolutely,

(01:08:24):
you know, stories that you read.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
I don't necessarily have something like that, but I have
a basically a false memory that my mother created. And
it's not that it didn't happen, it's that I don't
remember it. And it was when I was a very
little kid, the first house we lived at, which I
don't really even remember that house. I don't know how
old I was when we moved out, but I was
baby too, you know, so I don't really remember anything.

(01:08:49):
I've seen pictures and stuff, but I have no active
memories from that. And she told me a story about
how there was a blizzard, which I kind of remember
the blizzard because I think that was the first time
I experienced a blizzard, and this was on Long Island,
which it wasn't super common to get snowed in. And
the neighbor went to the store because he had a

(01:09:09):
truck or whatever, and he picked up milk for us,
and I apparently wanted to bring the milk in, so
they gave me the milk, and I went running down
the driveway, fell the milk, went into the air and
came crashing down and exploded. I can see this in
my mind like it happened, except I realized I'm looking
at it from a third person perspective. But it feels
like a memory because my mom told me that story

(01:09:30):
so many times. It's like this happened. Okay, well I
believe her. I'm sure it did happen. I don't remember it,
but I feel like I remember it right. Yeah, And
it's easy to be tricked about that stuff. So there's
a thing they call flash bulb memories. And this is
also very important, so without reading like all of it,

(01:09:51):
So flash bulb memories characterized these vivid, detailed memories for
surprising and important events. The name by analogy photography reflects
the idea that details surrounding surprising and emotionally significant events
are preserved in the instant they occur. Events meriting permanent
storage are imprinted in the brain, just as a scene

(01:10:14):
is imprinted onto film. It's very much like a photograph
that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each of us
found himself when the flash bulb was fired. So they
start talking about people where they were during nine to eleven,
and so he says. After writing down his own personal

(01:10:34):
recollections of nine to eleven for this book, Dan emailed
his former students and asked them to send them their
own for comparison. So they did that, and so it says.
The first respond was Steven Mittroff, now a professor at
Duke University. He said, I got an email from a
girlfriend saying a plane hit the World Trade Center. I
did a quick look at CNN and then went into

(01:10:55):
your office, where you and Michelle still Michael Silverman were chatting.
I told you you went back into my office and
you were looking at images on Steven's computer. You're surmised
it must have been a small plane in the pilot
lost control. We saw a picture of a huge commercial
jet plane right next to the tower, and you thought
it must be a photoshop pick. We looked at various websites,

(01:11:16):
including airline sites, to look at the status of updates
of the flights that were being reported as hijacked. After
more web searching, you looked up at the TV in
our testing room, and lots of people watched more in there.
I think we witnessed one of the towers collapse, but
I'm not confident in that we definitely were watching during
one of the key events. We all started to feel
an unwarranted uneasiness over being the tall over being in

(01:11:38):
the tallest building in town, and left before lunch. Michael
and I walked back to Boston. Dan's other two graduate
students at the time reported being away from the lab
that morning, so they could not have followed the news
reports with Dan. Mittroff remembered Michael, Dan's postdoctoral fellow at
the time, now a professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine,
being in Dan's office, but Dan did not. Dan emailed

(01:12:02):
Silverman the same question he had asked the other people,
and the following report came back. I was standing in
your office discussing something with you. The radio and your
bookshelf was on Mitchroff yelled from his office something to
the extent that CNN was reporting that a plane just
flew into the World Trade Center. I went to his

(01:12:22):
office to see, but the page was loading very slowly.
I mentioned that little planes fly the Hudson Corridor regularly,
so I guessed it was possible. The page loaded and
it showed a large plane flying towards the World Trade Center.
I said something to the extent that putting up a
photoshopped image like that was disgusting. I was still convinced
it was only a small plane that crashed. The next

(01:12:44):
information we received from came from your radio. CNN was
slow and not loading anything additional. We heard that not one,
but two planes had hit. I then went to my
office and tried to call my wife. She was also
trying to call me. Neither of us could get through.
Left my office, someone had turned on a television in
the testing room. The picture was noisy. It showed that

(01:13:05):
one tower had already dropped, and we watched the second
one fall I'm not sure if the second tower fallowing
was live, but I suspect it wasn't. You made the
decision for us to leave and go home around eleven o'clock,
Mittrof and I walked to his apartment, and then I
walked home. There are interesting similarities and differences amongst these accounts.
First the similarities. Everyone agrees that Dan heard about the

(01:13:25):
attack from Steve. They spent some time searching online for information,
and then Dan turned on the television in the lab,
where he and Mittroff were watching footage of a tower collapsing.
Now for the differences. Dan did not call Michael, being
recalled Michael being present, and he mistakenly remembered his other
graduate students being there. All three remember Mittroff coming into

(01:13:46):
Dan's office, but Silverman remembers Mittroff yelling from his office. First,
Dan recalled nothing about a discussion of the image of
the plane next to the tower. Mittroff recalled Dan commenting
that the plane was small and that the image of
the law plane was edited, and Silverman recalls making those
comments himself. Three cognitive psychologists had vivid memories for what

(01:14:08):
they experienced on nine to eleven, but their memories conflicted
in several ways. If memory worked like a video recording,
all three reports about nine to eleven would be identical.
In fact, there is no way to verify which of
the accounts is most accurate. The best we can do
is assume that the two independent and mutually consistent recollections
are more likely to be correct than the one recollection

(01:14:30):
that conflicts with both. Many cases of memory failure are
just like this, in that there is no documentary evidence
to establish the ground truth of what had actually happened.
On at least two occasions, Bush publicly recalled having seen
the first plane hit the tower on television before entering
the classroom. For example, on December fourth, two thousand and one,

(01:14:51):
response to a young boy, he recalled, I was sitting
outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw
the airplane hit the tower. The TV was obviously on,
and I used to fly myself, and I said, there's
a terrible pilot. And I said it shouldn't. That must
have been a horrible accident. The only problem is the
video footage broadcast that day of the attacks was all
of the second plane. There was no footage of the

(01:15:12):
first plane's impact available too long afterwards, right, So I
mean you could also say, well, he was lying, but
it's very possible he was just remembering wrong. But this
is the thing, so that What they're saying is that
the illusion to memory is that the vivided, the vividness
of our recollection is a tied to how they affect

(01:15:33):
us emotionally. But you should beware of memories accompanied by
strong emotions and vivid details, as they are just as
likely to be wrong as mundane memories, but you are
far less likely to realize it. So that says a lot.
You know, when someone's absolutely certain about a memory because
it really stuck with them, it doesn't mean it was accurate, right, right,

(01:15:55):
And again, we're all perceiving things a little bit differently,
so we're all focused on slightly different things.

Speaker 7 (01:16:00):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:16:01):
This is this is why this book is such a
mind bender, you know, like when you start taking all
this information in, you start realizing how little we actually
know about the reality we're experiencing and the similarities of
our reality to like the two of yours realities.

Speaker 6 (01:16:18):
Sure, absolutely, no, I think it's really important and it's
a really good sort of what did Jeffrey Kriipe will
call it? Flip like Catalyst Wolves is that book that
he wrote?

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
Yeah, I haven't read that one.

Speaker 6 (01:16:32):
It was about basically scientists to have like a moment
that you know, sort of flips them, you know, as
he did, where you know, he's accepting things that are
beyond the paradigm, you know, And yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
I have I do know of the book, and I know, yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:16:50):
Yeah, I know. I mean it's worth I read it
once when it came out, and I don't remember too
much of it, which is partially I'm sure, you know,
my degrading physiology, but it's also probably you know, you know,
I don't know if it was his best book that
was good.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
Also, memory is not perfect.

Speaker 6 (01:17:07):
Right, exactly, just as we were saying, because.

Speaker 3 (01:17:10):
There's plenty of things I'm sure about and then I
look them up and I'm like, oh, nope, I was wrong.
And then there's stuff I mean, like when I was
given the name Sarayah, it was spoken into my head
very loudly. The only problem with that memory is I
know exactly where I was at the time. I was
sitting in the backseat of my friend's car. My friend
was asleep next to me. She's like, and we're driving

(01:17:33):
past her house, and I'm like, this doesn't make sense.
Why will we be driving past her house? Why weren't
we dropping her off? This memory has to be wrong, right,
And when I finally started working on the book and
going through it, and I went on the autobiography, and
I'm going, oh, she came to my house before, and
he picked us up from my house, so she was
going back to my house, not hers. And then I'm like, oh, Okay,

(01:17:55):
now the memory's not wrong. Like I was kind of
surprised because I just assumed I was remembering something wrong,
and luckily I wrote it down enough, in enough detail
and the stuff around it where it made perfect sense.
Once I reread the stuff I wrote, and I was like, oh,
that memory was accurate Versus the tree shaking incident, where
I was sure the person who didn't see the tree

(01:18:17):
shake on the edge of the cliff there was the
person who never experienced anything with me. And I think
that was my brain logically taking that event and kind
of making it seem more sensible, like the person who
did experience stuff is of course the person who saw
the tree shaking. Until I looked at my notes and realized,
oh no, he was the one that Why why would

(01:18:39):
he be the one that didn't see it? You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And again, what's happening there? Is it that is he
just blind to that or are we perceiving a slightly
different reality. Was the tree not shaking and we were
picking something else up that made it seem like the
tree was shaking because our brain had no other way
to interpret it, right.

Speaker 6 (01:19:00):
Yeah, I mean it could be several of those things
at once. That's the thing that I think. You know,
it's so important to try to get our heads around
as humans as we explore, you know, the weirdness is
that this weirdness, you know, and I guess this is
embodied by the trickster. It is contradictory things. There are

(01:19:20):
contradictory things that exist at the same time, you know,
like it's it's you know, it's difficult.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
I mean I walked away from that experience saying, we
don't all perceive the same stuff, Like, we don't all
perceive the same reality. That's what I felt like that
whole experience was about that. That's what they were, whatever
it was was trying to show me. And to this
day I still think that. You know, so people will
say things like, well, maybe it was an invisible Bigfoot.
Well maybe, but I don't really think it matters like that.

(01:19:51):
I don't think it was the cause that was important there.
It's that what it showed me, right yep. And you know,
maybe it was an invisible big there was other monkey
stuff associated around that, but that particular event, I think
the whole point was just that.

Speaker 7 (01:20:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
So, like I said, we're going to have to do
a part two to this because there's a bunch more
and I'm going to do this stuff on idetic memory too,
so I can figure that out a little bit. But
I mean when you hate actually breaking this into two parts,
because it all kind of interconnects, right, the we can
touch a little bit on the illusion of confidence because

(01:20:28):
this is also very important, and what I wrote is that,
and this is kind of a way I look at things.
It says, chapter three, illusion of confidence equals making that
first circle. And then I wrote, this is why people
listen to things like the TTSA, Right, So that's how

(01:20:48):
long ago. This is why I how long ago I
started taking these notes. So the making that first circle
to me is I'll use it with computer repair idea,
Like you have someone who knows how to run a
virus scan and they've fixed their grandparents' computer because they
had a virus and they downloaded a virus scanner, and

(01:21:09):
then they think, ooh, I know how to fix computers, right,
and then they go to do something else and they
completely screw up the computer because they don't actually know anything.
They just happened to but they've made that first completed circle.
It's like it's like having an acre of property and
it's like filled with trees. You can't quite get into it,
so you can like walk around it and feel like, Okay,

(01:21:31):
well I know this property. I've walked all the way
around it, but you don't know what's in there. So
then maybe you take a drone you fly over it. Oh, well,
now I know this property because I've seen, you know,
from above. And then maybe you cut into it a
little bit and you find, oh, there's a house in here.
I didn't know there was a house in here, you know,
but it was all covered with foliage, and now you're like,

(01:21:52):
now I know the property. Like each time you learn
that piece of information, it feels like, oh, I know
what's going on now, but you don't know what happened before.
You don't know what else is hidden under the ground.
You don't know like it's real history. You only know
a piece, but it feels like you know a lot

(01:22:13):
because you've made that circle, like you could connect that
circle of information. So when I wrote, you know, making
the first circle, that's kind of what I was talking about.

Speaker 6 (01:22:24):
Was there something about like there's like a predominance of
I'm completely you know, blanking on the specifics of this,
but I know that there has been some studies recently
that have had to do with basically people who don't know.
The less people know about a subject, the more confident

(01:22:45):
they are in their opinions.

Speaker 3 (01:22:47):
Yes, is that don Dunning Kruger effects, Yeah, I think
so that's what I.

Speaker 6 (01:22:51):
Is at Dunning Kruger, Right, that's what it is. Yeah,
thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:22:54):
Yeah, you're you're too dumb to know you don't know anything?

Speaker 7 (01:22:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:58):
Yeah. And also as far as memory goes, I mean
I read this book at this point a couple of
years ago. I mean I mentioned the ttsas and that
hasn't really existed in a while. That's the two the
Stars group there.

Speaker 6 (01:23:15):
But I remember just laughing at what Redpill always says
about what that makes him think of what's just like DNA?

Speaker 3 (01:23:25):
Yeah yeah, yeah, So I remembered them saying that they
had video of the time in the office when nine
to eleven happened. And obviously I just read the thing
where they do not say that. They said they have
no definitive way of knowing, So that that's right there.
The illusion of memory. I took what they wrote, which
was that they compared the accounts and somehow remembered it

(01:23:48):
as they had something to compare it to. It must
have been a video from the office. Yeah. But the
illusion of confidence, and this is, like I said, very important.
It says confidence is the illusion of competence. We mistake
that easily, especially when coming from authorities. Confidence increases as

(01:24:08):
we gain skill and our over confidence decreases. False confidence
can be higher with people who know little about the
subject and have a confident personality. So yes, I mean
this is how con men work it. Yeah, but it's
also how a lot of politicians work. It's. Uh, let's

(01:24:30):
see if I can find the right exactly. Yes, sorry,
but that's what they have to be because if you
go out there and you can't say you don't know,
you have to confidently have the answers. Right, Let's see
if I can find It's.

Speaker 6 (01:24:44):
It's interesting too, because a lot of that has shifted
I think from confidently having the answers, you know, but
knowing that you're like pulling a scam to this almost
like and you know, it's it's like, gone, what is it?
Is it the Overton window? I don't know, it's like,
I don't think it's that, but it certainly crossed some
sort of threshold where I think everybody's convincing themselves. It's

(01:25:07):
almost become like that new thought, you know, positive because
there are plenty of politicians, many who are in power
that adhere to that new thought mantra of if you
say something enough and believe it, it becomes true. Yeah,
you know, yeah, and they do like they do you know,
big business, mafia, you know, corporate stuff that way.

Speaker 3 (01:25:28):
So chapter three is entitled What smart Chess Players and
Stupid Criminals Have in Common, and it says one summer
day when he was in graduate school, Chris woke up
with a headache. This was an unusual he had been
prone to headaches. Later that day, the aches spread to
the rest of his body, and he began to feel
exhausted and apathetic. It was a chore to get up
from bed, walk to the living room of his apartment,

(01:25:49):
sit down, and turn on the TV. His whole body hurt,
and when he tried to stand up simple tasks like
taking a shower left and breathless. The symptoms suggested a
bad flu, but strangely, he had no respiratory symptoms, and
July is not exactly the height of flu season. After
feeling awful for a few days, Chris went to Harvard's
Health Service. The nurse who saw him concluded that it

(01:26:10):
was probably a virus and told him to get some
rest and stay hydrated. The next day, a Sunday, his
symptoms unchanged, Chris took one of those invenerating showers, moving
slowly to conserve energy. He turned to let the water
hit the back of his legs, and just when he did,
he felt a sharp pain, twisting his neck and looking down,

(01:26:30):
he saw a huge red rash that looked like a
sunburst right in the middle of his left calf. It
was much larger than any mosquito bite he'd ever seen.
Armed with a new symptom, he went to the after
hours care department and proudly displayed the crash. The doctor
on duty asked Christ whether he'd been bitten by a
tick recently. At first, Chris was inclined to say no,

(01:26:52):
since he'd never seen a tick in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
but he then remembered that he visited his parents in
armunkburb of New York City a couple of weeks earlier,
and spent time with his mother in her vegetable garden.
There are plenty of ticks there. The doctor showed Chris
a picture of a medical book that illustrated the characteristic
skin rash produced by the infection which that causes lime disease.

(01:27:18):
It looked exactly like Chris's calf. If lime disease isn't
diagnosed early, it becomes more difficult to treat and has
the potential to cause chronic disability. After the doctor explained
the diagnosis, she excused herself from the room. She returned
moments later with another book which she looked up the
treatment for lime disease. She wrote a prescription for twenty

(01:27:40):
one days of the antibiotic and handed it to Chris.
Chris was a little unnerved by the experience. First, the
diagnosis itself seemed ominous, but more unsettling was the doctor's
open consultation of reference books during the session. Chris had
never seen a doctor do this before, and this one
did it twice? Did she know what she was doing?
In the north eastern the United States, where lyme disease

(01:28:02):
is prevalent, how could an urgent care doctor not be
familiar with its diagnosis and treatment. Chris went straight to
the drug store and filled the prescription, but couldn't help
feeling uneasy that the doctor's uncertainty. If you were encountered
a doctor who had to look up a diagnostic criteria
and recommend treatments for your condition, wouldn't you wonder too
to do so would only be natural. We all tend

(01:28:23):
to think of a confident doctor as a competent one,
and an uncertain doctor as a potential malpractice suit. We
treat confidence as an honest, single signal of a person's
professional skill, accurate memory, or expert knowledge. But as you'll
see in this chapter, the confidence that people project, whether
they are diagnosing a patient, making decisions about foreign policy,

(01:28:46):
or testifying in court, are all too often an illusion. Yeah,
and of course she was right. She just wanted to
be sure. But again, since she wasn't didn't have that confidence?
Oh this is what it is?

Speaker 5 (01:28:57):
Yeah, so yes, kind of be interesting isn't it where
when you see people pulling out references and things like that,
it's like, well, you don't know, yeah, but you know,
if you've been in those situations on the other side,
it's like, I'm really glad they're checking.

Speaker 6 (01:29:14):
Uh huh, well yeah, right.

Speaker 5 (01:29:16):
But but you almost have to be familiar with the
experience of like understanding one that whatever this topic is
is probably vast and more than one person can keep
in their head, and then you appreciate that that there
are enough to do that kind of you know, double
checking or anything like that, so something's not wrong versus
you know, just kind of like shooting from the hip,

(01:29:38):
but you know, shooting from the hip looks way cooler.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):
Yeah, yeah, oh totally.

Speaker 6 (01:29:44):
Yeah. Yeah, well that kind of bluster too. I mean
I think that we're you know, that's that's something that
is culturally learned and accepted.

Speaker 5 (01:29:52):
Yes, oh, it's not even like celebrated right in the West, right, yeah,
I mean yeah, Western characters were you know, we talk
about John Wayning things.

Speaker 6 (01:30:01):
I mean, that's that's what that is.

Speaker 5 (01:30:03):
And then a little bit of Han solo later on.

Speaker 6 (01:30:05):
And yeah, sure, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (01:30:09):
The section that we'll we'll get to next time is
unskilled and unaware of it. And it says Charles Darwin
observed that ignorance more frequently be gets confidence than does knowledge.
Right there you go, but uh yeah, we're gonna have
to stop there because we're out of time. We'll do
a Patreon segment on some other stuff, and we'll do
part two of this hopefully soon, because and also shoot

(01:30:33):
them notes and see if maybe I can get one
of them to talk to us.

Speaker 6 (01:30:37):
That'd be pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
But I highly highly recommend this book. Like I said,
of course, this book should be taught in high school
so people could understand how to communicate with other people
better and understand their own limitations and learn not to
be taken by people who are just confident in what
they're saying.

Speaker 5 (01:30:55):
Yeap, right, Well, you know it's nice too, because this
is not everything's made political these days, but this is
not political. It's just about observation, and you know it
leaves that up to you to decide how to apply that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
And if you do, if you are not a confident
sounding politician, you are not going to win.

Speaker 6 (01:31:15):
Oh right, no, right, If you have to think.

Speaker 3 (01:31:18):
About what you're going to say, people are like no,
we don't want that person.

Speaker 6 (01:31:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah right.

Speaker 3 (01:31:23):
You have to have quick, short SoundBite answers or you're
going to lose. Yeah, and you have to be telling
people what they want to hear on top of that.

Speaker 7 (01:31:30):
Mm yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:31:32):
And yet we keep repeating that cycle.

Speaker 7 (01:31:35):
I know.

Speaker 3 (01:31:37):
All right, Thank you, guys, thank you, thank you. I
want to take a moment here to thank all of
my patreons. Because of you, this show still survives, and
it is because of you that I intend to keep
going with it. So I want to give a special
shout out to those of you who are pledging ten
dollars or more. Greg Ross, Jerry Trapezoid tactical Therapist, John Blackburn,

(01:32:01):
Matt in Delaware, Mark Smith, Madeline j Marty Garza, Gant Dick,
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Tim Matthew Sproll, Ruth Fortescu, Andrew Nichols, Marth Arthur, Kyler, Glimpstead,
Christine Mothman, Brenn, Mark Brady, Patricia Guya, Quinta, Kevin Shrek, Lyns, Jackson,

(01:32:24):
Kay Charles and Florida, Land of the Crazy and Communicable
Charles Davis Kristin l Automaton Riker and Stark, Abby Allen, Right, Rectangle,
Eric Citron, Kevin American Rambler, Sam Sharon Tyler, Bell thunder Boy,
Eric Todd and Watowski, Vincent Trewell, Will Powell, Barbara Fisher,

(01:32:44):
Schmoopohls Devourer of Mortal Souls, Jay m de Kay, History
and Coffee, Diane b. Beverly, Williamson, Jim and Sophie, Andrew Mayns,
Jonathan Frost, Victoria, John Bracken, Paul Jeffries, Janet Planet, Ron Duprey,
Laser Printer, Jam Harry Peters, Veroche K m j Armstrong,

(01:33:06):
Jack Huntington, Laura McClain, Stacey Sherwood, James Lindsay, Linda from
Michigan Billuminati, Strange Stories with the Secret and Skeptic Podcast,
Mark Shoemaker, Ron Duprey, Will Cherry, Seed Person the Ghost
Story Guys, Liam Huddick, Harold Annabel Smith, Caroline Walker, GDD
Skunk Works, Craig Sagastumi, Colin Carris and Matthew Brown. Thank

(01:33:31):
you all so very very much for the support. There
is of course a Patreon extra segment for this show,
but it is not dealing with the invisible Gorilla. It's
talking about a bunch of other stuff, and we are
going to save the rest of the conversation for the
Invisible Gorilla for part two, which is next week. And
uh yeah, I hope people enjoyed that. I hope it

(01:33:52):
makes obvious why I think this book is so important,
Why bring it up so often? It just has so
much to do with everything, but especially like the paranormal stuff.
I mean, if our regular reality is so not specific
as we think it is, then when we come to
the paranormal it becomes even harder to figure out what's

(01:34:12):
going on there. Pick up the book, check it out.
It's well worth a read. And you can find you
a few bits and pieces of talks from Chris online
about it, from you know, back in like twenty eleven
or something like that. On YouTube if you want to
become a patron so you can hear the other stuff
we talked about. It's only three dollars a month. Go
to Where Do the Roadgo dot comic click on the

(01:34:33):
big Patreon link. As I said, extra stuff commercial free,
but the show's are commercial free. There early you get
extra stuff, and there's some some surprise secret stuff in
there as well that I try to throw up as
much as possible. Exclusive to patrons, you can also watch
the documentary Chris did on the Show on Myself and
Where Did the Road Go? That is available there too.

(01:34:55):
You can also just pick that up if you just
want to go watch it. It's I think three bucks.
On the Patreon site you can you can just pick
episodes too. If you just want to hear the extra
for something and not sign up, you can just pay
three bucks and get the extra content. As for a
end quote or in this case, poem, this is from
Percy Shelley, who lived from seventeen ninety two to eighteen

(01:35:19):
twenty two. It's kind of a famous poem called Ozi Mandius.
I met a traveler from an antique land who said,
two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.
Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage
lies who's frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.

(01:35:40):
Tell that its sculptor. Well, those passions read, which yet survive,
Stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them,
and the heart that fed, And on the pedestal these
words appear. My name is Ozzie Mendius, King of Kings,
look upon my works, Yay, Mighty and despair. Nothing beside

(01:36:03):
remains round the decay of that colossal wreck, Boundless and bare,
the lone and level sands stretch far away. I've always
enjoyed that one, so in case you've never heard it,
now you have. All right, So I'm going to take
you out with a band I've been a fan of
for a while. They're called a Versed. They're out of Boston.

(01:36:23):
They just signed with m Theory Records for their latest record,
and they have a couple of videos out. This is
one of them, although the Cross to Bear video is
probably better this. So most of their stuff is very heavy.
It's very technical death metal. This song's a little more melanic.
So I'm going to play this and I'm just gonna
give you that warning. This is definitely heavy, heavy stuff.
A song called Burn. Their new albums called The Rature

(01:36:46):
of Color. And if you like this, definitely check out
their other stuff. If you don't like this, definitely do
not check out their other stuff. There are very cool
people and a very cool band. There's some interviews up
on my last exit site with them, and yeah, so
here you go first Bird, I'll see you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:37:18):
So so.

Speaker 7 (01:37:22):
Correct last time M thirty verse, Well we're not join John.

Speaker 9 (01:37:42):
Joe, Well they turn you away or the man that
fix o.

Speaker 10 (01:38:02):
You got the post mental gnos the next mone your brido.

Speaker 9 (01:38:36):
Shirts, gott go.

Speaker 2 (01:38:46):
With the boys?

Speaker 7 (01:39:00):
Do last day? Say your day the world? Last Day

(01:39:45):
you say were toys or your joy? Joe, Dang, it's

(01:40:06):
very I.

Speaker 2 (01:40:08):
Told about very, very star that show.

Speaker 7 (01:40:29):
I thought I start I fill.

Speaker 4 (01:40:34):
By.

Speaker 6 (01:40:48):
You have been listening to Where Did the Road Go?

Speaker 3 (01:40:51):
This show is made possible in part from our patreons,
and we thank you and everyone listening for helping us
continue this exploration of the strange. You can always find
everything Where did the Road Go related at www dot
where didthroad go dot com, and thank you so much
for your support.

Speaker 1 (01:41:18):
Hi, everybody, it's me Cinderella Acts. You are listening to
the Fringe Radio Network. I know I was gonna tell them, Hey,
do you have the app? It's the best way to
listen to the Fringe Radio Network. It's safe and you
don't have to log in to use it, and it
doesn't track you or trace you, and it sounds beautiful.

(01:41:41):
I know I was gonna tell him how do you
get the app? Just go to fringeradionetwork dot com right
at the top of the page. I know, slippers. We
got to keep cleaning these chimneys.

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