Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (19 page)

Based in Quebec, JoJo and her big blond hairdo provided more self-parody than
Saturday Night Live
or
Second City TV
could have mustered. But while the laughter raged around her, JoJo’s team of specially trained telephone psychics fielded thousands of calls a day. Only Canadian legislation that restricts the billing of each call to $50 limited JoJo’s earnings. In the United States, where no such legislation is in place, Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends went to town unfettered, resulting in an industry whose yearly earnings in 1995 were estimated at between $100 million and $500 million.

Networks like JoJo’s and Dionne’s employ between 1,500 to 2,000 “psychics,” whose telephone work is typically billed at $5 a minute. Of this fee, the employee earns about 40 cents. They don’t need telepathy to tell them there is no point in complaining about the pay scale. Their training is minimal and there are plenty of unemployed folks out there waiting to take their place on the phone lines. Psychic listeners basically allow you to tell your tale while, with a few well-placed “uh-huhs” and “mm-hmms,” they manage to convince you that your mind had been read and your future foretold.

The process is quite similar to ones used by other psychic “scam artists,” except both JoJo and Dionne have an obvious advantage. People call
them
. Their customers are confused, vulnerable, and needy. Those adjectives may describe the human condition in general, but callers to psychic hotlines are arguably even more unhappy than most. By and large, the number of things that confuse and upset people is surprisingly small and predictable: relationships with lovers, families and friends, health and financial woes, and dissatisfaction with work. Many callers are on the brink of a major life decision (breaking up with a boyfriend, getting married, changing jobs) but want a bit of validation for a decision they have probably already made. The callers themselves give out enough minimal cues to narrow the list down and, before you know it, their anonymous telephone companion seems like a certifiable psychic. The troubled caller might not really believe that something supernatural has happened, but they do feel sufficiently heard and understood to let the credit card charges roll along.

Although television has largely replaced the nightclub as a venue for so-called psychic performances, one of the most successful of the 1960s-1970s was a Dutch house painter named Peter Hurkos. He gained fame during the 1960s as one of the consultants attempting to help police in the celebrated Boston Strangler case. Hurkos’s character even appears briefly in the 1968 film named for the case. It is of secondary importance that the Boston police were, by this time, absolutely desperate and willing to listen to anybody, and that Hurkos’s advice was essentially useless.

Peter Hurkos delighted in telling the story of his psychic emergence and shared it many times on late-night TV shows. (He was a semiregular guest for Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Geraldo, and Phil Donahue and even appeared on Ed Sullivan’s show.) The gist of Hurkos’s story is, after falling off a ladder and suffering a brain injury, he lay in a coma in a hospital room. One day he suddenly awoke with “the power.” Hurkos didn’t know he had the power except for the fact that he immediately blurted out, “You’d better stop having sex with that doctor or his wife will kill you,” which caused a nearby nurse to run screaming from the room. Hurkos was in business. Imagine that! A nurse having an affair with a doctor! Was there no limit to his psychic abilities?

Hurkos used the same time-honored bag of skills that kept most mass-market psychics in business. He would collect items such as keys and handkerchiefs from audience members and then, rubbing these items with great concentration, make pronouncements about their owners. “I’m getting something about illness,” he would proclaim profoundly. The bewildered owner would reply, “Yes, my cousin is having an operation,” to which Hurkos would nod enthusiastically. By tomorrow morning, the owner of the key ring would be telling friends and family that this nightclub mystic only had to rub her car keys and knew all about cousin Sadie’s hysterectomy. Perhaps when you’ve had a few drinks and invested a $20 cover charge in some entertainment, you’re a lot more open to persuasion. That, of course, was no excuse for His Holiness, Pope Pius XII, who decorated Hurkos and made kind, alliterative statements about his “God-given gift.”
¹⁶

Our sensory systems are beautifully designed machines that let us respond to things in the world outside our bodies. It is obviously essential to our survival and our normal functioning to know when something is out there, to interpret it correctly, and to engage in appropriate behavior toward it. The entire process is seamless: we see
something
off to our right, we interpret the image as “wife,” and we greet it with recognition and affection.

The process has evolved to be automatic; it is normally not appropriate for us to stop to think of all the component parts that have gone into that smooth and rapid sequence of events. But for the moment, let’s break it down and consider what is actually happening. A “thing” out there has triggered a variety of raw sensory stimuli delivered to our brains. We have taken those sights, sounds, and, perhaps, smells and
interpreted
them and responded to that interpretation. The crucial point is that, technically speaking, we have responded not directly to an item in the outside world but rather to our interpretation of a set of internal responses that it has evoked.

Most of the time there is no difference between those two things: what is actually “out there” is essentially the same as how our minds have interpreted those inner stimuli.
¹⁷
But there are two ways this system might go wrong. The more common is a glitch in our interpretation. “I’m sorry, I thought you were my wife,” or “That looked like my car,” or “I thought you said . . .” In each of those cases there really
was
something out there. We got that part right. It’s just that the interpreter function got a bit misled, causing us to engage in inappropriate behavior. Usually, when another person is involved, a quick “Sorry, I thought you were . . .” or “I thought you
said
. . .” is enough to set things right. We’ve all made similar mistakes and they are normally easy to fix and forgive.

It is the second type of error—a much less common one—that is really our concern here. Just as it is possible to misinterpret what we see or hear, it is also possible to register a brain stimulus when there is no triggering event in the outside world. Keep in mind that our interpreter function will be absolutely blind to this and will set about doing its job regardless. There is nothing in its programming to validate the source of incoming messages. Once a sensory stimulus is registered, the interpreter will offer its best shot at identifying it. Everything will feel normal in such circumstances, leading us to make “I’m telling you, I
saw
my wife this morning!” statements, when the reply might be, “But sir, your wife has been dead since last Tuesday.”

Under such circumstances, it is quite common for people to remain adamant about what they saw or heard. It is the interpretation they are actually adamant about. It rarely occurs to anyone that the fleeting sensory stimulus in the brain that led to the interpretation might not have come from the outside world, as it normally does. Being unaware of the chain of events that leads to perceptual experiences, most people are unprepared to second-guess that blip of activity in their brains that caused the interpreter function to spring into action. It is wrongly assumed that all perceptual reactions originate in the outside world. But they don’t.

Attempting to have this discussion with a person who has already experienced such a transient spike of brain activity and interpreted it is usually a waste of time. I recently met a friend of a friend over lunch. When she became aware that I was the one writing
that book
, she lit into me with surprising energy, telling me that nobody was going to convince
her
that her dead mother hadn’t visited her unexpectedly in the kitchen several years ago. That magical moment had offered further support for her “spiritual” worldview, which involved communication with ghosts of departed loved ones and also helped to ease her grief over the recent passing of her mother. I made no effort to debate with her or explain the basis of my views. These are not the conditions under which to offer a materialistic account of what can be a comforting spiritual illusion. But where do we draw the line?

Where do these spikes of internal activity—that can pass as the real thing—come from? The answer is, they are actually quite common and probably utterly random. When you think of the brain as an electrochemical system, it is not surprising that occasional and transient spikes of activity occur. Normally, there is so much signal or “real” activation triggered by events in the outside world that this background noise in the system is automatically ignored. It fails to trigger the interpreter that is already quite busy doing something else. But changes in the signal-to-noise ratio can increase the probability of an illusion. Indeed, a large number of “voices” heard by normal people—an experience that is surprisingly common—happens during quiet times. “I was alone in the kitchen and . . .” or “I was lying in bed and . . .” Such “hallucinations” became so common during sensory deprivation research of the 1960s that they became an established part of the phenomenon. Their explanation typically focused on the absence of normal background noise. Without such stimulation, internal events were likely to be registered and misinterpreted as having come from the outside world.

Thus, illusions are not great mysteries. Random activity in the brain is well documented and in no way baffling to neuroscience. Indeed, its absence would be surprising. That such blips should occasionally be interpreted as “signal” is also not surprising. The interpreter is a hair-triggered and extremely busy mechanism. Occasional false positives are part of its operating specs. It was easier, of course, to label the experiences in sensory deprivation experiments as “hallucinations” because the testing chambers were known to be empty, that is, devoid of stimuli that could trigger perception. The case is more confusing when the person is standing in a relatively quiet kitchen. Who can be sure that the spirit of a dead relative hasn’t slipped in through the dining room door?

So what remains to explain? That meaningless brain signals (i.e., ones that were not triggered by anything outside the body) are interpreted in personal and emotionally charged terms? This hardly seems surprising. My friend’s friend spent a good deal of time thinking about her dead parent. Interpretations are drawn from the well of experiences we each carry within us. The frequency with which these experiences are recalled, the emotional power they convey, all contribute to the raw material used by the interpreter function. In short, the attributions we make to those sights or sounds are hardly random. Don’t mistake this for a conscious or willful process in which we actively seek comfort and choose our interpretations accordingly. The whole process takes place well below our threshold for awareness.

Do we simply create supernatural causal agents out of whole cloth or do we have a little neurological help in creating the ghosts and spiritual entities around us? Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, strongly believes the latter and has some unusual data to back up his claim.
¹⁸
Persinger suggests that the experiences many attribute to supernatural forces have their origin in the brain’s temporal lobes. Persinger is not the only one approaching spirituality in this manner. In the past twenty years, the study of religion has largely moved from the hands of anthropologists, theologians, and psychologists to neuroscientists. The field is somewhat facetiously referred to as “neurotheology.” Much of this work involves the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Scientists are now able to isolate precisely which brain structures are activated during various types of religious experiences and have begun to talk in terms of a “God part of the brain.”

Persinger’s work uses a source of low-frequency magnetic waves, which are delivered while subjects wear a specially constructed helmet that directs this energy directly to the temporal lobe region of their brains. His results are quite dramatic. Virtually everyone reports something: out-of-body experiences, visions of lights and faces, a “presence in the room,” a long tunnel that draws subjects into it. Subjects describe these sensations as “pleasant” and often claim to have seen God or at least to have been in his presence. Others report the presence of extraterrestrial aliens. Persinger argues that such experiences are not confined to laboratory demonstrations. In people with temporal lobe sensitivity, naturally occurring geomagnetic activity can result in a variety of visions, ranging from the Blessed Virgin to a visitor from Venus.

In the course of writing a magazine article, I had occasion to interview a man from Edmond, Oklahoma. Since I had never heard of his hometown, I took a moment to ask my source about the town and its location. Several days later, while reading
Time
magazine (May 24, 2004), I came across an offbeat story about the theft of 2.5 tons of used cooking grease. There were all the predictable jokes about the thieves making a slick getaway. The location of the crime? You guessed it: Edmond, Oklahoma.

What conclusions might I draw about these events? More to the point, what conclusions do most people draw when such things happen? I have often heard someone say, “You never heard of a place [or a new word or an actor or a musician], and once you do—you just keep coming across it [or him or her], like the universe had been saving it up.” Perhaps the universe does work in mysterious ways with you as its personal target, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. Rather than seeing this mysterious process as
external
to us, it is also possible that the best account for my Edmond, Oklahoma, experience lies within me: an
internal
process.