A physicist explains ghosts in our digital reality

Discussion in 'UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters' started by Magical Realist, Mar 31, 2015.

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  1. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Problem is, MR isn't interested in facts; a claim being demonstrably false doesn't phase him, nor will it keep him from re-using it over and over... just look at his anti-vaxx rants for evidence of this.
     
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  3. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Harry Potter movies are real movies. I myself have seen several of them.
     
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  5. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    And videos showing ghosts are real, too. In both cases, however, the events they are depicting are fictional.
     
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  7. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    The occurrence of ufo phenomena as well as the Scole Experiments in which entities from other dimensions were contacted.

    See above.

    Actually I didn't say I know anything. I merely posited a possiblity. You understand the difference don't you?
     
  8. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    How do you know that? Did you see them faking the video when they made it?
     
  9. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I said hot days don't make 62 kids hallucinate the same thing at the same time. Perhaps you have a case showing otherwise?
     
  10. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    The temperature is immaterial. What is material is that 62 kids were together, and in cases like that, people collaborate until they all "agree" on what they saw. Again, it's a well known phenomenon.
     
  11. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    You were given examples and a link.
    Although, admittedly, the fact that it was a "hot day" may have nothing to do with it.
     
  12. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    You have a case where around 62 kids collaborated to lie about something they saw and even drew detailed pictures of roughly the same incident? Let's see it.
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    62? Probably not. I've seen studies where 20 people all agreed on a false memory after they were shown false answers from other people.

    Here's a good overview of the problem (from Wired):
    =========================================================
    How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect
    Jonah Lehrer
    Science
    • Date of Publication: 10.18.11. 10.18.11
    • Time of Publication: 2:48 pm. 2:48 pm
    Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life.
    But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become exercises in pure fiction . . .

    The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.

    The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that, they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions about the short movie while inside a brain scanner.

    This time, though, the subjects were given a “lifeline”: they were shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised their stories in light of the social pressure.

    The question, of course, is whether their memory of the film had actually undergone a change. (Previous studies have demonstrated that people will knowingly give a false answer just to conform to the group. We’re such wimps.) To find out, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab one last time to take the memory test, telling them that the answers they had previously been given were not those of their fellow film watchers, but randomly generated by a computer. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, but more than 40 percent remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted by the earlier session. They had come to believe their own bullshit.

    Here’s where the fMRI data proved useful. By comparing the differences in brain activity between the persistent false memories and the temporary errors of “social compliance” the scientists were able to detect the neural causes of the misremembering. The main trigger seemed to be a strong co-activation between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is known to play a role in long-term memory formation, while the amygdala is an emotional center in the brain. According to the scientists, the co-activation of these areas can sometimes result in the replacement of an accurate memory with a false one, provided the false memory has a social component. This suggests that feedback of others has the ability to strongly shape our remembered experience. We are all performers, twisting our stories for strangers.

    The scientists briefly speculate on why this effect might exist, given that it leads to such warped recollections of the past:

    Altering memory in response to group influence may produce untoward effects. For example, social influence such as false propaganda can deleteriously affect individuals’ memory in political campaigns and commercial advertising and impede justice by influencing eyewitness testimony. However, memory conformity may also serve an adaptive purpose, because social learning is often more efficient and accurate than individual learning. For this reason, humans may be predisposed to trust the judgment of the group, even when it stands in opposition to their own original beliefs.

    This research helps explain why a shared narrative can often lead to totally unreliable individual memories. We are so eager to conform to the collective, to fit our little lives into the arc of history, that we end up misleading ourselves. Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.
    =======================================
     
  14. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Note in this experiment the subjects were manipulated into believing the incident was different from what they witnessed. This makes sense. People told they are remembering something different from what others saw may update their own stories. But that doesn't prove people will naturally do this with no false feedback. In the case of the 62 children, no false feedback was given them. If anything, consulting with each other only strengthened their recall of the event and their confidence in their own accounts. Add to that the fact that it was an emotionally jarring experience, and the prospect of them all getting it wrong becomes highly unlikely.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    From the article:
    ===============
    Consider an investigation of flashbulb memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks, a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50 percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.
    ================

    People naturally do this with no feedback. It's part of the human psyche to want to conform to the group and "agree" with everyone while preserving what they care about (their role in the event, their witnessing of something remarkable.) It happens even to adults with no false feedback; in a group of imaginative schoolchildren, taught from an early age to "get along with one another" and to play games, it has an even higher chance of happening.

    EXACTLY! One kid said he saw something. Other kids, taught to play well together, said "yeah, it's great that you saw that!" A third kid overhears this cool thing they saw, and he wants to be part of the cool thing too. After consulting enough, they strengthen their recall of the event they all want to be a part of.
     
  16. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Unless, of course, that false feedback came from individuals WITHIN the group.

    Oh look!
    Funny isn't it.
    In, say law, witnesses aren't allowed to talk to each other because we KNOW that it's an opportunity to make sure they're all telling the same story.
    But when it comes to woo it appears that talking about it is merely regarded as "strengthening their recall".
     
  17. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    This isn't an example of collaborated accounts confabulating false details. It's merely showing the natural decay of memory. This is to be expected over several years. But the account of the 62 kids had no such time to decay. They were interviewed in a matter of days.
     
  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    It's not "decay" - they don't say "I don't remember; the details are hazy." It's reinterpreting their experiences to generate new (false) memories.
    Yep. Which is plenty of time to kids to amplify a sighting of something they didn't understand, strengthen their recall of the (now partly fictitious) event and create false confidence in their own accounts.
     
  19. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    "In the years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these personal stories."

    No..your example proves nothing like this. It shows that intentionally deceived witnesses will modify their accounts, and accounts will become less accurate over the years. You have no evidence for any of these children collaborating over the few days to remember something that never happened. Besides, the accounts were given right away after the sighting to the teachers. There was simply no time for them to "conspire" to make the same thing up.
     
  20. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    No, it shows people who were not deceived will change their story with time. Two more good examples:
    ===========
    A fairly recent example of memory conformity occurred in 2003 after the murder of former Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh. Immediately after the crime was committed, witnesses were put in a room together so they could not leave the scene of the crime until they were interviewed. The witnesses discussed the scene with each other while in the room, contrary to what they were told to do. The specific descriptions the witnesses gave about the perpetrator upon leaving the room were influenced by each other, causing the police to collect false information about the perpetrator while initially searching for him or her. The perpetrator, Mijailo Mijailovic, was caught on camera and did not match the descriptions that the eyewitnesses gave. Conclusions have been made that the cause of this false search was rooted in witnesses discussion of their accounts with one another, which led to co-witness influence.

    Another well-known case of memory conformity happened with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Three employees were working at the location where Timothy McVeigh rented the truck that was used in the bombing.Two of the witnesses originally thought that McVeigh was by himself, but the third believed that there was an accomplice. Later, after the three were left to discuss the event, the other two came to the conclusion that there was indeed a second man who assisted McVeigh. The FBI now believes that this “accomplice” never existed despite their initial search for him or her. The employee who claimed to have seen an accomplice most likely unintentionally influenced the other two employees, causing them to make later claims about an accomplice as well.
    =======================

    Above are two accounts that show people collaborating in much less time than that to create false memories. Not memories that someone had planted, memories that one person misremembered - those memories were then amplified, strenghtened and confirmed by talking to the other parties.
    In the case of the murder above, there was even less time to "conspire." Yet it happened.
     
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  21. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Besides, the accounts were given right away after the sighting to the teachers. There was simply no time for them to "conspire" to make the same thing up. Note also these memory changes always involve small details of appearance. None of them show witnesses totally making up THAT a crime occurred. The event itself is never in question.
     
  22. Dywyddyr Penguinaciously duckalicious. Valued Senior Member

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    Or, perhaps, more accurate now that the falsities aren't being reinforced.
    As indicated by the quoted passage: The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of details from that day are now inventions.

    Oh, you're lying again: The teachers at the school were in a meeting, so the 62 children were basically unsupervised while in the schoolyard on morning recess.
    And let's not forget: ...consulting with each other...
     
  23. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Wrong. The children immediately began screaming and ran to the school. There was simply no time to make anything up:

    "The smaller children were very frightened and cried for help. They believed that the little man was a demon who would eat them. Black African children have heard legends of tokoloshis, demons who eat children. The children ran to the tuck shop operator, but she did not want to leave the shop unattended and so did not go.

    The late Cynthia Hind, known as Africa's foremost UFO investigator, investigated the case the next day. When she was first contacted, she asked the headmaster of the school, Colin Mackie, to have the children draw pictures of what they had seen. When she arrived at the school, he had about 35 drawings for her. The drawings were of very similar objects."
     
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