Belief
How do people manage to believe strange things? One way is simply to conclude that they have Special Powers, of course; but apart from that? Skeptical Inquirer discusses it via a review of Susan Clancy’s Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.
…no one wakes up in the morning with a full-blown abduction experience. Sometimes, the experience is created and molded from the starting point of a dream or hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis. Other times, it starts with just a vague feeling that something had happened that needs to be explained. According to Clancy, all of the abductees she studied “had sought out books, movies, researchers, and hypnotists in an effort to understand the things that were troubling them” (143). Since sleep paralysis and its related hallucinations are almost unknown to the general public, the real explanation is not available. Thus, when someone who has had such an experience reads one of the books touting the reality of alien abductions or hears such claims on television or elsewhere, it seems the only explanation available.
Up to a point. I always wonder why people don’t ask themselves why the aliens drop in only when the dropped in on have just woken up from sound sleep. Why don’t they knock on the door at 3 in the afternoon and ask for lemonade? Why don’t they show up at noon and help make lunch? Why don’t they show up right after dinner and pass the mints? Why don’t they show up when everyone for miles around is wide awake and alert and dressed and walking around and thinking straight? Eh? Why is it always when people are lying there in fetid heaps wondering what woke them oh it’s an alien? You would think they’d wonder. Not, maybe, if it were something only a little bit strange, something absurd but not physically impossible – (I have to say that because I once had an auditory hallucination after being woken up at 3 a.m., and I didn’t realize it was a hallucination until years later, reading about hypnogogic sleep. But what I heard wasn’t aliens, or god rehearsing a speech, or The Great Unicorn humming a tune. It was odd, even socially impossible, but not supernatural.) – but if it were aliens? Barney and Betty aliens, mashed potato aliens, sperm-head aliens? I would think that would make people look a little harder for other explanations. But then of course some do; it’s just that others don’t. That’s not all that surprising. It’s a big world.
In chapter 5, “Who gets abducted?”, she reports the results of her own research on dozens of abductees, whom she interviewed and gave psychological tests. In general, these people are quite normal. They are certainly, with an exception or two, not “crazy,” as so many first suspect upon hearing their tales. They are, however, more imaginative, creative, and fantasy-prone than the general population.
Sure. It’s not at all about being crazy, I should think, it’s about being credulous, uncritical, mentally passive. All of which are natural! Those are pretty much default mode; it takes learning to be the other thing. Skepticism and caution and logic, poking at inferences, realizing the difference between correlation and causation – all those are learned behaviour. Lots of people never do learn it. And there are masses of influences teaching the opposite.
It may surprise you to know that my co-author has Special Powers. He’s been telling me about them lately. He was considering telling you about them too, but he may have decided not to profane the mysteries. He has a faint hope that telling me about his Special Powers will convince me that he is by definition always right about everything, but I have roundly assured him that it won’t. I defeated him in argument six times earlier today; he was merely too stiff-necked to concede as much.
I so do have Special Powers. Funnily enough, I also have a stiff neck today. I had to pull out of a squash game because of it. So maybe you have Special Powers too!
Uri Geller is a f OMG my keyboard has just started to melt and twist! gotta hit submit befo
I know, I said you have Special Powers. That’s what I said. Your Special Powers aren’t serving you very well if you think I said you didn’t.
But you really have a stiff neck? That’s eeeerie, dude. Also, as meaning I have Special Powers, good; means you’ll never again refuse to admit when I’ve won.
Bye, bluejewel! It’s been fun!
What was the socially impossible auditory hallucination you had? If you don’t mind my asking.
No, don’t mind your asking a bit, I skipped the detail only because I think I’ve given it before and don’t want to be more tedious than I already am. It was when I was a zookeeper; I got a call from the night keeper that the elephants had broken a door and were flinging it around, could I come in and secure it, he would come and pick me up (I lived a few blocks away, which is relevant). I dressed etc and went outside to wait for him; while I waited I heard the zoo’s public address system, which I could often hear on Sunday afternoons – I heard the zoo’s p.a. system announcing something or other the way it did on weekends – ‘go see the elephants having their bath in half an hour’ or some such. I thought that was odd – what could there be to see at 3 a.m., and anyway why bother to announce it, since there was no one there to look at it? I told Al when he arrived and I got in his car, what I had heard. He said I hadn’t. I said yes I did. He said I couldn’t have, it was 3 in the morning, and he hadn’t heard anything, and it wouldn’t be announcing anything in the middle of the night anyway. Well I heard it, I said, and I think we let it go at that. I don’t think I gave it much thought. But that’s odd, because he was right: I couldn’t possibly have heard it. Apart from anything else, it wasn’t automatic, there wasn’t a tape or anything; it was a matter of someone keying a mike and talking. (Physically, someone could have broken into the admin building and messed around – maybe that’s what I concluded, and why I didn’t think much more about it. That could be. But the neighbours would have complained; they weren’t fond of the PA system as it was. So that’s probably not what happened.)
GT, the proper title is mentioned in one of the quoted passages: hypnogogic sleep.
I think GT is referring to something called “sleep paralysis”.
Ah, I thought that was what it meant.
Here’s a handy page on the subject from Stanford. -gogic is at the outset of sleep, -pompic is at the end. I didn’t know that. Was wondering what -pompic meant.
I read Clancy’s book, and she mentions something interesting:
“Even when abductees acknowledge that sleep paralysis and false-memory creation are more probable explanations, intellectual reasoning can’t alter the actual experiences they had … Personal experience has an immediacy, even a kind of sanctity, that scientific explanations completely lack.” (pg. 78)
So knowing all about hypnopompic and hypnogagnic hallucinations would probably make no difference. Not afterwards and, I suspect, not before, either — not unless someone has that pesky little prime commitment to truth, consistency, and objectivity which will override the “sanctity” of a good personal story.
It’s just like with all sorts of other paranormal and religious beliefs — believers quickly admit that sure, lots of folk are self-deluded. Happens all the time. People just can’t be trusted when they think they’ve heard the voice of God or saw a ghost or cured themselves with goat dung or what-have-you. Humans make mistakes. Oh yeah. BUT I, ON THE OTHER HAND, AM DIFFERENT — because in this case, it really did happen to me. I was there.
Well the personal experience thing is exactly what Jerry has been talking about. And I have some – er – experience of that myself.
And that’s what I meant about the default mode. It’s understandable that experience would trump knowledge of sleep paralysis – unless one has (has been taught) that commitment to thinking again.
(John Mack remains peculiar though. He was trained, after all…)
“Why should we not cling to what we remember happening, even when presented with ‘authoritative’ explanations?”
Well…because we can be wrong, and therein trouble lies. Consider the havoc wreaked by “repressed memories” of terrible crimes. If the memories are wrong, that’s a problem.
Exactly. We already readily agree that Other People can be wrong on their interpretations — even when those Other People are honest and wise. To exempt ourselves from the same possibility of error is arrogant.
And to try to exempt ourselves from the possibility of error by sliding “I may have misinterpreted what happened to me” into “nothing happened to me” is sloppy at best.
If someone thinks they have a headache, they do. But if they therefore think they have a brain tumor, they might be wrong. Suggesting that they’re mistaken about the cause of the headache is nothing like telling them they should doubt the evidence of their own senses, and not believe their head hurts. I think too many people have problems with that distinction.
From Sastra’s first comment –
“because in this case, it really did happen to me. I was there.”
That is, needless to say, compelling. I think I can pinpoint one particular reading experience, one book, that drastically loosened the grip of that idea on my own mind: Elizabeth Loftus’s book on memory. Once one realizes how easy it is to convince people that they remember a deliberately planted memory – one also realizes (at least I did) that there is no internally detectable difference between memory and fantasy. There is only the knowledge (which is sometimes mistaken) that this is memory, that is fantasy – there is no other marker. Thinking about something one remembers is just like thinking about something one imagines. So – the fact that ‘I was there’ quickly becomes a very fallible reason for believing the truth of anything. The need for peer review and replication becomes blindingly obvious.
(That’s not to say that all our memories are false, of course, but it is to say that we can’t know for sure by ourselves. There just isn’t any way to know.)
I once saw a ghost.
I haven’t believed in ghosts since I was a nipper, don’t now and didn’t at the time. But at that moment, in that room, up close and personal with the bastard(technically the bastard’s disembodied hands and fore-arms), I believed. My metabolism certainly did, full fight or flight reflex at maximum.
And yes, it was preceded by sleep paralysis, but I was on my feet and reaching for the light switch when things just kept getting worse.
Since then I have reasoned it out, but I don’t think I would sleep in that bed again.