Turn Me On, Dead Man :
What do the Beatles, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Patricia Arquette and Michael
Keaton all have in common?
By Michael Shermer
In September 1969, as I began ninth grade, a rumor circulated that the Beatles'
Paul McCartney was dead, killed in a 1966 automobile accident and replaced
by a look-alike. The clues were there in the albums, if you knew where to
look.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's "A Day in the Life," for one, recounts
the accident: He blew his mind out in a car / He didn't notice that the lights
had changed / A crowd of people stood and stared / They'd seen his face before
/ Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords. The cover of
the Abbey Road album shows the Fab Four walking across a street in what looks
like a funeral procession, with John in white as the preacher, Ringo in black
as the pallbearer, a barefoot and out-of-step Paul as the corpse, and George
in work clothes as the gravedigger. In the background is a Volkswagen Beetle
(!) whose license plate reads "28IF"--Paul's supposed age "if" he had not
died.
Spookiest of all were the clues embedded in songs played backward. On a cheap
turntable, I moved the speed switch midway between 331/3
and 45 to disengage the motor drive, then manually turned the record
backward and listened in wide-eared wonder. The eeriest is "Revolution 9"
from the White Album, in which an ominously deep voice endlessly repeats:
number nine ... number nine ... number nine.... Played backward you hear:
turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man....
In time, thousands of clues emerged as the rumor mill cranked up (type "Paul
is dead" into Google for examples), despite John Lennon's 1970 statement
to Rolling Stone that "the whole thing was made up." But made up by whom?
Not the Beatles. Instead this was a fine example of the brain as a
pattern-recognition machine that all too often finds nonexistent signals
in the background noise of life.
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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
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What we have here is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that
are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance
or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association
learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our
ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are
skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity
of association learning.
Unfortunately, the system has flaws.
Superstitions are false
associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball
player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false
association learning.
Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition
(Google key words for visuals): the
face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese
sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson,
I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia
Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams
seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which
Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead
wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called
EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call
TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you
will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.
Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission
after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works. But there is only one
surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only
when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a
control group can we draw a valid conclusion.
We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated
the exchange of such association anecdotes. The problem is that although
true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does
not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon has endured
the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those
who remove themselves from the gene pool), like this column, will never want
for examples. Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.
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Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and author of
The Science of Good and Evil.
Skeptic.com
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