The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (28 page)

‘I’ve now seen over four hundred survivors that have all given ludicrously similar testimony,’ she says. ‘You know when someone is speaking, and it sends a chill down you – there’s a very big difference between someone who’s got a fantasy and utter terror.’

‘But Carole was delusional,’ I say. ‘She said a cabinet minister anally raped her with a claw hammer.’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised by misinformation, someone being drugged up and shown newsreels to make them—’

‘But isn’t this the problem?’ I interrupt. ‘All the stories that are obviously nonsensical, you dismiss as planted misinformation. If you can accept that some of it’s not true, how do you know
all of it’s
not true?’

‘The job of a therapist is not to be judge or jury or police force.’

‘Do you not accept that if a patient is delusional, a therapist who colluded in that delusion – who said, “Yes, there are satanists who are out to get you” – could be causing huge damage?’

‘That would cause real damage,’ she says. ‘But the purpose of therapy is hearing where a patient is.’

By now, I am getting cross.

‘When someone is saying they’ve been anally raped with a claw hammer by a conservative cabinet minister, that,
indisputably
, is someone suffering from a paranoid delusion.’

David pipes up: ‘Well, have you asked him whether it happened or not? We’ve been shocked by some of the stuff that’s proved to be true.’

I turn to Dr Sinason. ‘So you’re saying, maybe I’m wrong about the minister?’

She looks blankly at me.

‘Maybe.’

I leave the conversation feeling angry yet satisfied. For me, the case is closed. But then I have a conversation that rattles me. I am speaking
with Professor Richard Bentall, the madness expert who believes that sexual abuse is a major cause of people hearing voices. When I mention the case in passing, he says, ‘Not Valerie Sinason?’

‘Yes!’

‘I read one of her case accounts and it just seemed amazingly familiar. Obviously, I’ve not met the patient, so couldn’t say for sure. But, to me it sounded like somebody with psychosis.’

I tell him about Carole Myers.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he says. ‘She’s had a paranoid psychosis, that’s what’s happened! I don’t know this person, but I always say, with paranoid patients – you have to bear in mind there’s usually a nugget of truth in their paranoia. I think it’s certainly the case that some therapists with their own agendas are capable of encouraging a distorted memory of events, if you follow what I’m saying.’

I spend a moment struggling to absorb what he has just told me.

‘You’re saying, Carole might have been abused?’

‘You’ve been asking, is this satanic abuse, or is she imagining it? But there is a third option. She got abused – although not satanically – and then had a psychotic interpretation of it.’

‘I’m sure the family are innocent,’ I say.

‘A hell of a lot of abuse is not by family members,’ he says. ‘Maybe she had been abused by somebody outside the family and developed a distorted memory of it. This is one of the horrible cases where we just don’t know what really happened.’

*

On 21 June 2005, after years of silence, Carole unexpectedly phoned her brother Richard. She told him that she was lonely in London and that she had no friends. She had decided, after all this time, that she wanted to move back to Stockport to be with the family. On Wednesday the 29th, the day that Carole mysteriously died, Richard wrote the letter that would be discovered by Dr Fisher and would eventually trigger the family’s search for truth. He recounted the latest news – about his business, his brothers, his dad’s heart attack – and finished with a flourish that, in retrospect, seems haunting and prescient. ‘One shouldn’t maintain too great a distance,’ he wrote, ‘as once the moment is gone, it is gone.’

So now we know. The men and women of science have delivered the shaming news and humanity has responded, in the main, by ignoring it. Of course it has – this is just what you would expect from brains that have evolved to project an image of reasonable, wise, clear-sighted coherence and yet whose decision-making engines run on a slick conjuration of illusion, prejudice and ego-bolstering sleights of truth; a system of irrationality that includes a kind of neural blacksmith’s workshop for dealing with uncomfortable facts – there the furnace for softening them up, there the hammer and tongs for reshaping them, there the window from which to toss them out.

But all this is not enough. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the brain’s desire to have the outer, real world match its inner models of it – it takes us part of the way there. It tells us that a properly functioning brain cannot be trusted to think rationally and, because our minds play these tricks without telling us, that owners of brains cannot be trusted to judge their own rationality. But since meeting Gemma the Homeopath, I have come to suspect that there is something else going on – some crucial process that I have missed.

Gemma had one fact that required explanation: her belief that homeopathy cured her cancer. When I asked her to explain this belief, she gave me far less than any respectable scientific study could offer – no data, no proof. And yet she also gave me
more
. Gemma told a compelling tale. A young woman on her deathbed, a hapless medical
service, scenes of lonely devastation, of falling hair and swelling moon-faces, of a deathly oncologist and a sensational recovery just in time for Christmas. Crack open the belief and something magical bursts out. A story.

The model-defending brain tells of an organ that is, naturally enough, defensive. But before it has any models to defend, it has to actually build them. If I am to track the source of faulty beliefs, I need to discover how they become a part of the model in the first place. I have to understand, not just the brain’s destructive powers, but also its creative ones. Creativity is, after all, a defining quality of humanity, and my journey has already found great glittering piles of it. Many thousands of followers of Swami Ramdev benefit from what I believe to be the placebo effect, and yet spin tales about ancient Eastern wisdom battling evil Western medicine. Buddhists feel the proven effects of meditation and yet run far from those safe lands, towards karma, reincarnation and extra-mortal realms inhabited by giants. Men and women feel an unexplained itch and weave a plot atop their welts that tells of nanotechnology and tiny wasps and a medico-industrial conspiracy. John Mackay experiences life in the world, and the mystery of its being here, and explains it using creation myths from the deserts of the old Middle East.

These are stories, and they seem to have a terrible effect on truth. With their narratives of good and evil, heroism and villainy, they are neural seducers, coaxing people ever deeper into the darklands of craziness. For Rufus May, this happened literally. He was bored and unhappy and began to tell himself an exciting tale in which he was being recruited as a trainee spy. Partly through a process which has the appearance, at least, of a pathological cousin of confirmation bias, he began to see evidence for this narrative everywhere. The story became the truth and Rufus became mad.

Whether Rufus May’s experience has anything in common with that of the alien abductees is not clear. There is no consensus on if and how ordinary self-deception overlaps with the dangerous delusions of psychotics. But
in a paper published in the
Journal of Philosophical Studies
, Lisa Bortolotti and Matteo Mameli point to the ‘considerable continuity’ that is evident between them. Both, they write, ‘serve to
either preserve positive emotions, deny unpleasant or disturbing facts or satisfy some other pressing psychological need.’
Psychiatrist Robin Murray
, meanwhile, says that schizophrenia can be seen as a ‘salience disorder’ in which random events in an individual’s daily experience are soaked in too much significance. ‘Everything seems important. Why are there all these red cars? Why are all these people wearing red jumpers? Could it be because someone has hired them to follow me? Could it be because I’m very important? Or could it be because they’re all out to get me?’ It is as if the mind of the schizophrenic is suffering from an excess of stories. This, I have come to suspect, is not a coincidence.

We humans are creatures of story. And the story of story begins in the unconscious.

*

To reveal the secrets of the storytelling brain, we need to lead our search backwards in time. Throughout childhood and until late adolescence, our brains are building their internal models of what is out there and how it all works – physical, social, emotional and so on. After that, our core beliefs harden and we find change,
according to Professor of Psychiatry Bruce Wexler
, ‘difficult and painful.’ The power of our many cognitive biases skews our view. We attack unwelcome information. The gravity of our personal worlds attracts us to other, similar worlds – people who ‘see it like we do,’ whose opinions give us the warm, reassuring pleasure of comfort, familiarity, safety. It all thickens the illusion that our way is the
true
way. And some take it even further. In their heroic, heretical and wonderfully human way, they get up and get out there and attempt to change the models of other people so that they match their own. They write, they blog, they preach, they
create
.

But before all that, our models must be built, and it is in this building that the first awakenings of our need for storytelling can be discovered.
Developmental biologist
Professor Lewis Wolpert writes that babies ‘construct reality through converging lines of sensory and motor information’ – by interacting with the world and learning how causes create effects.

Cause and effect is at the core of belief. It is at the core of thinking, the core of being human. It has to be. Cause and effect is what we do – we just
have
to make things happen. It is sometimes known as the ‘effectance motive’ – the urge to learn by interacting with the world.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has called effectance
‘almost as basic a need as food and water.’

Our understanding of the law of cause and effect is so fundamental that our brains are wired to spot it everywhere, even when it doesn’t exist. In
Thinking, Fast and Slow
,
Professor Daniel Kahneman invites his readers
to observe two words: ‘bananas’ and ‘vomit’. ‘There was no particular reason to do so,’ he writes, ‘but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words
bananas
and
vomit
, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.’
Professor Wolpert, meanwhile, writes of studies
in which people who view moving discs on a computer screen cannot resist the belief that they are bouncing off one another. Similarly, moving dots often appear as if they are involved in a chase.

Our models are built by ever more complex observations that are based on a simple question – if you do
that
, then
what
will happen? This is why emotions are so crucial to thinking. They tell us the answer. They are the strange, ancient whale-songs of your models communicating with you, predicting the effect that will follow the cause. They represent a
mode of language that is millions of years older
than any human one. It is a form that we have been using since before we
were
human. If you are about to do something that your models predict will be good, you will get a subtle encouraging hit of pleasure. If you are about to do something inadvisable, you will feel bad. We are assailed with a constantly shifting sense-scape of complex feelings: disgust, pride, hate, hope, love, lust, rage and all the rest of them. Everything we come across –
every sight, every smell, every person, every idea, every
thing
– comes coupled with a feeling, no matter how subtle. These feelings are your models – your unconscious mind – speaking to you.
Professor Michael Gazzaniga writes
that ‘All decisions we make are based on whether to approach or withdraw, including our moral decisions.’ Without emotions, we would be
incapable of making these decisions
.

Emotions guide all of your behaviour. In essence, they work by rooting through the past to tell you stories about the future. In their silent language of feelings, they are your constant adviser,
hitting you with dread or desire
or any one of their other terrible, shimmering, beautiful states in order to guide your thinking.

The old notion that there are two simple states of mind – conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional – remains useful for describing these ideas, but is now known to be radically simplistic. Recent theory on the unconscious – where those other simplified objects, the ‘models’, reside – says that it is not a single thinking-centre but,
in the words of Professor David Eagleman
, ‘a combination of sub-agents’ who often want different things and challenge each other for control of your actions. The mind, he writes in
Incognito
, is ‘built of multiple over-lapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices’ and are ‘locked in chronic battle.’ What you decide and how you act is mostly (possibly
completely
) determined by the outcomes of these fights. ‘Your behaviour – what you do in the world – is simply the end result of the battles.’

The point at which you sense that emotional hit, then, is usually the point at which these fights have been fought and won. We have many models of the world, which offer many predictions about the future, many different answers to the simple question: ‘If I cause this to happen, what will be the effect?’ The emotion that you feel when trying to make a decision – approach, withdraw – is a kind of match-report, informing you of the outcome of this complex debate between experts.

We have experts inside us, we have competing models of the world and we also have other people. When we are young and building our models through observations of cause and effect, we are not just seeing what happens when we shake a rattle. We are also creating models of human relationships, by interacting with others.
Professor Bruce Wexler writes
that the psyche is seen ‘as an emerging organisation that evolves through increasingly complex interchanges with people.’ He describes the psychoanalytic theory that we are prone to identifying not just with humans, but with animals, the ‘heroes of a previous generation,’ long-dead ancestors and even characters from fiction,
internalising them, so that they ultimately become components of ourselves. In
Brain and Culture
,
he offers the example of young Native American men
who, on reaching sexual maturity, are given the names of certain animals with the intention that they will assume ‘important qualities of that animal.’ Reading about all this, I cannot help but recall Ron Coleman and the frighteningly vivid models his brain contained of the criminal priest and of his lost love, Annabel.