Ep66 "Why do brains love conspiracy theories?"

to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is about conspiracy theories. Now, the point of today's podcast is not to assess the truth value of any particular theory, but instead, my interest is in why they happen in the brain and why they are so sticky

in society. Okay, So, for definition, the idea of a conspiracy theory is this, although all the available facts seem to indicate X, there is an alternative story that reveals a different truth. There are a million examples of this, but let's just take a couple of examples to get the ball rolling. So in nineteen forty seven, in Roswell,

New Mexico, an object falls from the sky. The examiners conclude that it is a weather balloon, but that confirmation did nothing to stem the tide of a conspiracy theory that space aliens had crashed in Roswell. The alternative explanation suggested it was a spaceship and no one wanted to

admit it. Now, this is an example of a conspiracy theory because it requires that some people know the truth, in this case, that there's evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization and in fact one that has vehicle troubles like we do. But the conspiracy is to conceal that from the rest

of the population. Or take the nineteen sixty nine Moon landing, a moment of great pride for the scientists and engineers who made it happen, but many thousands of people at that time and I think even some now, asserted that the landing was a fake filmed professionally in a movie studio. Or take the assassination of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty three. Although one man

Oswald was captured for the crime. The conspiracy theory is that many powerful shadowy figures and perhaps even another shooter was involved with all of these examples. Decades after the event, there are still assertions that there are alternative and better explanations to the mainstream stories that the general public has taken on. Now, most people that I talk with imagine

that conspiracy theories are something new. They are not. As best I can tell, there is no country in the world and no time in history that was not rife with conspiracy theories. And this, as we shall see, is because conspiracy theories don't require any particular technology or country or politics. All they require are human brains. For example, in sixty four CE, there was a huge fire that

destroyed much of the city of Rome. Now, historical accounts suggest that the Emperor Nero had no responsibility for the fire, and in fact he helped people in the fires aftermath. But he had previously announced plans to build his new palace the Domis area, and for that land needed to be cleared. So conspiracy theories bloss and Roman said, maybe Nero lit the fire or allowed it to happen, because he clearly has something to gain here. Conspiracy theories pervade history.

There's so many examples, like who was really behind the assassination of Julius Caesar twenty years earlier than that, or who was actually responsible for the death of Alexander the Great, which was three hundred and seventy years before that, or who actually wanted to make sure that Socrates was tried and executed before that. So conspiracy theories go back for as long as we have written history, and that's the signature that tells us we're not just looking at a

cultural phenomenon but a neural one. Now, it's often easy to take the position of laughing at all conspiracy theories, in large part because they end up being different than whatever we have in our internal models. But I'm going to assert that there are good and bad approaches to analyzing any new explanatory idea, because, first of all, there probably are some conspiracy theories that have some truth value.

A tame example would be price fixing, where you have a small handful of companies who control a market, so they all get together and decide that all of them should keep their prices high. Or another example is that of planned obsolescence, where a company will make a product that's pretty good, but it's not going to last you eight years. Instead, it's going to break down in a much shorter time so that you'll have to buy the next model of it, and they'll get to enjoy you

as a repeat customer. So our conspiracy theory is true, not true sometimes all the time. I only mention this to remind us that the world is driven by incentives of individuals, and sometimes weird stuff can happen. And then, of course remember that sometimes there are unsolved mysteries, like in nineteen seventy one, when a mild mannered man hijacked the Northwest Airlines between Portland and Seattle and exchanged the passengers for two hundred thousand dollars and then kept the

crew and ordered them to fly to Mexico City. And then on the flight he did something totally unexpected. He leapt out of the back of the plane with a parachute and the money. This remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in FBI history. Are there conspiracy theories around the shore, but of course it's hard to separate whether something was a conspiracy or whether the investigators were just

not talented enough or whether the perpetrator was just too talented. Anyway, it's a big, complicated world, and we can't always rule out conspiracy theories right away because something could be possible. But what we are going to see today is how to think about this through a scientific lens to distinguish which ones have some modicum of possibility and which ones most likely do not. So to begin, I'm going to

argue that conspiracy theories are inevitable. There's no way to say if we just get better education and better media, then we'll get rid of conspiracy theories, because in fact, they emerge as I'll argue from a brain locked in silence and darkness trying to understand the outside world. The way brains figure out the world is by making hypotheses. They make their best guesses about how everything in the

world fits together. Now, almost everything in the world is beyond the reach of your short little limbs and even your line of sight. So to understand what's happening with groups of people, or politics or societies, we work to put these little puzzle pieces together. Now, we essentially never have all the puzzle pieces, so we always just work with what we can. This is how we function in the world, and brains work to balance their conclusions against

an assessment of how likely that hypothesis is. So let me give you an example. Brains cough up hypotheses on everything, usually entirely unconsciously, and then they evaluate those hypotheses, and almost all of them are wrong. So an example is you say, I thought that I had put my keys on the counter right here, But where are they? So your brain runs through simulations. Maybe they're in your pocket from last night's pants. Maybe you accidentally carried them into

the other room and left them over there. Maybe you left them in the door. But if none of those hypotheses pan out, eventually your brain starts turning up the temperature to cook up more and more exotic possibilities. Maybe my wife took them accidentally thinking they were her keys. Maybe the electrician who fixed our panel accidentally pocketed them.

And eventually, because you've ruled out many of the other explanations, you might come up with something in a more far away range, like the electrician who was here was casing the joint and has plans to come back and rob me, So he took the keys in order to make a copy. Now what interests me is not just that brains come up with increasingly more esoteric hypotheses, that's what brains do, but our evaluation of those hypotheses, because we're always trying

to land on a story that makes sense. We're always looking for a through line that takes the complexity of the external world and turns it into something we can understand. So when do we say, yeah, I think that is the optimal explanation. Now, fundamentally, finding the best explanation is a matter of connecting different dots together in ways that best match the world. Here's a visual description of this picture.

A bunch of dots, and the dots are data points. Okay, Now imagine some lines in between connecting the dots, something like a subway map. And now this represents knowledge. And when you can trace a path all the way from one dot to another, we call that inside. And the question is when does something go from insight to being lots and lots of dots all connected to each other in a pattern that no one else sees. And that's what puts us into the realm of conspiracy theories, which

is what we'll talk about today. So why do people find themselves there from a neural point of view. I think there are several reasons. First, the brain is all about pattern recognition. Our brains are wired to detect patterns and make connections even when none exists. And this tendency to see patterns even in random data is what's known as apophenia. And by the way, if you listen to episode sixty three about the way that we sometimes see faces and patterns even where there is not a face,

that's called paridolia. And note that this is a visual type of apofenia. But apofenia relates not just to what we see, but to any sense like hearing, as well as to con We make patterns out of random data, and this is really at the heart of conspiracy theories. Now there's another thing as well, which is that puzzle solving activates our reward systems. That's why we do Sudoku or wordle or brain teasers or whatever, because we love

finding solutions. Presumably this involves the reward systems in the brain, like the neurotransmitter dopamine associated with the reward system. When you engage with a bunch of facts and suddenly see a pattern, we all know the sense of excitement that triggers and the positive reinforcement there. Now, it's for these reasons that we solve puzzles, and of course when we're kids in school, we get rewarded all the time for solving problems by connecting the dots. And by the way,

I suspect this is why we love mystery novels. Something seems so impossible and complex and confusing, and the satisfaction is delivered in the final pages when Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot gives the explanation and now that you see it, you thrill in the transition from something seeming impenetrable moments ago now being rotated to a different angle so that you can connect all these dots with ease. It's the same series of events, but now there's a clear path

connecting them. So when someone generates a good conspiracy theory to suddenly explain a mysterious event, there is this satisfying feeling of having cracked the puzzle. Plus, I imagine that one of the appeals of conspiracy theories is the overwhelming sense of awe that you are the first person in the world who sees the truth, whereas everyone else is fooled.

You're the Sherlock. Now, I want to make clear that even though people often say that conspiracy theories are not rational, it's perfectly in line with what brains do to try to solve problems. It's not necessarily the case that anyone is trying to be disingenuous. It's that the world is large and complex, and the best anyone can do is to try to fit together the lego pieces that we have to try to make a model of what is

going on out there. So the desire to crack mysteries to resolve questions, this is presumably one of the things at the heart of our success as a species. It's what drives us to constantly cook up the next solution and find the shorter paths and solve things that would have otherwise been opaque. So why do we like having answers so much? While psychologists point to a number of drives that push us towards finding answers, the first is

the desire to reduce cognitive dissonance. When we're faced with facts that don't fit our model or information that conflicts, we experience a state of mental discomfort. I know that I feel this way when something doesn't make sense. It almost hurts physically until I can solve it. So we're always trying to resolve this discomfort, and sometimes conspiracy theories can offer explanations that seem to provide a fit to

one's own existing beliefs or biases. A closely related issue is that we always seek things that reduce cognitive load, and this is why we so often look for simple explanations for very complex events. When we're faced with overwhelming our ambiguous information, our brains often prefer a more straightforward narrative, even if it's incorrect, to reduce cognitive load. And I'll come back to this in a little bit, but I

also want to mention one more thing. We typically have what's called a confirmation bias, which means we seek out information and we favor information that confirms our pre existing beliefs and we disregard contradictory evidence. This shows up really importantly in conspiracy theories when people selectively gather and interpret

information that supports their views. So these are reasons why we seek answers in gener But there are even more specific drives that shape a good conspiracy theory, and that has to do with in group and outgroup dynamics. So we grew up in small tribes for millions of years, and you knew the people in your tribe, but you didn't know those other people on the other side of the hill. So as a matter of our deep history,

we have developed suspicions about our outgroups. In other episodes, you've heard me talk a lot about the dynamics of in groups and outgroups. But the key here today is that many details of conspiracy theories are influenced by social identity. Specifically, you are more likely to believe in theories that align with your group's view and portray your outgroups those outside

your social or political group negatively to your mind. Your outgroups are predisposed to act poorly and without the kind of excellent conscience possessed by your in group, and that fact gives a great deal of latitude for your theories. After all, if you were trying to explain some terrible event that happens and you only had your in group, you would be limited in your explanation. But without groups, all the normal constraints of human behavior are unlocked, which

opens a broader set of possible narratives to use. Suddenly, you're not talking about your friends and neighbors. Now you're talking about them, that other group that lacks morality and ethics and always wants to trip up the good intentions of your group, And so the impossible now seems possible. This was all a ruse. It was a setup to fool everyone, and only they would be sneaky enough and

cynical enough and devious enough to do something like this. Now, one of the social benefits that people derive from outgroup accusations is that it can strengthen in group cohesion and identity. So your group, with all of its flaws, can nonetheless feel pretty good about itself. So conspiracy theories typically reflect who our friends are and who our enemies are. In other words, the particular conspiracy that a theorist chooses is consistent with what they already have in their internal model.

So if they hate Russians for whatever reason, then that is the target of their conspiracy. If they hate Ukrainians, then that is the target of the conspiracy. And there's one more thing I just want to mention here about in groups and outgroups. Your outgroup doesn't have to be someone with whom you have enmity, just someone you don't trust. Maybe you think they're secretive, and this is why shadowy

government organizations so often feature. They are a default outgroup that you don't trust because they reveal their cards so little. We'll come back to that, okay, So returning to the bigger picture of why people generate conspiracy theories, there's another drive that deserves mention, and that is the jern audience. It shouldn't be overlooked that there is a social component to conspiracy theories. So for the puzzle solver, there's often a sense that they will get famous for nailing this

thing that everyone else overlooked. The theorist's mind races to visions of the future in which they are on the front page of Time magazine for having figured out what no one else did. All of these are feelings that are natural and important drives of our brains. Not only the desire to simplify a complex model to something that suddenly clarifies our understanding, but also the desire to demonstrate

your value to your community. And this social component, I suspect is an important piece of what powers the creation of conspiracy theories. But there's even a slightly more tame way that the social drive expresses itself and that's even just repeating the story. You get something out of telling it. After all. The piracy theory is interesting, so you get the attention at the party or on the couch or on social media. The reason it's interesting is because it

challenges someone else's internal model. They think they understand something, and suddenly you tell them, voila, you have a totally different framework for explaining the same thing. That's why it holds their attention. Maybe you weren't the original sherlock who came up with the theory, but you can glow in much of the credit because you're the one spreading the word. So conspiracy theory is propagate because you get to be

the one who tells the story. It's like having this precious little gem that you get to show over and over. It's like a gift certificate that you can use, but it doesn't get used up. And that's why if you have a good conspiracy theory, you'll tell everybody you know, because it's not only about truth, it's about social dynamics. Now, this is not to say that you as the teller, might not believe it totally, just that you don't have

to believe it totally to get all this delicious social feedback. Okay, so these are some of the drivers of why people create and repeat conspiracy theories. We are all driven to solve puzzles and that helps us to simplify narratives and reduce cognitive dissonance. And there are many social components here. Our in groups and out groups typically play big roles

in shaping the story. And finally, conspiracy theories tend to be sticky because people could have the impression that they are doing something valuable for their community or at minimum getting social attention for being the one to offer the surprise twist. And in thinking about conspiracy theories from the neuroscience point of view, I realized there we're two more things that are important here. The first has to do with threat detection. One of the most important jobs of

the brain is to see trouble coming. What we find in neuroimaging is that the amigdala is like an emergency control center that kicks into gear when anything menacing is brewing, whether that's a real threat or even just a perceived threat. And once you're amigdala is revd up, you operate with heightened suspicion and vigilance. Now like almost everything in neuroscience, we find a spectrum of threat detection across the population.

Some people never see threats, possibly at their detriment, while other people have more fear and anxiety and see threats everywhere. I just want to note that Mother Nature always seems to do this. She generates a spectrum, and in some situations or in some eras, one end of the spectrum might do better than another. But it's not to say that there is a single best answer for all situations.

Along with threat detection, there's one more thing that brains try to do all the time, which is agency detection. Did this event happen because of the actions of agents behind it, like other people or groups of people, Like are my keys missing because I with them somewhere stupid or because someone else came in and took them? Not surprisingly, we find the same kind of spectrum here, such that at one end people think that everything just ends up the way it is by natural forces, not by any

planning by humans. At the other end, people have hyperactive agency detection, and they are more likely to believe that powerful forces are behind complex events. Now I've been talking about this so far, as though anywhere on that spectrum is equally useful, but in fact, at the extremes we find things like paranoid schizophrenia. People who suffer from this are much more likely to be predisposed to conspiracy thinking.

In paranoid schizophrenia, we generally find patterns of suspicious thinking and a heightened tendency to see threats and hidden motives. These detectors are all cranked way up, and the reason that we categorize this as a mental illness is because it tends to in ped the social progress of a person because they're out on a part of the spectrum which is unlikely to be correct very often. Again, I'm not saying that there's no possibility of conspiracies in the world.

It's just that if you connect the dots everywhere all the time, it's very unlikely within your lifetime that you are going to be right often if ever. Now, what has always fascinated me about people who suffer from paranoid schizophrenia as I've traveled around the world is an obsession that they have with shadowy organizations, but specifically whatever your local shadowy organization is. So, if you have schizophrenia in the United States, you obsess about the FBI or the NSA.

But if you're in Russia, you obsess about the Federal Security Service, the FSB or its predecessor of the KGB. In the United Kingdom, it's the MI six that you worry about. In China, it's the Ministry of State Security, known for its secretive operations. In North Korea, you're sure it's the Reconnaissance General Bureau that's behind whatever conspiracy theory you're working on. So the stories themselves are plug and play. You find the same stories translated everywhere. The thing that

changes is the local group that you are paranoid about. Okay, Now, with that foundation about why brains cook up more and more esoteric explanations for things, I now want to pose the question, what are the chances of any particular theory being true? I mean, we all have limited information, and there's a possibility that some things are done in a shady way. But I assert that with any proposed theory, the important thing is to look at it through the

lens of probability. And there are a couple of ways that I want us to think about this. First, let's consider the optimal number of people involved to keep a conspiracy going. My guess is that this number would have to be very small, like two or three, because that would give just enough power to do something maybe interesting, but it wouldn't involve so many people that you're guaranteed

that somebody is going to defect. Now, the fact is, any of these conspiracy theories that float around, like the moon landing was faked, or JFK was murdered by a larger organization, or nine to eleven was an inside job by the American government, all of these would require an enormous number of people to keep a secret. And the question is, how do you keep a really big secret in the face of someone involved getting drunk in a bar, or talking in his sleep or having a deathbed confession.

Now you can model this mathematically by his assuming that each day there's some very tiny probability of defection or of accidentally spilling the secret, and then you look at time ticking along, and if each day you have a tiny probability of the secret coming out, the chance that that secret survives drops with time. This is done mathematically with what's called a survival analysis. So, for example, say on a given night, you have a super small chance

of getting drunk and spilling the secret. Let's say it's a point zho one chance. Then after a year of having to keep this secret every day, there's a larger chance that you have spilled the secret, And after two years the chance is even bigger, and so on. But

now here's where I think it's really interesting. There's a branch of math called game theory, which studies the interaction between people and the strategies they use and the outcomes that happen, especially when the outcome for each person depends on the choices of everyone who's involved. In other words, what happens when people are making independent decisions, but those decisions are actually all related to one another, but the

outcome depends on all of the decisions. One of the most famous versions of this is a puzzle called the prisoner's dilemma. Now there can be many versions of this, but here's the basic idea. Two criminals get arrested, but instead of getting thrown in the same cell, they're separated

into different cells and interrogated independently. The police investigator says to each one, look, we don't have the evidence yet that you guys robbed the bank, but we can charge you right now on a lesser offense, and you're both gonna get one year in jail. But if you confess. Now, if you rat out your partner, he'll get ten years and you get to go home. And by the way, if they both rat each other out, they'll both do

seven years. So each prisoner can either stay silent and not admit that they were up to anything, and they'll both just spend a year in prison, or each prisoner can make the decision to defect to rat out his partner, because that way, as a defector, you can go free, while the prisoner who stayed silent would receive a long sentence. Now, the key is that if both prisoners remain silent, if they don't admit anything, then they can only be charged

on the lesser offense. They will both have a much shorter sentence, so that it turns out as the optimal solution for both of them mutual cooperation and a short sentence. But it never happens because individually it's actually better to defect to betray your partner, which leads to a worse outcome for both of them. The expected outcome essentially every time is that both don't want to take the chance that the other is going to rat them out, so

they take the option to betray. Now there's a parallel here with anything that requires a lot of people to cover it up. So let's say there were some conspiracy. For the guy who decides to break from the group, he frees himself from getting in trouble, and he's incentivized to do so before someone else in the group does it to him. He doesn't want to be the one who's been ratted out. He wants to do the ratting. And presumably if you're the first guy who comes clean,

you'd be world famous. If you're the guy who says, look, I was there, here's how we set up a studio and filmed a fake moon landing, and here's all my proof and documentation, or here's how he orchestrated this incredibly sly assassination of a president and kept it secret for decades.

But now I am coming clean, or my conscience has gotten to me, and two and a half decades after nine to eleven, I'm going to explain how this was done as an inside job, and I'm going to write an internationally best selling book on this and beyond every news and morning show and presumably make a ton of money because I'm the one who chose to blow the whistle for reasons of guilt or over some internal argument, or because I can win the prisoner's dilemma this way,

because I suspect that some other guy on the team is on the verge of spilling the means, whatever the reasons, game theory would suggest that the rational thing to do would be too defect before someone else does. And this is why I look skeptically at UFO conspiracies. It's not that I don't think the cosmos is enormous and there could be other life forms out there. In fact, I

think it's inevitable. But all the conspiracy theories about UFOs I find difficult to believe because it's very hard to get a large group of people to keep a secret. The incentives are just too high to defect. The defector could say, you know what I want protection, I want a seven figure deal with Penguin Random House to publish the best selling book of the decade. I want to be played by Tom Cruise in the movie of My

Life and so on. Okay, so maybe you'll say, well, you have a bunch of military discipline involved, a bunch of hard men who would never crack. But what about their law young haired rebellious kid or their gen z grandkid. They'd be thrilled to be on CNN revealing what they discovered in the attic, like a little piece of spaceship or a secret correspondence, and then everyone on their social

media would give them thumbs up. And at the heart of this discussion about getting a big group of individuals to keep a secret is a critical question what would be the point of keeping a secret? For example, what's the point of keeping a secret about aliens having landed in nineteen forty seven. The conspiracy theorist always insists that the government keeps it a secret because if it's revealed, the public will freak out and some sort of unspecified

chaos will rain. But that argument seems specious to me, given that every person is talking about aliens in Roswell. Anyway. It just so happens that my brother went to military school in Roswell, New Mexico, so I've been there plenty of times, and they sell t shirts there with UFOs on them, and hats and toys with UFOs and so on,

and outside Roswell and even outside New Mexico. Almost everyone in the nation who I run into recognizes the name Roswell precisely because they've heard about this supposed alien crash landing. But the conspiracy theory requires, for its upkeep that every single person who knows anything has to stay quiet because the nation would freak out if they knew. And yet that is all that almost anyone associates with the town of Roswell. It seems like a leak at this point

would be anti climactics. Someone would come out with the big reveal and everyone would say, yeah, tell me something I don't know. So I'm not making the claim that we are the only life form in the cosmos. Statistics would suggest there should be lots and lots of life pervading the galaxies. But I am suggesting that it's probably going to be easy to know when we actually get visited, because it won't depend on dozens or hundreds of people keeping a secret with no particular clarity on why the

secret is being kept. Or take the Moon landing, some small fraction of the population still says this was actually a hoax. Now, this one is easy to address because with some equipment you can actually prove to yourself that it's not a hoax. I was lucky enough to meet Neil Armstrong, and he would always say that he was just a lowly worker whose job was to put a mirror on the Moon. Now he was obviously much more than that, but it's true about him placing the mirror.

The mirror is there to bounce a laser light off of, so you can measure the distance to the Moon with millimeter precision by using the speed of light. This is called lunar laser ranging. And by the way, there are now six mirrors on the Moon, three placed by the USA, two by the Soviets, and one by India. So you can prove this to yourself by bouncing a laser off the Moon. But let's say you didn't know about the retroflectors and you thought there was a possibility that the

moon landing had been faked. Again, there are presumably an enormous number of people who would have to have been involved here, certainly more than two or three I would guess.

To pull off a moon landing hoax where the entire world is watching and you want to fool the whole population, you would need the participation from the entirety of NASA, from the production crew, from the newscasters, you certainly need the whole astronaut core to be on board, and probably the president and presumably hundreds of engineers who went home

to their families each night. And every one of these people was at risk of getting drunk or talking in their sleep, or having spasms of guilt or religious conversions or deathbed regrets or whatever. So the key whenever you are confronted with a conspiracy theory is to ask what are the probabilities. You shouldn't dismiss a new hypothesis on the grounds that anything outside your internal model simply can't

be true. Instead, you should consider the numbers, how many people would have to be involved, what incentive structure would keep them not talking, how much time has passed where they could have had a chance to slip up or make a purposeful confession. Okay, now, I just want to take a minute to address something that I often hear people lament about conspiracy theories, and that is the idea that the Internet is a key problem here. This is

what allows for the easy flooding of conspiracy theories. I think the Internet is not particularly powerful here. Why because Whenever someone asserts this to me, I say, okay, let's say you wanted to make a new conspiracy theory, say that Joe Biden actually has an alien baby. So what do you mean that the Internet gives you the technology to flood the world with your crazy idea? Really? Picture this. You post this statement on your x account, and you do a selfie video, and you post it to Insta

and TikTok. Now, the question is is the Internet meaningfully allowing you to flood society with your conspiracy theory or does nobody care that you've posted this? Do you get hundreds of reposts or do you get none? When people talk about how easy it is to flood a conspiracy theory, what they overlook is a subtle but critical point, what makes a really good conspiracy theory? Because it has to live in a very narrow range to get love online,

you can't flood the Internet with anything. Just like Darwinian evolution, only a very tiny number of ideas make it and have successful reproduction. So this leads us to the really important question what kind of conspiracy theories stick? And the answer is it has to make a really good story. As I said earlier, the story has to connect the dots in a way that it's interesting and surprising and has explanatory power and reduces cognitive load. A good conspiracy

theory is one that has an appealing narrative structure. Many times, when something happens, like the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, it's because of a mistake or incompetence or an oversight, and those don't make an interesting story. And this is what opens the opportunity for conspiracy theories to blossom, if they can put together a bigger and more exciting story. My guess would be in fact, that if some random chance event occurred,

you're always going to get a conspiracy theory blossoming. And if you re ran the exact history a thousand times, every time, the randomness of the event would not be believed, and instead alternative explanations would shoot up around it. Why, Because we want story, We want a clear explanation. Story gives meaning to events. And by the way, I think we can flip this description and look at it from

the brain's point of view. Sequences of events that have meaning, in other words, things that resonate in the internal model, as in this cause this, which caused this, this is what we call a story, as in, I have a narrative that explains this, and the narrative is easy to remember because each thought follows from the last, and there's a minimum that I have to memorize because the pieces fall into place. So what makes a good conspiracy theory, Well, it can't be too complex. It has to be a

digestible story, and it has to be plausible, even if unlikely. Plausible. It often involves a shadowy group or simply any out group, and it has to be surprising and compelling. So, coming back to the Great Fire of Rome in the year sixty four, who the heck knows how the fire started.

It might have been someone cooking a chicken and a spark flu or some candle in a house somewhere melted most of the way and then fell over, or there was an accidental spark from a blacksmith, or maybe someone doing a religious ritual, or a seven year old kicking embers around or whatever. They didn't have forensic tools for the investigation at that time, and even if they did, it's not clear that they would have found the answer. But the story that Emperor Nero would directly benefit from

having this land cleared. That's straightforward, and it's spicy and compelling and repeat worthy because of the simplicity and deviousness of the whole thing. Or a weather balloon randomly landing in Roswell is obviously not the kind of thing that people are going to get all excited about write books and start clubs over. But alien life covered up by

the government that is a very compelling plot. Or Oswald acting alone in JFK's assassination is one kind of narrative, but it's not nearly as compelling as a larger story where lots of secretive people decided that they wanted the president dead. So to work, a conspiracy theory needs to have a good narrative. Now, I've watched news events happen for years and conspiracy theories come out about them, and the thing that has struck me as so interesting is

how the whole thing unfolds. Like physics, as in, if X happens, then you're guaranteed some group will come out and say, wait, what if why happened? So, for example, Nero's rome gets incinerated, but someone realized says, hey, he could benefit from this because the land is now clear. Therefore he might have been the one to have caused this. With thousands or millions of brains thinking about the situation, it is absolutely inevitable that that version of things will

come down the pike next or after JFK's assassination. The FBI ran twenty five thousand interviews and that's how they concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But that's just fuel for the fire. We're guaranteed that another version of the story is inevitable. I really can't think of a single big event in history where one story came out and everyone said, Wow, what a world we're in, and

everyone shook hands on the narrative. So nowadays I'm putting together a model of this because my assertion is that what unfolds every time is inevitable. When X happens, there are many people in the world who could have had a vested interest in it. As one random example, when Hamas invaded Israel, someone I knew suggested, Hey, this seems like the kind of thing that Russia could have been behind, because Russia wants to get the attention off of themselves

for their attack on the Ukraine. And of course that's true that Russia would theoretically like to have a distraction, But does that mean that Russia was behind it? Well, I can't know. But just because an entity has an interest, does that tell you something meaningful? Maybe? Maybe not. So the model goes like this, an event happens. Then let's say there are ten entities in the world, like governments or people or organizations who could, in theory, have something

to gain from that. What will inevitably happen then is that all ten will become the targets of different conspiracy theories because they could in some way benefit, perhaps directly, perhaps very circuitously, but they could benefit from the event that just happened. So all ten of them will be the target of a round of YouTube videos and AM radio programs and so on saying hey, look, I think they were behind this event. And then there's the second level.

There's the people who could benefit from having someone else accused of benefiting. So in a cartoon example, we might say, well, Ukraine would benefit if people thought that Russia was behind the attack. So then it becomes a second level conspiracy because the idea is that they would benefit from igniting a conspiracy theory about Russia, and I suspect that good conspiracy theorists can do third level and fourth level theories, where they can point to anywhere on the map and

connect enough dots to make a story. The story might not be compelling to everyone, but if it involves the right out groups, it can get traction, at least among a particular in group. In other words, the cascade of conspiracy theories following any event seems to me totally predictable, because in any random situation, there will always be other parties that could be seen to benefit from it, other

countries or governments, or individuals or shadowy organizations. And because of the inherent complexity of the world, there will always be a large canvas upon which to draw connections between dots. And I just want to address one final point. Someone asked me recently if I thought that conspiracy theories were more common right now than they are at other times in history. I don't know, and I think it's hard to study that with high resolution, But two things seem

clear to me. The first is that we always retrospectively romanticize. We imagine that previous eras were more rational, whereas any close reading of history tells us that's absolutely not the case. The second is, like I mentioned before, there have been lots and lots of conspiracy theories all throughout history. I mentioned the plot against Socrates, or the death of Alexander

the Great, or the assassination of Julius Caesar. But I have to allow that only tells us that conspiracies exist across the centuries of millennia, but it can't tell us much about whether there's some slight up and down that happens on the scale of decades. So this is very speculative and maybe erroneous, But I've been wondering if conspiracy theories grew more popular around twenty twenty than they were

in the years just preceding that. Now, again this is just a speculation, but if it's true, I feel like I have an explanation for that, and that is covid. I'm making this conjecture because of something you've heard me say a million times that brains build internal models of the outside world to try to predict things as best they can. Fundamentally, the brain is a prediction machine, and that is why we have brains, and that is why we have been so successful as a species. But what

happens when our internal models suddenly are not predicting. Well. Example I've ever seen at a societal level was when COVID hit. It all seems clear enough in retrospect, as in, that's what happened, and the world did this and that, But if you can really put yourself back and let's say March of twenty twenty, what you might remember is

that the whole thing seemed not possible. We all heard there was some virus in China that people were worried about, and it started hitting our ears, some discussion about it, and then at some point you heard the term SARS COVID two virus for the first time, and eventually you hear COVID nineteen and you realize you've heard that word a couple of times now, and then it starts being part of more conversations, and pretty soon it's all anybody

is talking about. But the feeling that essentially everyone had was that this is somehow going to get taken care of, because that's why we have governments, and they have all kinds of special departments and units and people in white coats, and surely this is the kind of thing that somebody will take care of and it'll just blow over, just like everything else is blown over. After all, we haven't had a meaningful pandemic since the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic,

and now, for goodness sakes, it's twenty twenty. We're living in the future. There's not going to be anything to worry about here. And at some point in the middle of March twenty twenty, it became clear that we all needed to shut down our businesses and offices temporarily and work from home, something most of us had never done.

And I don't know if you remember the details, but it seemed like we were going to have to shut things down for a few days, and pretty soon we were all dismayed to realize this was going to last at least a couple of weeks, and suddenly the world became highly unpredictable. By your brain. It used to be that the biggest surprise you'd had was maybe your local store rearranged things so the toilet paper moved from Aisle

six to Aisle eight. But you never in your life saw a situation where they simply said, we don't have any toilet paper. The supply chain broke, and you probably never even thought about the supply chain before, and now you didn't know if the Starbucks down the road was going to be open, would your haircut place be open, would the bank be open? Suddenly all of your prediction abilities were afraid. Our internal models in March twenty twenty

suddenly revealed themselves to be woefully inadequate. So what happens when our internal models suddenly are not doing a good job. I hypothesize that they grasp for foundation, They grab for things that would seem to return them to a firm footing. So I watched this and myself and in all my colleagues. You would read an article that said this is all going to be over by next week, and you think, okay, cool, I got it. I believe the argument. I can repeat

this to my friends. And then ten minutes later you read an article that says two hundred thousand Americans are going to die and you think, wow, well that was well argued. I get it. I can repeat this to my friends. Now. It's not easy to remember now, but we were all going back and forth on completely different predictions about the world and everything happening around us. We had a breakdown of the internal model. And this, I suggest,

is when conspiracy theories really thrive. Why Because we're seeking harder than ever to find foundation, to place our understanding of the world on firm ground, and whackier and wackier theories can scratch the itch of reducing cognitive dissonance and giving good explanations for things. And the fact is, the main thing we learned from the pandemic is that the world is very complicated and fragile, and when it's suddenly tossed into a blender by a global pandemic, the results

can be unpredictable. But our brains aren't in that business. They're in the business of finding hypotheses that allow the mind to impose a narrative that makes sense. Okay, so let's wrap up. What we saw in this episode is that conspiracy theories have been with us for as long as we have recorded history, so it's not something brand new.

On the other hand, I did make the argument that there may be small periods of time, like during COVID, when the brain's internal model is having a harder time landing predictions and therefore is more susceptible to compelling stories. We also saw that brains love to solve puzzles, and this is something like a compulsion for brains which always

want to lighten cognitive load and reduce cognitive dissonance. But the fact is that events in the world tend to be quite complex, so there are many ways to solve the puzzle, some more straightforward and some more arcane. And the reason the arcane explanations are sometimes appealing to some people is because they give an opportunity to confirm biases about our outgroups. And I also emphasized the social aspect

of that is gained from having the conspiracy theory. Finally, I suggested that we can't always know what is true and not true because the world is complex, But the most sensible thing to do is to approach any particular suggestion with a scientific lens and ask yourself questions about it, like how many people would have to be involved, do they have realistic incentives that would allow them to spend the rest of their life in prison if they get caught,

And with the increasing passage of time, how likely is it that none of the people involved would defect in order to save themselves from punishment and make themselves famous as the whistleblower. Most conspiracy theories that float around are not particularly robust When viewed against the background of these questions, and very often it's because the conspiracy theories are not

built on a good model of human behavior. In a future episode, I'm going to dive into this issue of why conspiracy theories are generally unlikely because of the difficulty of keeping anything confidential. That upcoming episode is called why is it so hard for the brain to keep a secret?

I don't mean to imply that these considerations would rule out any conspiracy theory, but certainly many or most conspiracy theories are ruled out by a good understanding of our neural drives and the resultant insight into human social dynamics. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information

and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.