From the Vault: The Moses Illusion

welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be talking about an interesting observation in cognitive psychology that deals with language that starts off as kind of just a funny little quirk about the way we process certain kinds of sentences but ends up having some some broader and more interesting implications about knowledge and language and

thought both. The best way to start here would just be to illustrate the prime example of the effect we're going to be talking about. And to do that, I think we need to do a bit of Bible trivia. Rob, are you ready to go to Sunday School. Let's do it. Let's go to Sunday School. Okay, And if you I'm gonna ask you a few questions about the Bible. If you get one wrong, you are going to get a paddling. Whoa, what the domination? Is this one of the ones that

means business? All right? Okay, so how about let's see it so, um, in in the garden of Eden, what type of animal is it that tempts Eve to eat from the tree? Oh, that's a snake, that's right, the serpent it is? Uh. Okay. When after God created the world, on which day of the week did he rest? Oh? That was the seventh day. You got that one, right, Okay, next one, How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the arc? Oh? Too, of course. And there

you go. That is the prime example. Now, Rob, I know you were playing along because you already know the trick in here what I actually said when I asked that question. Hopefully you were playing along at home as as you're listening, or maybe you're not at home, wherever the heck you are. Um, you may have thought the same thing, right, Moses took two of each animal on

the arc. But in fact, in the Bible story which maybe not everybody knows, but maybe you do know this story of of the arc and in the Book of Genesis, and you do in fact know that it was not Moses who did that. It was Noah in the story who took animals on the arc. And yet you thought after I said the question that the answer is too

and didn't even register the fact that the name was wrong. Yeah, It's it's an interesting uh phenomenon to uh, to encounter, you know, others, but also in yourself because you m there's several different ways to look at and we'll get into a number of these here. But like even just now when you ask me those questions like the serpent one, I'm totally firm on that, like I of the I

know that aspect of the story inside and out. Uh. And of course I know it's the seventh day that he rested on the God rested on he she yet ohever you want to look at it. Uh, But there was still like this moment of hesitation because I was like, it's seven, right, it is seven. I don't want to

come come off with the wrong answer on the podcast. Um. But then when one encount and granted already knew the answer to the third one, but there is this temptation though too, like when you when you know why, when you know the answer to something like you just you can just jump in without hesitation, Like there's a certainty that just propels you. Um, you're excited to get your answer in and then you know, get the acclaim and

the praise for getting it right. Yeah, there's a certain kind of way in which a question, especially a question posed in quiz format, where you feel you are under performance pressure and you're being evaluated for whether or not you're going to get the right answer. It sort of takes away some amount of critical thinking that would normally go into reading a sentence and causes you to focus more exclusive lee on like just can I get the

right answer? And so it's not hard to see how now, and this of course might not be the only explanation for why this is happening, but it's not hard to see why you could pretty easily miss a major error in a question that is not you know, that is not necessarily something that you're fuzzy on to begin with, Like you could know perfectly well that it's Noah in

the story, and yet it just goes completely over your head. Yeah, and you know, we've we've been doing this podcast quite a while at this point, and occasionally this this comes up in our data, not so much in things that we've researched for the podcast, because I feel like if we've been crunching the facts or the numbers, you know, or the you know, we're we're more likely to be putting a lot of thought into the situation and we're

maybe just a you know, a little hesitant anyway. But the times where I've personally like said something that was absolutely incorrect, it would be something that I felt so sure about that I just belt it out without fact checking it at all. You know, Uh, something you generally it's something not directly related to the episode, but something that just kind of comes up in organic conversation. That's

exactly right. Yeah, it's when you feel so confident that you're not even being careful, you know that that you can really make some big blunders. Uh. There were some other questions I was reading about in one of the I think the earliest study on this phenomenon we're talking about today. Some of the other questions were in the biblical story, what is Joshua swallowed by? Of course, that's Jonah that is swallowed by the whale or the great fish,

the sea monster. Joshua of course is the the conquering leader of the Israelites as they go about Kanaan. Another one I really liked was in the novel Moby Dick. What color was the whale that Captain Nemo was after? I think I think I might have fallen for that one. Yeah, I mean, I wonder how much of the ego is involved here, because it's like, you're kind of like, all right, let's get to the part of this where I get to talk and get to be the one is correct,

like like fast followers through all this other stuff. I don't care. I have an answer and it is the correct one. Yeah. Um, that's that's quite perceptive, and I think that's right. Um. But anyway, so this question that we're looking at today, that this effect of not noticing that the question says Moses and just barreling right on through to the answer, even if you know that it's actually Noah in the story and not Moses. This effect has a name, and it's known as the Moses illusion.

It's a particular type of semantic illusion that occurs when we are trying to process certain kinds of sentences, and this was first explored in a classic study in psychology. It was a study called from Words to Meaning a Semantic Illusion, published in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior in nineteen eighty one by Thomas D. Ericsson

and Mark E. Mattson. And I think it's interesting that this original observation about this, this question about Moses, it comes out of a mysterious question about how we process the meaning of sentences. Uh. The authors of this study ask, quote, how are the meanings of individual words combined to form a more global description of meaning? And if you start to think hard about this question about the human capacity

for language, I would argue it is absolutely astonishing. It's almost baffling the way that we're not only able to associate symbolic meaning with certain sounds coming out of our mouths or glyphs on a page, but you're able to combine those things endlessly to form and comprehend infinite variations of combinations of those sounds, to create sentences that actually means something and other people can understand what you mean

when you say them. Like, I think this type of capacity for language is one of the features of the natural world that to me seems closest to magic. Yeah. Absolutely, And I feel like that the mostest illusion is one of those things that that reveals the magic that makes you more aware of the magic trick that is inherent to your just everyday perception of reality and how you engage with facts and information and the fact that you're

just like it. It's crazy that we're just constantly throwing together sentences, almost effortlessly, that are combining all these words together. Each word has a huge range of of possible meanings and associations, and and that we are able to do this with such fluency, I mean, sometimes with more fluency than other times. But uh, but yeah, it is truly

astounding to me. And so the authors here are sort of talking about this process and some of the question marks that existed at the time in science about how we form sentences and how we comprehend sentences. So they start in their introduction by talking about how quote a central process in language comprehension is the construction of a global description of the sentence meaning from the meanings of

individual words which make up the sentence. Right, So you know what individual words mean, but somehow, like we're just talking about, you can combine them into these overall gist forms of what somebody is getting at. You know, like, like, what kind of answer is being quested by a question that might be made up of ten different words that are all you know, throwing your brain in ten different directions.

Yet you can get the gist of the question and figure out what is getting at pretty quickly actually, And they talk about how there's been a lot of work on how language processing works in the realm of artificial intelligence, but at the time of this paper, there was still a lot that we didn't know about the global meaning of of a sentence and and how that's constructed in

the brain. And so they summarize the way they're starting this paper by saying, uh, it has become widely assumed that sentences are subject to exhaustive analysis and consistency checks during processing, but this is not the case. People do not always understand what is said to them. Sometimes they

fail to understand, sometimes they misunderstand. And while these failures of comprehension are sometimes due to lack of appropriate knowledge or error on the part of the speaker, there are other cases in which such failures occur when the understander possesses all the knowledge necessary for correct understanding. This paper explores such a phenomenon and then they give the example of the Moses illusion that we already talked about. The question that they pose is how many animals of each

kind did Moses take on the arc? And so what the authors here found in their original study and eighty one was that the majority of people failed to notice a problem with the question and simply answer to despite later displaying knowledge that it was in fact Noah and the story and not Moses. And so that it's not that they just don't know that much about the Bible, like they can answer the question correctly when it's posed, like, hey, was it Noah or Moses who took animals onto the ark?

They can answer that correctly and yet still fail to notice a problem in the question. And studies find that people do this even when they're not rushed. They still make the mistake when they are given unlimited time to

think about it. Another interesting thing here they found was that the the effect is not caused by people misreading or miss hearing the question, because people still make the Moses illusion mistake even if they themselves read the question out loud, including the name Moses, so they are saying Moses out of their own lips, and they still might

not notice it now. In this first study, the authors conclude that what's very important, because they're getting at things about the semantics of words and a sentence and how the meanings of sentences are formed. They conclude that shared semantic features of the mix up are probably significantly contributing

to the effect. In other words, this effect would probably not be nearly as pronounced, maybe not even maybe totally non existent if the items were not in some way closely related in the way that's a two Bible characters are. If you ask, you know, how many of each kind did Captain Hook take into the arc, the effect probably vanishes. Another study, I was looking at side at an example I found really funny, which was how many animals of

each kind did Nixon take on the arc? And yeah, and and I like that because they were saying, Okay, well, what if it's just like phonological similarities, like Nixon and Noah have some similarities. They start with the same sound, they've got the same number of syllables. But clearly when you put Nixon in the sentence, people notice. And so the Moses illusion is just one persistent example from a class of mental phenomena that could be called knowledge neglect.

This is a term used by a couple of authors that will cite later in the episode. But knowledge neglect and simplified terms, is when you behave as if you don't know something even though you definitely do know it. And the Moses illusion is of course an example of knowledge neglect, because the problem isn't that people think Moses was the biblical character who built the arc. You can know that it was Noah, not Moses. If you're asked directly, you'll get the answer right, but you don't notice the

problem when it's phrased in a question like this. And of course it's not just Moses and Noah. There are plenty of other sentences in studies that have shown the same thing. Though it is interesting that Moses and Noah are like sort of the perfect example of it. I think there might be particular characteristics of these two names and characters that make it like that make people especially prone to the mix up in this case, though it is true for lots of other types of you know,

words and objects. Well, speaking of that, let's do a quick breakdown and just especially for folks who are not that up on Moses and Noah. Uh, just to give a little you know, basic information about each of them, and give me, give me the magic the gathering card on each one. Okay, well let's start. Let's start with with Noah. Okay, certainly the the older of the two, the first that in the chronological order. So Noah was h is written as as a was an antediluvian patriarch

in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. The basic story, God grows sick of humanity, so he tells Noah to round up his family and two of every animal and get them on a big old boat the arc, uh, the first of two arcs we're going to discuss here, so they alone can survive the noble flood that's about to happen. Yeah. Now, one interesting variation. I think most people probably wouldn't even

their brains wouldn't go this far into the question. Uh. It is actually more complicated than two of every kind, because it also says in the Noah's ark story that I think they're supposed to bring more of every kind of like certain types of animals, like certain clean animals and just two of the unclean animals or something. But but yeah, when you get it gets a little more

complicated right, I mean it's all kinds of animal management. Yeah, which I would love to see somebody fail the test of of the the Noah illusion the Moses illusion here by by going into a lot of detail about the you know, the the actual biblical text while still failing. I think that right. Well, it was fourteen of every kind of clean animal alright. Well, anyway, Noah strengths megaproject management and animal handling. Obviously weakness, alcoholism, that's a major

part of the store, right. Um. Actors of note who have betrayed him. Uh, this is not a complete list, but these are the main main ones. John Houston, Russell Crowe, David Thrillful. This is a guy on Shameless. He also played Dr John d and Elizabeth the Golden Age. John Voight, David Rentall. Uh, David Rentall is the guy who played Aries Targarian on the Game of Thrones show. Oh interesting,

wait a Aries to the Mad King. I believe. So that's the main areas, right, Okay, yeah, well maybe I guess for some reason I thought there was another one. I am wrong. Um, okay, So the I've got a really funny story about John Voight playing Noah. I remember seeing this one, oh, I have. It was made for TV. I think came out when I was in like middle school, and it is not at all faithful to the Bible, and to say, very hollywooded up version of the Noah's

Arks story. John Voight does play Noah and the arc is attacked by pirates. What. Yeah, it's attacked by like water World pirates. I mean, it might as well be Dennis Hopper and the Smokers, but it's actually I think they get attacked by pirates led by the biblical character Lot. Okay, alright, well, if that is in the Bible, at least they're they're

playing around with it. Was this brought up at all when um Uh, when Darren Aronofsky was being criticized for the plot of his Noah movie, which has like um Uh giants and Nephelim in it. Oh, I kind of liked his Noah movie. It was way more more faithful to I think it included stuff from non canonical ancient texts, but was actually inspired by ancient texts. Okay, alright, I still haven't seen it. It's it's been on the list for a while. All Right, let's talk about Moses real quick. Okay,

So Moses comes later. He's an Old Testament prophet um central figure in the narrative of the Exodus. In the account, he helps the Jewish people in their liberation from Egypt Egyptian captivity and following Tim the tin Plegs of Egypt. He assists him in the Exodus, and he also is involved with an arc. But it's the Ark of the Covenant, which we've discussed on the show before. Not a boat,

but a golden vessel that contains sacred items. Yeah. I would assume that the words are related because they're both like a container of kinds, like a big box. Okay, So Moses his strength community organizing of course, and sorcery his weaknesses. This is this is kind of interesting, I guess, because it's either not obeying God and everything or obeying God and everything, depending on who you ask, right, uh, I mean, if you ask God, he would say, well,

he didn't obey me and everything. That's why I didn't get to go into the Promised Land. But especially modern critics are like, it seems like he he may be followed the letter of the law a little bit too. Um uh too. Seriously, I seem to recall at one point him commanding the death penalty for a dude who was working on the Sabbath. That seems a little harsh. Yeah,

it seems seems a little harsh. Um. Okay, So actors of note who have betrayed Moses, well, Charlton has obviously, Burt Lancaster, mel Brooks, Ben Kingsley, Val Kilmer, though that

that may have just been a voice role. And Christian Bale. Now, the last one is interesting because as I was looking at these actors was one of the interesting things is even though they're basically interchangeable, like the same, Um, you know, in most of these cases, you're dealing with the same white dude that could play either of these characters in

a big Hollywood production. Um. But it's interesting that I don't think anyone has actually played both Moses and Noah, though Christian Bale reportedly came very close because Darren Aronofsky originally wanted Christian Bale to play the title role in his Noah film, but scheduling conflicts prohibited that from happening. Oh he couldn't because he was filming like terminator Mick g or whatever. Yeah. I don't know, but um, but imagine if if Bale had played both Noah and Moses.

What would that have meant for the Moses illusion? Would it have made the would would it just destroy are semantic understanding of reality? Maybe there's a secret counsel. There's like no Hollywood, no actor can play both of these roles because it will totally tear our understanding of of of facts and fiction apart. I could see that. I mean, so, I think what some of the authors here are proposing is that the the fact that it's not just that Moses and Noah are words that kind of sound similar.

They've got some similar consonants and uh in the same number of syllables, similar vowel sounds. That's all true, and that does seem to matter, But it's also very important that they are semantically related, that they are both characters from the Torah, from the Old Testament, and that sort

of links them together. And I think the more you could do to link them even further together and associate them in in our minds, like yes, having one actor play both, I think that would actually probably make people even more susceptible. Yeah, um, I was thinking about this too, Like obviously we've already touched on a few extra examples

of this. But I was trying to come up with with other examples that would play on the same energy here, and one that came to mind would be, uh, if we were to look to Chinese mythology, if we were to say, hey, how did the Yellow Emperor decide how to order the animals of the zodiac? And you might respond with, oh, well, there's this cool little story about a race for the animals, etcetera. Um, but it wasn't the Yellow Emperor. It was the Jade Emperor, who's an

even more primordial god ruler than the Yellow Emperor. Um. So I don't know that seems like it could be could play in the similar could work in a similar way to the Moses and Noah illusion. Or how about this in Return of the Jedi, what was Django fet swallowed by? Oh? I just see. For some reason, I feel like that one doesn't work because then learn as you as soon as you say the word django, like people's alarms go off and like, wait a minute, what

are we talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well I don't maybe it would. Okay, here's one for Avatar, the last Airbender fans out there, Um, we're hearing from several of them. Which nation was the avatar Apa born into. I don't know if that one or not. But of course ang is the last and not the last avatar, and is the avatar uh Appa is the sky by sin that he rides on. Ah. I see, so I don't know ang Appa. Maybe that works not sure? Well

that went over my head anyway. So you might think, well, now that we have told you there is such a thing as the Moses illusion, uh you know you would never fall for it, right because you know you will now always having this knowledge in your mind. Notice when there will be substitutions of this kind in a question or a sentence. But it turns out that's not necessarily true.

Uh So there was this original research from nineteen eighty one, but there have been a bunch of studies in the decades since then replicating the original finding and further probing the effect to figure out what's going on in our brains. Uh So, I wanted to talk about some typical findings. First of all, some things that were summarized in h in a few literature reviews I was looking at. One was in a book chapter by Elizabeth J. Marsh and

SHARDA Umanath. It was a book called Processing Inaccurate Information published by M. I. T. Press. In that book sounds like a scream, but their chapter is called knowledge neglect failures to notice contradictions with stored knowledge and will revisit this chapter a few times later in the episode. But

they summarize some things about the Moses illusion. Uh so they say that most of the time people will fall for the Moses solution even though they actually know the difference between Moses and Noah, as demonstrated with later interrogation. So you can ask people questions like who built the arc or who took the animals into the arc, and they'll get the answer right, but they still fail to

notice that it's Moses in the question. And this can be accomplished with other similar Switcherus actually included rob a list for you to look at of questions like this one. I like, is um, what did Goldilocks eat at the Three Little Pigs house? And a lot of people will is to answer porridge, even though you can later ask them like, hey, whose house did Goldilocks go into? The three bears or the three Little pigs? And they of

course know that it was the bears. Now that One's interesting because for me anyway, there's a there's an associated mental image of the bears or the pigs. Uh. They they look rather different, uh, and and ultimately they have different functions in the stories, whereas Moses and Noah are more interchangeable. And it is the same sort of character and there of course the same species, because the pigs are there to be the victims of the big bad wolf story and to get beaten, and the bears are

there too. I don't know what, just hang out in their house, I guess right, But I can still imagine someone uh falling for this or or you know, having airing in answering this question, because in a way, again, you're you're racing into the finish line. You're picking up on the you know, the basics of the question, even though you're you're you're skipping over this. This this this

misinformation that's embedded in the middle of it. Right. Though, it's interesting that you mentioned racing to get to the answer.

I do think you're basically right about that, except it doesn't really seem that time is a factor here, because giving people extra or even unlimited time to think about the question does not eliminate the effect does it, So it doesn't seem to result from people being in a hurry in terms of time, though I think you could still think about it as people being in a hurry in terms of just like wanting to get to the

part where they answer the question. I don't know, maybe that could be like self imposed time limits, even if they're not imposed by somebody externally trying to rush you through. Now, Also, in a typical setup for these Moses illusion experiments, readers will be warned that some questions will contain incorrect presuppositions, so it's not just like a trick question where they

don't know this is coming. They'll be told, Okay, some of these questions will be valid questions, in which case you should just answer them, but other questions will have incorrect presuppositions, and when you come across one of those, you should note that the question is not valid. Now, the interesting thing is, I would think something like that would almost completely erase the effect, because you're putting people on guard to be like interrogating the questions. But it doesn't.

You can put people on guard like that and they still fall for the Moses solution. In these experiments, it does seem to be a very robust effect, like a substantial number of people will fail to detect errors in questions, even though they later showed that they possessed the knowledge to answer them correctly. Uh. The exact percentages of the effect, though very a good bit UH from that chapter by

Martian Umanov the they right quote. Overall, the Moses solution is robust, with readers answering from fourteen percent to forty percent to fifty two percent to seventy seven percent of distorted questions depending on the particular experiments. So they're citing a number of different results there. The fourteen percent was by van Jarsveld Dikstra, and Herman's was Hannon and Donovan and too, and one was Ericson and Mattson in one

and was Barton and Sandford inte. And I would imagine these differences have a lot to do with like what what exactly types of warnings you're giving people ahead of time, what exactly what exact examples are used? As we've said, you know, it's it's clear that different questions are more prone than others. Like I think more people would probably fall for the Moses Noah confusion than for the Three

Little Pigs, Three bears confusion. Yeah, I have to say some of the the examples that you included on a list here, it's it's interesting to run through this because even though I'm not encountering them as actual questions like one and someone in one of these studies would be I can certainly pick up on the ones that I feel like would have been more likely to fool me, like, for instance, what kind of treated Lincoln chop down? What

kind of treated Washington chop down? Um? Like I can imagine myself sort of this being a story I'm not tremendously in the it in, but have a version off stored away I can instantly skip, or even not instantly, but even with some thought would be like I think, yeah, cherry Tree, cherry Tree, that's the one, you know, even if said Lincoln. Yeah, even if it's said Lincoln, because

also I don't know Lincoln. Something about like their stories about him, you know, we also have sort of tall tales about him and his exploits, and um, the one about him, Uh, there's one about him answering a duel. Somebody challenged him to a duel and he says, well, I get to choose the place and the weapon. So I choose, uh, what's sledgehammers and five feet of water or something? DAVI that he's tall and the other person

was short, something like that. I have no idea if that's an even a legitimate story, but I have it in my head. So I have an image of Lincoln holding some sort of long handled tool, so it fits in nicely into the story, like I can easily overlay one over the other. Yeah. One of the examples that I feel extremely confident that I would not fall for is the one of what is the name of the Mexican dip made with mashed artichokes? I definitely, I mean, I just know artichokes. No, that is not what it is.

You don't mash artichokes, do you. I mean, I haven't seen it. Could could make an artichoke paste, but artichoke guacamole. That sounds gross, I mean, but yet artichoke depp is amazing, but artichoke guacamole just says it sound right? But anyway, So Marcia and Umanov also note that um that that error detection is lower when items uh that items are swapped are similar in a couple of ways. We've already mentioned these, but they reiterate that it helps when there's

phonological similarity. So do the words sound close to each other? I feel like, uh, Avocados and artichokes, like they have some similar vowel sounds, and they start with the same letter, but they sound different enough to me that I'm immediately strong. I think somehow like the hard k sound coming towards the end of the word art a choke, but coming towards the beginning of or, I guess in the middle of avocado. Somehow, that makes a big difference in my brain.

And then, of course, as we've been saying, semantic similarity, are the concept somehow similar or related? Would we put them in a kind of meaning next us together in the brain? Uh? And and of course it's notable that the Moses versus Noah one meets both of the criteria. They sound similar and they're related. So anyway, it's just this interesting fact about our brains that something about being

asked a question like this. So trying to process a sentence like the questions in these studies causes us to ignore the fact that the contents of the sentence conflict with things that we know to be true, and I wanted to mention one other study I was looking at that. This one is by Hadency Bottoms, Andrea and Slick and Elizabeth J. Marsh from published in the journal Memory called Memory and the Moses illusion failures to detect contradictions with

stored knowledge yield negative memorial consequences. Now we can revisit some of the things in this more as we go on, but I just wanted to note a few things that they bring up. Uh So, first of all, they note some other previous findings in their introduction. One is that um error detection improves, so people are less likely to fall for the Moses illusion when the error appears in what they call the cleft phrase or the main focus

of the sentence. So there are ways that you can basically ask the same question but just sort of rearrange the words to make people more likely to notice the problem. So, if you take the sentence how many animals of each kind did Moses take on the arc? The word Moses is kind of syntactically de emphasized in that sentence, you know, it's not like the main focus of the way the sentence is phrased. You can re orient the words to make moses more prominent in the sentence, in which case

people are more likely to catch the problem. Yeah, Like I also feel like having the word show up so late in the sentence. I'm I'm, I'm. Like, you're always predicting where sentences are going, you know, yes, so you've kind of already filled it in to a certain extent, like you know, you know who we're talking about. Uh, even if you end up using the wrong name. Um, yeah,

I think you're exactly right about that. Like that, once you've heard I don't know, you get like four or five words into the sentence, you you sort of are like you already know what it's going to be, and you're just sort of like okay, you like mostly ignoring the words that come after that. Another thing that they point out that's interesting is that error detection improves when questions appear in a difficult to read font And they say this is because it reduces processing fluency, which in

turn makes material seem less familiar and less true. And this was found by Song and Schwartz in two thousand and eight. And this, of course, this comes back to our old friend. Processing fluency, a cognitive factor that I believe is one of the most underappreciated influences on our thoughts and beliefs and behavior. We talked about it in

our episode on the illusory truth effect. Basically, processing fluency means how easy is it for this stimulus to be processed by the brain and uh, and it came up in the illusory truth Effect episode because I remember. The illusory truth effect is where statements you've encountered before seem

more true than statements that are new to you. And one possible explanation for this is that familiar statements are easier for the brain to process than unfamiliar ones are, and at some level, the brain makes an equivalence between that processing fluency, how easy it is to process this incoming sentence because it's familiar and factual trustworthiness. They actually have nothing to do with one another, but the brain

maybe uses a little bit of shortcut there. So are you saying that in the future for our our shared notes, Joe, we should use chill or font instead of whatever we're

using now. Yeah, that would that make it less like I mean, I think that would generally slow us down and make it harder to do the podcast, But it also might make it less likely that we would just like flub words here and there, because it would be a like really effortful, laborious process to get through every single thought, which you know sometimes it is anyway, but

that that's on us, um. But anyway, So Song and Shorts here in two thousand and eight found that simply by making statements harder to read so you put them in, you said, Chiller, I was thinking, Papyrus. I don't know what what actual thought they used, but it would just make people more likely to spot errors in the questions instead of just rolling right over them without noticing. And you know that makes sense to me, Yeah, yeah, it does.

It is interesting that that's how our brains work, though, Yeah, it is sort of counterintuitive at the same time, like you might just assume that if something's harder to read, you would be less likely to catch errors in it. But yeah, I think there's some kind of process where it's like slowing you down. It's not allowing you to just like skip over the parts that it seemed like yeah, yeah, okay,

Moses whatever. It's like like a bit of food that's extra chewy, so you're going to really taste this, You're really going to get a feel for the texture. There's no just wolf in this down. Yeah. Now, In the study by Bottoms at All, they were looking at the question of whether participants can detect errors in questions better if there are just more errors overall in the sample

of questions. So, if I give you a bunch of questions and like, I don't know, seventy of them contain errors of this kind in them, are people more likely to catch them? And it looks like the answer is yes. Like, if you if you've got people on guard because they were just constantly problems with these questions, their guard goes up and they do seem to make the Moses illusion

mistake less often. And it strikes me that that could be possibly, or at least partially because once you start, you know, showing people questions where most of them contain a problem, or even just a large minority of them contain a problem, people probably start uh interacting with the question less as questions and becoming less focused on just getting the answer and start looking at them more like a puzzle where you're you're trying to parse the sentence

very clearly. Yeah, Yeah, It's like, how is this trying to trick me. Yeah, but then there's one kind of scary implication from this paper the author's right quote. More generally, the failure to detect errors had negative memorial consequences, increasing the likelihood that errors were used to answer later general knowledge questions. Methodological implications of this finding are discussed, as it suggests that typical analyzes likely underestimate the size of

the Moses illusion. Overall, answering distorted questions can yield errors in the knowledge base. More importantly, prior knowledge does not protect against these negative memorial consequences. And Robert, I think you had a note about that. We can talk a little bit more about that in a bit, but yeah, basically, there there is some evidence that just steamrolling over an incorrect fact in a sentence, even when you know otherwise,

can can later damage your ability to recall that fact correctly. Yeah, yeah, so it Yeah, as as well discuss here. It's it's not just a situation where oh, well this is a quirk. This is interesting. The brain does this. I mean, it is that, but it it has it has greater implications. Yeah. Now I want to go back on the other side and say that when we encounter things like this, you know, illusions that humans often fall for. When you read about a certain type of I don't know, cognitive bias or

or something. I think our tendency is often to at first react like, wow, our dumb brains were so stupid. But but I think there's another way to think about it, and that's this. How amazing is it that we have such a powerful command of language based reasoning that we can answer questions even though key elements of the sentence do not match with our knowledge base. I mean, think about the trouble that a computer would run into trying

to do the same thing. Like, While it's an interesting case of an illusion failing to notice facts that conflict with our existing knowledge, it's also a demonstration of an absolutely amazing capacity for language comprehension, even when there are severe errors in the questions or sentences that we're trying to comprehend, Like somehow our brains are so good at getting what seems to be the gist the intended global meaning of a sentence, even when pivotal items in that

sentence are wrong and should be pointing you off in the wrong direction and make you totally confused. Yeah, yeah, um, you know, I can't help but be reminded in all this about the drawing of the bicycle that we've touched on before about often, I mean it's different. We're not dealing with language, We're dealing with a uh like a mental image. Like we all think we have the mental image of a bicycle pretty firm in our heads, and yet when put to the test, when acts asked to

draw a bicycle, um, we're often floored. You know. Yeah, that was a different one of our cognitive Allusions episodes. That was the the illusion of explanatory depth. Yeah, the issue where people they tend to think like that they understand how something works until they're asked to explain it. So somehow the brain has a way of representing a sort of pat Tempken comprehension, you know that it puts up this facade of yeah, you know how that works. I I I know how I know the parts of

a bicycle. I know all the parts of a can opener. I could make one basically. But then if you are asked to like explain the steps of how it works or draw all the parts, you're like, uh, yeah, I thought about this a lot watching the Outlander TV show about the time traveler goes back in time and she's recreating various things that she knows about from the future, and like, God, like, how many of us, you know, we go if we were to do that, if we were to go back in time, we might tell somebody

about all these marvelous things like oh yeah, penicillin and uh you know, by sickles and whatnot, and it'd be like, oh great, how did it work? And it'd be like, uh yeah, no, no idea, I have some some vague so I have some of the facts that I had, but not near enough to reproduce anything that I'm talking about. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Coming back to this thing about how the Moses ilusion is, it is and could be looked at as an example of how amazingly

adaptive at comprehension our brains are. Actually found a book chapter discussing this very aspect of the effect. So the authors here were hik Young Park and Lynn M. Rader. Uh And this was a chapter in a book, and the chapter was called the Moses Illusion. I think it was published in two thousand four. And so they're talking

about different potential explanations for the Moses illusion. What's going on in the brain, and they conclude that they, or at least they argue that the most likely explanation for what's going on when we fall for this is something they call the partial match HYPOTHESI us so I just want to read from their conclusion that's along the lines

of what we've just been talking about. Quote. Research on the Moses illusion demonstrates that people have difficulty in detecting distortions or inaccuracies when a distorted element is semantically related to the theme of the sentence. Why should our cognitive system be so tolerant of distortions and find it so difficult to do careful matches to memory. It might seem that partial matching is a less than ideal way to

process information. However, the partial match process is not only common and normal, but also a necessary mechanism of our cognitive system. This partial match process enables useful communication and comprehension. Very few things that we see or here will perfectly match the representation that we already have stored in memory. In order to answer questions, we need to be able

to use an acceptable match. In order to understand a new situation and map it onto something we have already seen or done, we must apt slight variations every day. At many levels, we accept slight distortions without even noticing the process. Occasionally we notice a distortion and choose to ignore it, but more frequently we do not even realize that distortions have occurred. A rigid comprehension system would have

a difficult time. Indeed, many of our cognitive operations are driven by familiarity based heuristics rather than careful matching operations. The Moses illusion is an example of how the adaptive human cognitive system works. Everyday, cognitive processing must be based on simple heuristics, such as matching sets of features, rather than exact matches, as very few tasks require exact matches. Sentences do not match stored information. Faces change, voices may

change slightly, even our pets and friends change over time. Therefore, it makes sense that people do use partial matches in the normal course of matching to memory. Rcial matching is immutable because it is the most efficient way for memory to operate given the nature of the environment in which we live. And so, yeah, this really makes me think along the lines of what we were just saying a few minutes ago. Like the Moses illusion is kind of funny when you notice yourself doing it, but it's also

it's also kind of a superpower. Yeah, Like, imagine if you went to a video store, which we still have one in Atlanta. Imagine you went there and you were to say, um, yeah, I'm looking for a particular movie. Um it started Anthony Hopkins and it had a puppet in it. And instead of being able to piece that together and tell you which movie you're talking about, what if they were to say, Okay, keep listening, I need you to list the entire cast. I need all of

the details. We have to make acent match here. Or Yeah, imagine somebody comes into the video store and they say, I'm looking for The Godfather too, and they say, sorry, we don't have that. What they actually have is The Godfather Cole and Part two. Oh man, that that's not completely unbelievable and not with our video store, but just sort of like the cliche video store. You mean the

god Father part to Philistine. I mean, that's a kind of silly example, but I think the authors of this chapter are exactly right that every basically, every single moment of our lives, we are testing reality against our memories, and we have to do so in a fast and loose way, and our ability to do so in a fast and loose way without relying on every detail to be an exact correct match is is what allows us to live adaptively, to sort of like be thinking creatures

looking for exact matches between the current case you're observing and what's stored in your memory. Like I made the comparison to a computer earlier. Today, I guess we're more familiar with more adaptive types of computer functions that are based on like AI or like huge amounts of machine

learning or something like that. It makes me think about like the early old days of dealing with the you know, computer programming, where like if you slightly misspelled, like you know, um, you're you're playing Zork or something and you type like wolke north the w o l K, it's not is to be like that is not a valid action. Like yeah, it's amazing nowadays, how just like how much thumb fumbling I can put into typing something in search and it

still knows what I'm talking about. I still um able to floor it every now and then because I'll get really reckless and u and it'll just have no clue. But but more often than not, it'll it'll guess what I'm going for. But that is amazing because that is the the the input receiver whatever, you know. This piece of technology it's called AI because it's becoming more like our brains. It's becoming usefully sloppy and and loose in

the way our brains are. Now. I guess we could talk about a couple of other possible examples of knowledge neglect or implications of knowledge neglect. One that I came across that I thought was pretty funny is something that seems fairly narrow, but it's known as the yolk phenomenon. Uh, So it goes like this apparently was originally described in an article in the Psychological Review by Gregory Kimball and

Lawrence Pearl Mutter. Uh this was in the year ninety if I didn't already say that, But it consists of asking somebody a list of questions and and it's designed to produce a certain answer. So you say, what do we call the tree that grows from acorns? And you say an oak? And then you say, what do you call a funny story joke? What's the sound made by a frog croak? What's another word? For a cape cloak.

What do we call the white of an egg? And most people say yolk um, which is obviously wrong, And people are not confused about the white of an egg

being called the yolk. But it seems like instead the implication is that there's a certain kind of pattern seeking that overtakes semantic processing here, like the brain starts to conclude while you're answering these questions because of the established pattern that rhyming is more important than the actual meaning of the word that rhymes and you know it rhymes march exactly. It's the rhymes reason effects sort of. I mean, uh, which I think we talked with that in our episode

on anti metaboli. But I was wondering, I wonder how many items in a list like this it takes before the majority of respondents will give the yolk type answer, will ignore the known meaning of a word and just supply the nonsensical rhyming match. I don't know. I feel like I'm very susceptible to this one, because I I recently was trying to do a recipe and it got kind of confusing, and I had a moment where I had to ask myself, wait, which part is the yolk

and which is white. Um, it was only a momentary lapse, but there were a lot of things going on. There was a lot. I was like having to take them apart, you know, as one of those we have to have the egg white and one bowl and the yolks and the other. And it was I was making a su flight That's what it was, and an applicated dish. Yeah, and I did had I had not had coffee yet either, so I had that going for me. Um. It was successful.

But yeah, there was that moment where I'm like, okay, I have to have so many egg whites and then a different number of yolks and which ones which? Now? Uh so I would totally fall for this. I mean, did you succeed? Did it rise? Yeah? I had Rise. It was good. Yeah. I don't think I want to put it in regular weekly rotation, but it was. It was good for a special treat. I feel like the soufle a that is just one of the most notorious, tricky, tricky dishes for people who aren't I guess like working

in you know, kitchens or bakeries every day. Yeah, it was still it was tricky. It was tricky for me even though I went with a very what seemed like a very simple recipe that that didn't steer me too wrong, but still I got lost a little bit for a moment. Well, I'm impressed, So I was. I was reading through this book chapter as well, um on Knowledge Neglect by marsh and Humana, and uh, yeah, this was this was very interesting. Um so yeah. They point to a couple of other misconceptions.

I don't think we've mentioned these on on the episode thus far, but one of them was Toronto is the capital of Canada, and a blow to the head cure's amnesia, which I guess is like a TV you know, cartoon kind of a thing. But these are all like examples of misconceptions that you might have in your head that

are are not true. They point out that you know it tries, we might misconceptions are impossible to ignore, and uh, your best hope if you can't avoid hearing misconceptions altogether, which again is probably impossible, uh, is to have them immediately corrected. But that would be difficult, Like you'd have to have like a standing conversation with somebody who would not fall for your miscommunication, you know, or you'd have to just be constantly, uh like with with paranoia, just

fact checking everything you come across. Otherwise some of them are going to get past your your guard and they're not going to be instantly corrected. And then they're just kinda they're just kind of in there. Like even if you hear otherwise later, you might still fall back to the earlier misconception. Yeah, or it's just or it's something that doesn't come up in daily life, you know, so you just there's never been an opportunity for it to

be corrected. I'm reminded of that episode of This American Life where they started off by talking about this, uh, this this particular individual who had just grown up thinking that unicorns existed, like it had never been corrected for, and so she just had that misconception in her head until finally she's at a party in there and there's a conversation, like just a random chatter about, hey, what are your favorite animals or something, and she she mentions

the unicorn and there's like this awkward silence. So why would that be all that awkward? I mean, would she like the unicorn which is real? Well, I think it was, it was probably why if I'm remembering it correctly it was. There's a certain bit of ambiguity where people are like, is she joking or oh my goodness, she's not joking. She thinks there. But it also makes all of us, I think, wonder, which, what what misconceptions do we have

just rattling around in our brain right now? We have no idea, but they're just they're ready to go at any moment, you know, they can be loaded into the torpedo tube of conversation or podcasting or the next job interview, just just just ready to go when you have no idea. I'd say one of the most common edits I have to make to this show before we release it as I realized that I just sort of said something that

I knew was true. And then later I'm listening back to it, I'm like, wait a minute, I don't think that's right. Yeah, yeah, I've definitely definitely done that before. But well, I mean when I said it, I wasn't

even wondering, you know, just now now. The authors here, they they touch on, of course, the fact that the prior knowledge seems like it should be able to protect us, uh, you know, and and yet quote surprisingly, the effects of exposure to misconceptions are not limited to cases where people are ignorant of the true state of the world. We touched on that already. Um. Another great example they bring bring out is a plane crashed, where did they bury

the survivors? Okay, which you know obviously you're not going to bury survivors, you were going to bury the dead. But again, this is another question where you've kind of filled in all the blanks, you know. Uh, they by the time the survivors is the last word in the sentence. Uh, and you fall for it, right, So it's not like you think that the survivors get buried, but you could be trying to answer the questions just because like that's

gone straight past you. Yeah, And they really drive home in this that knowledge neglect isn't just a momentary lapse in memory, but rather something with real consequences for memory. If you don't recognize the error, the error can become coded into your memory, into your worldview as fact. Uh. And because that error was recently encountered, it's more easily accessed. So again we have to remember that items in our memory are not made of stone, they're made of clay.

Merely accessing them can change them. And our most accessed memories are the most changed memories of all the ones we can trust the least. Um So, an air that pops to mind quickly is more likely to be thought of as fact, not Oh I heard once that X. I'm not sure about X, but I think X, but

rather just X is true, X is the answer. Yeah, So I guess this is This is connecting back to that finding we talked about earlier that you know, um that even against your existing prior knowledge, like misconceptions or errors that get by you unnoticed in one of these Moses solution type sentences can later damage your ability to remember the actual fact of that sentence correctly. Um, it can undermine your knowledge that it was in fact Noah, potentially.

And this makes me think about the broader phenomenon of people who are really trying to argue a point will often structure sentences to try to get something past you really quickly. In the non pivotal part of the sentence.

It's almost like we have an intuitive grasp of the Moses solution type thing, where like a, I don't know, you see people like like arguing about politics on TV or something, and like so one person will pose a question to the other person, and the the pivotal part of the sentence that's supposed to be in dispute, maybe is is one part of the sentence, but then in a different part of the sentence, there's also like a disputable claim that's just like shoved in there and goes

by real quick, right right, Yeah. If you end up with a statement that has some some mistruths sort of sprinkled in there that are not key to the like the main you know, talking point, or even the main untruth, you know, that's that can often be the nefarious thing too. It's like you catch the larger um misconception or lie in the statement, but then there are other lies in there that you're not paying attention to because of the

big one. Now, the authors here they point out that improved monitoring can help, you know, this is stuff like we're talking about, like putting things in a different font, etcetera. Um, But drawing attention to errors can have the opposite effect, increasing suggestibility, which is is weird therefore to it as an ironic effect. Um. Plus, many manipulations designed to promote monitoring may actually fail to do so, And they say

it's difficult to predict which manipulations will actually work. So again, there's no there's no like one guy, like, here are the three steps you need to take to uh to keep this misinformation from leaking into your brain. I think a lot of what I take away from this is that, uh, I don't know, being well informed is an ongoing process that last your entire life. And it's not a question of like just getting the right facts in the bank

one time and then you're set. You know. Yeah, there's a lot of upkeep involved and a lot of just continual pruning and not just new weeds, weeds that have been in there your whole life sometimes or seeing right bap the very least. Um. Yeah. The authors why, they also drive home that ultimately we know a lot more about how people come to misremember events versus misremember facts, especially when errors are are the errors involved contradict stored knowledge.

So uh, you know, you know, again we get into the complexity of memory, the different types of memory that we have going on the brain. Um, and we we still have a lot more to learn about just how this all comes together. Yeah. Now, you know, here's a question that comes to mind. Um, I wonder if anyone has constructed a Moses illusion statement using Bilbo and Frodo. Oh yes, that might so. Um, like what was Bilbo carrying into the fires of Mountain Doom? Yeah, that's sort

of thing. I don't know, of course, I guess you would want to you'd want to try and construct it right so that you get Bilbo there at the very end or Frodo at the very end, depending on how you're you're you're messing around with its rum who was who was the dragon whose lair was infiltrated by Frodo Baggins. Yeah, yeah, that sort of thing that might work. Yeah, I said,

Bilbo and Frodo or even closer together than Noah and Moses. Yeah, I mean they are certainly that they actually overlap, as opposed to being separated by by long stretches of time. Very very similar characters actually related, right, they are related? Yeah? Um, yeah, it's that they would work. What Uncle, great uncle Uncle, So I always forget what happened to Frodo's parents. I've read it and I still forget it. I'm gonna say, uncle,

all the all the Hobbits are cousins. Yeah, they're all related. Actually, yes, all right, well there you have it. We'd love to hear from everybody about this, because of course this just touches on how our brains work and how it now they are brains work with with new information, be it accurate or or or or misconception. Uh So I think everybody out there has something to share. Which of these Moses illusions worked the most on you? Which ones I've worked on you in the past. Uh, we'd love to

hear from you. All right. If you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you know where to find it. You can find the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed wherever you get your your podcasts, and we'll have core episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you've got listener mail. On Mondays, you've got them, We've got the Artifact on Wednesdays. You've got Weird House Cinema on Fridays in a vault episode on the weekends, Huge things. As always to our

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