Born Liars (12 page)

At the end of the weekend, as the rest of the campers were boarding buses ready to take them back to the church, Franko came across Ericka Ingram sitting on the stage of the conference centre, sobbing. A few friends surrounded her, though they had no idea why she was upset. Franko prayed over her. As she did so she felt the Lord prompting her with information about Ericka's plight. ‘You have been abused as a child, sexually abused,' the minister told Ericka. As her charge continued to weep, Franko received another divine prompting, and told Ericka that her father had been the abuser. Ericka was too overcome to say a word.

Shortly after returning from the retreat, Ericka and her younger sister, Julie, eighteen, moved out of the Ingram home. Six weeks later she told her mother that she had been repeatedly molested by her father. Sandy, Ericka's mother, immediately confronted her husband with the accusations. Paul claimed to have no idea what to make of them. Julie supported her sister's story, also claiming to have been molested by Paul. When word reached the sheriff's office, Paul was arrested.

In the febrile atmosphere of 1980s America, the concept of Recovered Memory Syndrome mingled with fundamentalist Christian doctrines stressing the Devil's active presence in the world to produce a potent, unpredictable force that tore through families and entire communities. Court cases based on these memories became a regular feature on local news bulletins, and a common theme of these stories was the involvement of satanic ritual. The inhabitants of many small towns began to wonder if there weren't dark forces at work just beneath the placid surface of their own community.

This was by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. In 1990, nine children from the Orkney Islands were seized from their homes in the middle of the night, bundled into a plane and flown to the Scottish mainland, after social workers reported that they had uncovered a devil-worshipping paedophile ring. The only evidence ever found for this was from the testimony of the children in subsequent interviews. The judge who threw out the original case said that the children were subjected to intense and aggressive cross-examinations designed to make them admit to abuse. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, more than a hundred children were removed from their families in Cleveland, Nottinghamshire, Rochdale, Bishop Auckland and Ayrshire, for similar reasons. Social workers ‘uncovered' memories of children forced to eat faeces, drink blood and have sex with hooded adults. In none of these cases was any evidence found to support the allegations.

During interviews with detectives, Ericka and Julie Ingram expanded on their story. Their accounts of the abuse were strangely inconsistent and changeable, however. For instance, Julie had told her mother that the last time Paul had abused her was five years ago, but after the police informed her about statutes of limitations, she remembered that the last assault was only three years ago. As months passed and the girls were interviewed by a long succession of sympathetic lawyers, detectives and therapists, their recollections of the abuse became ever more vivid, detailed, and gaudily grotesque. Ericka described a large group of Satan-worshippers, including many well-known members of the community, who would don green robes, gather in barns and empty churches, and chant incantations around a fire as a priestess killed babies in acts of ritual sacrifice. The girls said they'd been cut, tortured, and nailed to the floor. Ericka said that when she was sixteen, and five months pregnant, the Satanists performed an abortion on her. The foetus was removed and, still alive, was placed on top of her, where it was cut into pieces and eaten by members of the congregation. Detectives grew suspicious of the daughters' outlandish allegations, for which they could find no corroborating evidence, despite strenuous and expensive efforts.
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What kept the prosecution case alive was Paul Ingram's confession.

Following his arrest, the pressure on Ingram to confess was intense. During his first conversation with investigators, he denied the allegations, but the arresting officers – Paul's own colleagues, men he knew and trusted – pressed him to consider how unlikely it was that his daughters were lying. Paul's confidence in his own memory – and his own character – soon began to weaken. After several hours of interrogation he still couldn't remember committing any abuse, but conceded the possibility he had made himself blind to it. Like the detectives, he didn't believe that his daughters were capable of lying about such things, and preferred to mistrust himself rather than them. ‘There may be a dark side of me that I don't know about,' he said.

For six months Paul Ingram had almost no contact with anyone sceptical of the charges against him. He was kept in an isolated cell with the lights on nearly all the time (he was under a suicide watch) and interrogated by trusted former colleagues, all of whom appeared to believe the charges. His alleged crimes were spelt out in graphic detail. He was told by a police psychologist that he was probably repressing memories of his actions, and he was subjected to hypnosis in an attempt to ‘recover' the hidden memories. The police department's chaplain urged him to confess, framing his predicament as a spiritual one in a way that Ingram must have found both moving and terrifying. ‘If there's ever been a time that you were offered a choice between the Devil and God, it's right now,' said the pastor.

Eventually, the confessions started to flow. A ritual developed. During long interrogation sessions, Ingram would be told about specific crimes of which he had been accused, and return to his cell to ‘pray on it'. This entailed going into a trance-like state (he had been urged by the pastor to visualise everything), after which he would return to describe his memory of the crimes in a calm, dreamy voice, using a curiously tentative syntax – ‘I would've removed her underpants or bottoms to the nightgown,' he said, in the first of these sessions. The more he told, the more elaborate his recollections became: he described his participation in satanic rituals, including the time he cut the heart out of a live cat. He even confessed to the murder of a prostitute in Seattle in 1983, implicating himself in a well-known series of killings (Seattle police looked into it, but found nothing in Ingram's statement worthy of further investigation). The trouble was, Ingram's narratives repeatedly failed to match up with those told by his daughters, or with any other evidence.

To help build their case, the prosecutors decided to bring in a known expert on cults and mind-control: Richard Ofshe. A flamboyant man who sported a luxuriant grey and white beard, Ofshe had a reputation in the academic community for being arrogant, wilful, and brilliant. The Olympia policeman who picked him up from the local airport described the mysteries of the case to him: the lack of hard evidence, the conflicting stories, the girls' confusing testimony, the way that Paul Ingram's recollections combined gory imagery with a baffling vagueness about more prosaic details of time and place. The description struck a chord with Ofshe, who was also, coincidentally, becoming interested in the ability of coercive interrogations to extract confessions from innocent people. As soon as he interviewed Paul, Ofshe suspected that he was so confused, so desperate to help his interrogators and to protect his daughters from further pain, that he was ‘confabulating' false memories of his supposed crimes. On the spot, Ofshe came up with an audacious method of testing his hypothesis.

‘I was talking to one of your sons and one of your daughters and they told me about something that happened,' he told Ingram, as dumbfounded police officers, aware that Ofshe hadn't spoken to any members of Ingram's family, struggled to catch on. Paul had been accused, said Ofshe, of forcing one of his daughters to have sex with his son while he watched (the Ingram children had reported no such episode and later confirmed that it had never taken place). He provided Paul with a few suggestive details of the fictional incident – just as had happened in earlier interrogations – and asked if it was true. At first, Paul denied it, but Ofshe asked him to try and visualise the scene. Paul closed his eyes and after a few minutes announced that memories of it were beginning to return. Ofshe told him to go back to his cell and continue praying on it. When Ingram emerged the next day he presented Ofshe with a three-page written confession which described the imaginary event in detail, complete with dialogue.

Recovered Memory Syndrome was founded on Freud's idea that the mind represses memories of events too awful to be allowed into consciousness. It was a theory that Freud abandoned late his career, when he came to believe that such repressions were more likely to involve forbidden fantasy and wishes rather than real incidents. Even when still in thrall to the theory, however, he seemed to intuit its fatal flaw. In this passage from 1899 he anticipated much contemporary research into the nature of memory:

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time.

This description of memory tallies with the experimental evidence of Elizabeth Loftus, and with the findings of modern neuroscience. Remembering is an act of creative reconstruction rather than simple replaying. Every time a memory is recalled it is re-formed, and in the process it becomes mingled with the stories of others and shaped by our own anxieties, desires and imaginings. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, the brain carries ‘no hard copies'.

Ofshe told Paul he had made up the scene, and repeatedly tried to get him to admit his confession was fictional. But Ingram would not shaken from his conviction that it was real. Ofshe wrote a report for the court, arguing strongly that Ingram's confessions were invented, but it came too late to influence the trial. Despite it becoming increasingly apparent to most observers that the allegations had no basis in reality, Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of third-degree rape. Ofshe called Ingram, imploring him to withdraw his guilty plea, but Ingram held firm. Months later, after the interrogations had ceased and he was moved to a different prison, Ingram concluded that his visualisations had not been real memories after all. But by then it was too late; he was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Despite several legal appeals, at which Ofshe, Loftus and others testified on Ingram's behalf, and the campaign of a support group dedicated to getting the case reopened, Ingram served the majority of his sentence. A confession, once made, is almost impossible to retract.

We have long dreamed of a technology that can cut through the messy, confusing uncertainties of human behaviour and take us straight to an authentic source of truth. The polygraph rose to prominence when we started thinking of the body as the site of truth; these days we tend to look for truth in the brain. But, as Sartre's story about the soldier who unwittingly betrays his colleague reminds us, the truth doesn't reside inside any one person – it's out there in the world, and it can only be established by the gathering of evidence, and the painstaking assembly of multiple points of view. As individuals, we are thoroughly unreliable witnesses, even to ourselves.

Some legal scholars make the reasonable argument that even if the results of fMRI lie detection tests are not entirely dependable they should still be admissible in court. After all, unreliable evidence, such as the testimony of character witnesses, or circumstantial evidence, is regularly introduced as part of a larger picture put together by lawyers. As one scholar puts it, ‘Although slight evidence ought not to be good enough for scientists, it is a large part of the law.' But the likelihood is that the results of an fMRI lie detection test will always be assigned more credence than they deserve; a jury faced with such evidence will, to borrow Saul Kassin's phrase, feel ‘bound to convict'. Perhaps we are too in love with the dream of a truth machine to allow it to become a reality.

‘It didn't cross my mind that I was lying,' said Joseph Dick, long after recanting his confession to the murder of Michelle Moore-Busko. ‘I believed what I was saying was true.' Even knowing what we know, it is almost impossible to comprehend that a man could falsely believe he has committed a murder he didn't commit. But then, our capacity for self-deception is far greater than we imagine.

Why we're designed to deceive ourselves

I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.

Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case,
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson

Imagine that I blindfolded you and walked you into a strange room in which there is a llama, an umbrella and a cactus. As soon as your blindfold is removed, you'd become instantly aware of the shape and dimensions of the room and its contents. You might take the llama for a goat at first, but that would probably be the extent of your confusion. You might be wondering why you're here – but you wouldn't exert any conscious mental effort establishing where or what ‘here' is. You'd just look around.

But if you were to watch a recording of what your
eyes
actually see when the blindfold is off, you'd be shocked. It would resemble a bootlegged DVD of
The Blair Witch Project
on which somebody has spilt beer and then stuck in a toaster – shaky, blurred, black and white, and with a hole in it. In fact, make that two bootlegged DVDs, each of them showing a slightly different movie: if you cover one eye and then quickly switch your hand to the other, you'll remind yourself that each eye has a different field of vision. Even presuming you have perfect eyesight, the only part of the picture full of detail and colour would be a small area in the middle; to the right and left of it the screen would lose resolution steeply, becoming a greyish blur.

Our natural feeling is that our minds are like a mirror on which light falls – that we simply perceive the world as it is. For a long time, philosophers and scientists thought along similar lines. In the late eighteenth century Immanuel Kant introduced the idea that there is a stage between what our eyes and ears pick up and what we perceive; that while we depend on sensory data for our knowledge, we make sense of its profusion and confusion by relying on in-built mental categories. But it took science some time to catch up with Kant; in classical physiology up until the twentieth century, visual images fell upon the optic nerve, and that was that. Freud suspected that the functions of
receiving
sensory signals and
registering
them were separate, though he had no strong evidence for it at the time. We now know that the brain does indeed do a lot of work to make reality comprehensible – that the world as scanned by our eyes is rather different from the world we
see
. As the neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it, your brain ‘serves up a story to you'. In a sense, deception begins the moment you open your eyes.

When the blindfold comes off, a huge amount of cognitive filling and smoothing gets under way. The brain seamlessly merges both fields of vision. The image that falls on your retina is in two dimensions; the third is added later. There is a blind spot in each eye; the brain fills in for it (this is a mundane problem of furniture arrangement: the optical nerve has to attach to the retina somewhere and it takes up space that would otherwise be filled with receptors). Your eyes don't have enough neuronal receptors to capture a whole scene properly, so your pupils dance frantically around as they try to bring the sharper region of focus to bear on every part of the room, a movement known as the saccade. Yet you have the illusion of continuous, coherent vision. Cognitive scientists have given this latter phenomenon the lyrical name of ‘confabulation across saccades'.

The brain doesn't just tidy up what the senses record; it does something more creative than that. Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals is one of the best catchers of the ball in America's National Football League. As a wide receiver a large part of his job is to pluck passes out of the air, and he does it with acrobatic agility and perfect timing. He also does it with his eyes closed. Photographs that capture the moment he seizes the ball reveal that he does so without looking at it. His many admirers, already in awe of his ability, are baffled; it's a coaching truism that a player must keep his eye on the ball at all times. Fitzgerald himself can't explain it.

Joan Vickers, a cognitive scientist who studies the eye movements of sportspeople, hypothesises that Fitzgerald is using ‘predictive control', a skill we all have, but one that Fitzgerald has honed through years of experience of the game. As the ball approaches him, he takes a mental snapshot of it, which his subconscious then instantly compares to a vast library of memories drawn from years of playing and observation. As a teenager Fitzgerald worked as a ballboy for six seasons, and Vickers thinks that the thousands of passes he witnessed from the sidelines left him with a catalogue of impressions most athletes take years to accumulate. By matching his snapshot with the memory of all these other passes, Fitzgerald's brain is able to conjure up a picture of where the ball will go. He can then work out how to put himself in position to catch it – without looking.
¹⁰

Though Fitzgerald has an exceptionally refined skill in this regard, he's using a feature of the brain that we all share. In the words of Chris Frith, a cognitive neuroscientist, the brain ‘actively creates pictures of the world'. Rather than trying to interpret every new thing it sees as if encountering it for the first time, the brain makes a series of working assumptions about what a chair looks like, or a person, and where that ball is going to be, then makes predictions – best guesses – about what's before us. It compares its expectations with the new information coming in, checks for mistakes, and revises accordingly. The result, in Frith's striking formulation, is ‘a fantasy that collides with reality'.

Our pro-active, interventionist cognitive system works extremely well most of the time – it has to, otherwise we couldn't have survived as a species. But it can be fooled. The cognitive psychologist Gustav Kuhn recorded people's eye movements while they watched a video of a magician performing the Vanishing Ball illusion, in which a ball thrown into the air seems to disappear mid-flight. The magician tosses the ball straight up into the air and catches it a few times. On the final throw, he only pretends to toss the ball, secreting it in the palm of his hand. As he does so, he looks to the sky, as if tracking the rise of the ball into thin air. This last detail is significant. Half the spectators were shown a version of the trick in which the magician looked at his hand instead of skyward on the final throw, and most of them spotted the trick. The spectators who succumbed to the illusion were being led by the movement of the magician's head and eyes. These participants reported that they'd actually seen the ball leave the top of the screen. The eye-tracking analysis, however, showed that on that final, deceptive throw, their eyes didn't even go to the top of the screen but stayed fixed on the ball. In other words, they had such strong expectations of where the ball was going to be that they hallucinated it.

Magicians, architects and artists have known about how to exploit the quirks of our perceptual system for millennia. The platform on which the mighty pillars of the Parthenon stand is not straight, but curved; its architects knew this is the only way to obtain the
effect
of a straight line. When magicians misdirect us away from their method and towards their effect, it's our attention they're manipulating, not our gaze. These bugs can occasionally cause disasters, when the brain directs our attention to the wrong things, overriding the reports of the senses. Time and again, under conditions of high visibility, and with no evidence of mechanical failure, drivers and pilots crash into obvious obstacles. In an experiment using a flight simulator, commercial airline pilots were asked to land a Boeing 727. On some approaches, the image of a small aircraft was unexpectedly superimposed onto the runway. Two out of eight pilots blithely continued with the landing manoeuvre as if the runway was clear.

So far we've talked only about vision, but the principles of cognitive self-deception apply elsewhere. We are deceived about our own bodies, for instance. Although we're rarely aware of it, we are constantly monitoring information about the position of our bodies, and unconsciously making adjustments. When you lift your left arm you subtly shift some weight to the right side of your body to maintain balance and avoid listing to one side. The sensory feedback we receive about our muscles, joints and skin is known as proprioception, but most of us barely know it exists, because the brain makes our normal movements feel effortless.
¹¹
We vastly underestimate the mental sophistication and effort required just to stand still, or pick up a fork, let alone walk along a crowded street without colliding with people.

Our experience of
when
things are happening is partly illusory too. If you're touched on your nose and your toe at precisely the same moment, the signal from the toe will reach your brain one tenth of a second after the signal from the nose, because it has further to travel along the body's nerve fibres to the brain. But you will experience the touches as simultaneous, because the brain puts the first signal – from the nose – on hold while it waits for any other signals to arrive. When the toe signal arrives, you get the feeling of ‘now'. We all live at a slight lag from reality, and tall people experience a slightly longer lag from reality than short people, simply because the distance from toe to head is greater, which means the brain takes longer to check on all the signals. David Eagleman recounts that in the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronised. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a tenth of a second's grace; as long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers wouldn't notice a thing. Their brains would automatically resynchronise the signals.

The world we perceive is also shaped by our desires. In 1947 Jerome Bruner and Cecile Goodman found that children consistently judged coins to be bigger than identically sized cardboard circles. The monetary value of the coins was influencing how big they perceived the dimensions to be. Tellingly, children from poor families perceived the coins to be bigger than children from affluent families. In a more recent study, psychologists from New York University asked students to estimate the distance between their own position and a full bottle of water on the table at which they were sitting. Beforehand, they fed some of the students a diet of pretzels to make them thirsty. The thirsty students judged the bottle to be closer than the other students did. Another study revealed that hills appear steeper to us than they actually are, and that this tendency is exaggerated when the observer is old, unhealthy, or wearing a backpack. This is self-deception rather than simple misjudgement. When participants in these studies are asked to judge the hill's incline by adjusting the slant of a movable board with their hands (without looking at their hands) they got it right. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘wishful seeing'.

Imagination, said Coleridge, is ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception', a sentiment echoed by Charles Darwin when he asserted that there could be no true
observation
of the world without
speculation
. Beginning at the most fundamental level, we are engaged in a continual negotiation between our expectations and desires about the world, and the world itself, between imagination and reality. Why does our brain deceive us about so much? Partly because it needs to fill in the gaps left by our sensory organs, but also because without an automatic ability to interpret and organise the incoming chaos of signals we would drown in them, becoming slaves to our impulses. Some brain-damaged people cannot help but act on everything they see. If they see a glass they must drink from it; if they see a pen they must write with it. Through the use of what Frith calls ‘controlled fantasy' our brain screens out what it deems irrelevant and helps us to establish what's important to us – amidst all the noise and chatter at a party your name leaps out at you.

For the brain, truthfully depicting reality accurately comes second to survival. Of course, the two objectives are very much aligned, but not completely. We're less likely to kill ourselves attempting that hill if we think it's steeper than it is, and we're more likely to make an effort to reach something desirable if it seems nearer than it is.

In 1983, Benjamin Libet of the University of California asked participants in an experiment to make a movement at an arbitrary moment decided by them (they were instructed to flex their wrist ‘freely and capriciously'), and to note the precise time, using a specially designed clock, at which they decided to make their move. As they did so, Libet monitored their brain activity. He found that the brain prepares the body to move several hundred milliseconds
before
the person consciously decides to move. The person's conscious intention seemed to be, literally, an afterthought.
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We like to think that we deliberate about what to do, then do it. But Libet's experiment, and others that followed, suggest that most of the time we act first and invent reasons, feelings and motivations afterwards.

In another, rather eerie experiment, designed by the psychologist Daniel Wegner, you participate with a companion who is apparently doing the same experiment but who is actually an assistant of the experimenter. You and your companion sit at a computer screen and both of you place a finger on a shared, specially designed mouse. There are lots of objects on the screen, and through earphones someone tells you to move the on-screen pointer towards one of them. You have the thought, and then you move the mouse. If your companion moves the mouse as you are having the thought, but
before
you have actually moved your arm, then you will believe that you moved the mouse. You'll feel as if you chose to do something that somebody else did for you (this illusion works if the interval between having the thought and the mouse moving is about one and a fifth seconds or less).