The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (31 page)

Indeed, the Mozart effect still resonates with many. Eric Mangini must have been a believer in 2007 when he made classical music the new workout soundtrack for the New York Jets. Until we each had our first child, we didn’t realize the extent to which the Mozart-for-babies myth has permeated the child-care industry. Intelligent, highly educated friends sent us toys that included—as a matter of routine, not a special feature—a “Mozart” setting that played classical music. The Baby Einstein company was founded in a basement with $5,000 in capital in 1997 (hot on the heels of the initial burst of Mozart effect publicity) and grew to sales of $25 million in 2001 before it was acquired by Disney.
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The names of its DVDs—
Baby Mozart, Baby Einstein, Baby Van Gogh
, and so on—imply that by watching them, your child will become more like a genius and less like an ordinary baby. Videos designed to be watched by babies are now a $100-million-a-year business,
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even though the American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends that children younger than two years old watch no television or videos whatsoever.

A research group led by Frederick J. Zimmerman, a pediatrician at the University of Washington, attempted to test the effect of the products inspired by the Mozart effect on children’s cognitive abilities. The researchers commissioned a telephone survey of parents of children less than two years old in the states of Washington and Montana. Each parent answered a series of questions about how much time his or her child spent watching educational television, movies, and other media, with a separate category for “baby DVDs/videos.” Later in the survey, the parents were asked whether their children understood and/or used each of
ninety words typically found in the vocabularies of young children. There were separate vocabulary lists for infants (age 8–16 months) and toddlers (age 17–24 months), so the researchers looked at these age groups separately. For the infants, each additional hour per day spent watching baby DVDs was associated with an 8 percent
reduction
in vocabulary. For the toddlers, there was no significant relationship between DVD viewing and vocabulary size.
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If you have become sensitive to the illusion of cause that we discussed in
Chapter 5
, you will notice that this is just a correlational study. The researchers couldn’t randomly assign some babies to watch videos and others to not watch videos, so a headline of “Watching Baby DVDs Will Make Your Child Dumber” is not justified. The family environments of infants who watched more videos might be less conducive to vocabulary building in other ways. In their statistical analysis, Zimmerman and his colleagues accounted for some of the most likely factors that could make the DVD-watching children different, such as how much education their parents had, how much their parents read to them, how much other media they watched, whether they watched alone or with their parents, and so on. Even after all of those factors were accounted for, DVD watching was still associated with smaller vocabularies. Although we cannot make a strong causal inference from this study, it certainly provides no support for the belief that watching videos or listening to Mozart
improves
cognition.

Disney, which was getting $200 million in annual revenue from the Baby Einstein brand when the Zimmerman group published its article, reacted sharply. Its CEO, Robert Iger, publicly criticized the study as “flawed” for not differentiating between different baby DVD products, implying that other DVDs might lead to smaller vocabularies, but not those made by his company.
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A Disney spokesman pounced on a statement by one of Zimmerman’s coauthors, who told a newspaper that the study had found “harm” to children’s vocabularies from baby DVDs. The company had a point here: As we have noted, the study was correlational, not causal, so strictly speaking, harm was not found.

Unfortunately, Disney’s spokesman undermined his defense of scientific
rigor by making an even more fallacious argument himself: “‘Baby Einstein’ has been so well-received, and if properly used, they do have an impact on infants’ health and happiness.”
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In other words, the product must be good for kids because it has been “well-received” (presumably by parents, many of whom might be understandably grateful for something that absorbs the attention of a crying baby for a few minutes, and who would like to believe that a product they spent money on with good intentions really did benefit their child). The spokesman offered no evidence, either correlational or causal, to support his claim that using the DVDs “properly” is beneficial.

In the end, Eric Mangini’s own Mozart experiment did not succeed. In 2006, he had guided the Jets to a 10–6 record and a playoff appearance. He added classical music to the practices the next season, and his team went 4–12. Mangini lasted just one more year as the Jets’ head coach before being fired.
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Why does the Mozart effect find such a ready audience? Why do so many people buy classical CDs for their infants and DVDs for their toddlers? Why are people so willing to believe that music and videos can effortlessly raise their children’s IQs? The Mozart effect masterfully exploits the illusion of potential. We all would like to be more intelligent, and the Mozart effect tells us that we can become more intelligent just by listening to classical music. The subtitle to Don Campbell’s book
The Mozart Effect
directly appeals to the illusion:
Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit
.

We already mentioned that 40 percent of people still believe in the Mozart effect, despite the scientific evidence against it. Lest you think that this is just a silly belief that has no real importance, consider some of the implications. Parents holding this belief might think that they are doing just as much, if not more, for their children by sitting them in front of a baby DVD or playing classical music than by interacting with them. Daycare centers, schools, and other institutions might follow
suit. The fad of playing Mozart to babies could substitute for much better practices, ones that might actually help the social and intellectual development of children. In other words, a belief in the Mozart effect might make children worse off than they would have been otherwise, as suggested by the Zimmerman group’s study of baby DVDs.

If such a sizable number of people continue to believe in the Mozart effect despite its debunking, what about other beliefs in hidden mental powers that have not received as severe a public lashing as the Mozart effect? In our national telephone survey, we asked several questions that touched on other manifestations of the illusion of potential.

Sixty-one percent of our respondents agreed that “hypnosis is useful in helping witnesses accurately recall details of crimes.” The idea that hypnosis can put the brain into a special state, in which the powers of memory are dramatically greater than normal, reflects a belief in a form of easily unlocked potential. But it is false. People under hypnosis do generate more “memories” than they do in a normal state, but these recollections are as likely to be false as true.
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Hypnosis leads them to come up with more information, but not necessarily more accurate information. In fact, it might actually be people’s beliefs in the power of hypnosis that lead them to recall more things: If people believe that they should have better memory under hypnosis, they will try harder to retrieve more memories when hypnotized. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know whether the memories hypnotized people retrieve are true or not—unless of course we know exactly what the person should be able to remember. But if we knew that, then we’d have no need to use hypnosis in the first place!
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Seventy-two percent of people agreed that “most people use only 10 percent of their brain capacity.” This strange belief, a staple of advertisements, self-help books, and comedy routines, has been around so long that some psychologists have conducted historical investigations of its origins.
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In some ways, it is the purest form of the illusion of potential: If we use only 10 percent of our brain, there must be another 90 percent waiting to be put to work, if we can just figure out how. There are so many problems with this belief that it’s hard to know where to
begin. Just as some laws cannot be enforced because they are written too imprecisely, this statement ought to be declared “void for vagueness.” First, there is no known way to measure a person’s “brain capacity” or to determine how much of that capacity he or she uses. Second, when brain tissue produces no activity whatsoever for an extended time, that means it is dead. So, if we only used 10 percent of our brain, there would be no possibility of increasing that percentage, short of a miraculous resurrection or a brain transplant. Finally, there is no reason to suspect that evolution—or even an intelligent designer—would give us an organ that is 90 percent inefficient. Having a large brain is positively dangerous to the survival of the human species—the large head needed to contain it can barely exit the birth canal, leading to a risk of death during childbirth. If we used only a fraction of our brain, natural selection would have shrunk it long ago.

This “10 percent myth” surfaced long before brain-imaging technologies like MRI and PET scanning even existed, but misunderstandings of neuroscience research might reinforce it. In the pictures of brain activity (“brain porn”) that appear in media reports about neuroscience research, large areas of the brain are dark, or not “lit up” with blobs of color. However, the blobs don’t indicate the “active” areas of the brain—they indicate areas that are
more
active in one situation or group of people than in another. For a neurologically normal person, the entire brain, including the dark areas, is always “on,” with at least a baseline level of activity, and any task you can perform will raise activity in many brain areas. So, needless to say, “using more of your brain” will not help you avoid everyday illusions.

Sixty-five percent of people apparently believe that “if someone behind you is staring at the back of your head, you can sense that they are looking at you.” Although it would be nice if we could reach out and touch someone with our eyes, our eyes do not emit any such rays, and there are no receptors in the back of our head that can detect someone’s stare. This false belief rests on the idea that people have hidden, previously unmeasured perceptual abilities that function independently of our standard five senses, and that this sixth sense can prove useful. The
idea has been thoroughly debunked, though. A prominent psychologist named Edward Titchener wrote, in the journal
Science
, “I have tested this … in a series of laboratory experiments conducted with persons who declared themselves peculiarly susceptible to the stare or peculiarly capable of ‘making people turn round’ … the experiments have invariably given a negative result.”
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We can’t make people turn around by looking at them, and we can’t tell when someone else is looking at us, at least not without first looking back at them.
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Why would people come to believe in such extrasensory perception? We tend to remember those cases when we turned around and saw someone, but not those cases when we turned around and nobody was there (nor the times when someone was there and we didn’t notice, and certainly not the “times” when nobody was there and we didn’t notice anyone). Recall from
Chapter 5
that we are also prone to infer a causal pattern when the sequence of events is consistent with a narrative. If you start staring at someone and then they happen to turn around, the illusion of cause would lead you to the false inference that you caused them to turn. And when you infer a cause, you are especially likely to remember it.

Since it was utterly obvious to him that people actually couldn’t feel the stares of others, Titchener felt the need to explain why he bothered to conduct studies to debunk the idea in the first place. He noted that the experiments “have their justification in the breaking-down of a superstition which has deep and widespread roots in the popular consciousness.” He was absolutely right about the prevalence of the “sixth sense” belief. Unfortunately, Titchener’s attempts to eradicate this superstition through experimentation were ineffective.
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The prevalence of the false belief about feeling the stares of others has been remarkably stable over time—Titchener’s article in
Science
was published in 1898.

The most popular false belief in our survey was the idea that “subliminal messages in advertisements can cause people to buy things,” which
was endorsed by 76 percent of respondents. Subliminal persuasion, much like the belief that you can feel someone staring, is based on the idea that people are inordinately sensitive to weak signals, ones that we might not be able to detect using our normal sensory mechanisms. If we can change people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors through subtle and undetectable influences, then in principle we could use those same powers to allow ourselves to accomplish great things, releasing abilities and skills we didn’t know we had. A belief in the power of subliminal persuasion underlies the idea that we can help ourselves quit smoking or learn a new language by listening to subliminal recordings while we sleep, unlocking the potential for change without exerting any conscious effort.

You might have heard of a famous experiment from the 1950s in which subliminal messages were shown during movies to drive up sales of soda and popcorn. You might also remember reading that advertisers embed sexual words and images in photographs to arouse greater desire for their products. In his 1973 bestseller
Subliminal Seduction
, Wilson Bryan Key described many examples of such subliminal “embeds” and his theories of the psychology behind them.
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The first sentence of Key’s book states: “Subliminal perception is a subject that virtually no one wants to believe exists, and—if it does exist—they much less believe that it has any practical application.” If Key was right about public sentiment at that time, then our survey and others like it show that popular beliefs have changed dramatically in the years since. People now overwhelmingly believe that subliminal information affects how we think and act.