There is an eerie consistency in many alien abduction stories when the victims describe their kidnappers...

A classic design from the movie 'Extraterrestrial'

It's resulted in an all-pervasive image of what an alien looks like. You know it: the pear shaped almost featureless face, smooth skin, tiny nose and mouth and huge almond shaped black eyes.

A typical encounter was recounted by a man named Sebastian:


"It was like three years ago. I saw this ET. It woke me up in the middle of the night, while I was mediating. They exist. If some could go like this and open your eyelids while you're mediating, while you're in deep man there's something out there. It looked like a little kid except it had big eyes, it looked just like a little kid except it had big eyes, small nose and a little mouth. Big eyes, small nose and a little mouth."

 It's dominated our media for decades as the catch-all symbol for extraterrestrial life. But why is the image so consistent? Could it be that all alleged abductees have been hunted by the same alien species; can this consistency of narrative be classified as proof that aliens truly exist?

Maybe.
But a more likely explanation for the consistency of experience could be down to how human consciousness has evolved - and survived- over the millions of years.

In his paper Close Encounters of the Facial Kind, Frederick V. Malmstrom suggests that instead the distinctive character of the alien face is due to an Inborn Facial Recognition Template. In his 1979 collaboration with Richard Coffman he found that out of a random sample of 30 reported aliens 100% were of a median height close to that of the average woman, and 80% displayed prominent diagonally oriented wraparound eyes, double slit nostrils and little or no mouth. In addition, most subjects reported to being between sleep and wakefulness when the encounters happened or later recalled this face when they were put into hypnotic regression. Both states of conciousness are ripe grounds for out of body experiences and hallucinations.

Similar experiments were conducted elsewhere, looking into the possibility that alien

Sketches on Barney Hill's alien kidnapper:
Top Image drawn under hypnosis
with bottom images as artist's
interpretations from his descriptions.
  (credit: NICAP 1972)

encounters were actually forms of out of body experiences. Richard Wiseman, in his book Paranormality, states that between 10-20% of the population have experienced out of body experiences when very relaxed, anaesthetised, experiencing sensory deprivation, under the influence of cannabis or following a life threatening situation (such as the famous 'light at the end of the tunnel'). He explains that out of body experiences are the product of the human brain continually seeking to identify where it is and it can be easily tricked. For example, by using mirrors and a dummy hand, along with simultaneous stimulation of their real -hidden- hand, a subject can be tricked into feeling as if the dummy hand is part of them because the confused brain anchors itself to the dummy hand that it is presented with. Out of body experiences are a similar decoupling of identity. When Michael Raduga conducted an experiment at the Out-of-Body-Experience Research Centre in Los Angeles more than half the volunteers he studied experienced at least one full or partial out-of-body experience (following guided relaxation techniques). Seven of the twenty volunteers were able to make supposed contact with UFOS or aliens during these dream like experiences.

In these lucid out of body experiences the brain is uncertain and falls back on a mix of subconscious memory and instinctual programming  and it is here that the Inborn Visual Recognition Template takes hold and gives us the distinctive image of the alien.


So what is the Inborn Visual Recognition Template?

The pupil schematic most favoured by
newborns according to Hess' study

Evolution is a amazing thing. In The Study of Instinct  Niko Tinbergen found that newly hatched chicks were born with an inherent knowledge of their predators and would automatically hide from shadow patterns that resembled dangerous hawks, while ignoring shadow patterns that showed benign geese. Human babies are particularly vulnerable infants and part of a species that survives due to social performance and so similarly are hardwired to recognise faces from the womb. As a matter of survival they respond favourably to these faces and seek them out.
Up until two months old, however, this ability isn't particularly sophisticated and they will seek out anything that has 'face-like' features, whether these are potentially scary - like a halloween mask - or benign. The key seems to be instead the makeup of the face - two eyes and, usually, a nose. Infants ignore one eye or three eyes and focus on two. Similarly, Eckhard hess found that they also respond more favourably to eyes with larger pupils. When I.W.R Bushnell took this research a step further, they found that babies found it easier to recognise a hairless and earless face and that this recognition is hardwired into the hippocampus - a noncortial 'lower' area of the brain. Only later does the baby start to use the 'higher' cortical areas of the brain to add in additional recognition cues such as the hairline and ear.


Another feature of newborn vision that is important to note is their limitations. While there is disagreement as to whether babies are born shortsighted or longsighted either way they will usually only pay attention to objects between 7-25 cm in front of their eyes, with this expanding to around a meter as quickly as one to two days after birth. In addition newborn vision is generally blurred and 'foggy' with very weak or entirely absent colour differentiation. When apply these restrictions to the image of mother's face at a typically intimate distance, the change is quite alarming, and revealing.

The mother's face in the vision of a newborn

Above is the standard mother's face having been reduced down to the vision range expected of a newborn. The second image was reduced to a coarseness of about 150 pixels and a field of a 50 degree visual angle with simulated radial astigmatism and a very shallow depth of focus. The third image smoothed to remove the residual high spacial frequencies following the digitization and simulate the 'fogginess' of new born vision.
In the process you can see how the facial recognition is still very clear when using the restrictions of newborn sight and when following the hardwired symbols of the hippocampus. Two large black eyes with large black pupils. Also, interestingly, it's clear to see how an alien face emerges - the large black slanted eyes, the almost non existent mouth, and the vertical slit nostrils, with a hairline blurred. We have our alien.

Sebastian's alien drawing

Aliens: The most primitive face?

During lucid dreaming and in out of body experiences it would be no surprise that the brain dips back into the subconscious and pulls out its most primitive programming.Therefore it seems likely that many of the creatures seen in 'alien abduction' stories aren't actually aliens at all but, fundamentally, an instinctual ghost of the Mother.

But, of course, it would be impossible to leave any article on aliens without returning a little ambiguity to the mix, so I leave you with this quote by Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in New York:


"You’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet was, say, one in a trillion...But even that guess — one chance in a trillion — implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about 10 billion other times over cosmic history."

We may not be getting abducted, but that's not to say that we're alone in the universe, so keep curious and keep questioning, and I shall see you next week.




Other Posts on Aliens...

-The Wonder of Snottites and the Search for Alien Life
-The Race to Europa
-Preludes Recommends: PBS Spacetime
-Review: Paranormality by Richard Wiseman







Keep in touch....

Remember, you can follow Preludes: Blog of Words us on Twitter and Facebook. Or Subscribe to us on Blogluvin' to never miss a post.

Stay curious!

Sources

-This post as heavily influenced by the excellent paper 'Close Encounters of the Facial kind: Are UFO Alien Faces an Inborn Facial Recognition Template' by Frederick V.Malmstrom. At the Skeptic reading room
-The surprising origin of alien abduction stories -LiveScience
-Alien Abductions may be vivid dreams, study shows - LiveScience
-Betty and Barney Hill Abduction Case (Sept 19, 1961) - UFO Evidence.org
-Extraterrestrial movie
-The Universe has Probably Hosted Many Alien civilizations: Study - Space.com 
-Paranormality by Prof. Richard Wiseman
-The real Life X Files - meet people abducted by aliens - DailyMail

Today I want to try something a bit different and give you a walk through my non-fiction bookshelf.

I never realised how many non-fiction books I had accumulated over the years until I moved into my new flat and actually attempted to organise them on a bookshelf. So in this Vlog I take you through some of my favourites for learning about social history, psychology & philosophy and science.

This is my first attempt at a vlog and was filmed on my ipad, so apologies for the occasional dip in sound volume. But you do get to actually hear my voice so...bonus?

You can view the video above or click here to go directly to Youtube.

Have a good weekend, and keep curious ;)

I'm back, baby!

Thanks for bearing with me while we've been on hiatus. I've moved in, the internet is working, and I've managed to get through a week as a home-owner without starving to death and/or setting myself on fire.

Amid all the chaos I've been reading Sapiens- a Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and I've been bursting to give it my recommendation.


In Sapiens Harari attempts to describe and explain the entirety of the history of Homo Sapiens, from our creation to what could one day be our evolution.

 How did our species success in the battle for dominance? How did we become to believe in Gods, nations and human rights? Have we actually become happier and more peaceful in the process? By tackling these broad and significant questions and maintaining a critical historical stance Sapiens elevates itself into something special and worthy of a place on every good bookshelf.

The chapters are broken down by each revolutionary period in humanity's histories of thought and technology: the Cognitive Revolution ('A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve'), the Agricultural Revolution ('History's Biggest Fraud'), the Unification of Humankind ('The Arrow of History') and finally the Scientific Revolution (from 'The Discovery of Ignorance' to 'The End of Homo Sapiens'). Throughout this history Harari considers the reasons for human development, the impact we make to the world and people around us, how monotheistic religion conquered animistic religions, whether empires are truly evil or simply inevitable, how humanity managed to organise itself through the power of imagination and much more.




As you can see, the scope of the work is massive and it's something I can very much respect.

Using such large brush strokes, from a historical perspective, is always going to be problematic; a huge chunk of the discipline is dedicated to moving away from macrocosmic explanations of why history has turned out the way it has. But what Harari manages to do in Sapiens is effectively 'explain' human history's movement while still acknowledging that things could have turned out very, very differently and, in the end, history is always going to throw a curveball at you. Nothing is inevitable, but sometimes once humanity has chosen a path - as with the Agricultural revolution - it's almost impossible to move back to the way things once were. Instead of creating a deterministic view of history, Harari instead does something more clever in that he shows us the structures of human history and what built them. He, in a way, dissects human history down to its skeleton and shows you the movement of each ligament attached to it while still acknowledging that history is a living breathing creature. In doing so his arguments are far more convincing and you feel genuinely enlightened in places having read them.


The book has already appeared on the blog in various forms, lurking in the sources. Recently my post 'Was the Agricultural Revolution the Worst Mistake in Human History?' was pulled entirely from Harari's extremely convincing argument, so if you'd like to get a flavour for the content of the book please head along to there.

For a bonus, team this up with the equally excellent 'The Self Illusion' by Bruce Hood - that I reviewed in February - and proceed to feel like you know everything you need to know about how these funny little human animals tick. 

In short? Get it on your shelf, you'll be referring back to it for years to come.

Today I thought I'd do something new with this week's review: a face off!


I'm sure that you're all hard working people who want to make their money stretch a bit further, and you're all a curious lot or else you wouldn't be here. So, if you want to learn a bit about psychology and how our minds work in all their weirdness, which would be a better investment, Quirkology or The Self Illusion?



The Self Illusion: How the Social brain Creates Identity

The Self Illusion is written by Bruce Hood, professor of Psychology in Society at the University of Bristol and aims to explore what makes up the very human feeling of an individual self. By pulling apart this concept and by arguing that it is in fact an illusion, he takes us on a fascinating journey into how our own minds and psychologies are constructed in reaction to a uncertain world where humans have learnt to be social to survive.

Some of the chapters are:


-The Most Wondrous Organ
-The Machiavellian baby
-The Looking glass Self
-The Cost of Free Will
-Why Our choices Are Not Our Own
-How the Tribe Made Me
-The Stories We Live By
-Caught in the Web
-Why You Can't See Your Self In Reflection


The Self Illusion is, in the end, more academic than Quirkology in its style, but it is still hugely interesting and very approachable, with each chapter broken down into neat and entertaining examples and anecdotes that lead to wider discussions. Because of this it makes a perfect book to dip in and out of at will, so can sit very much at home on your coffee or breakfast table.


Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives

Quirkology is another book that would sit very well on a coffee table and seems set out to give you plenty of tidbits for interesting dinner party conversations. Richard Wiseman is Britain's only professor for the Public Understanding of Psychology and thrives in looking into the weirdest research methods, so the book is written very much with an aim to entertain and even shock with it's anecdotal chapters. The book is also nicely supported with the occasional picture and 'exercise' that you can try at home.

Some of the chapters on offer are:


-What does your date of birth really say about you? The new science of chronopsychology.

-Trust everyone but always cut the cards: the psychology of lying and deception.
-Believing six impossible things before breakfast: Psychology enters the twilight zone.
-Making your mind up: The strange science of decision-making.
-The scientific search for the world's funniest joke: explorations into the psychology of humour.
-Sinner or Saint? The psychology of when we help and when we hinder.

Overall Quirkology offers a general entertaining approach for anyone interested in the various little strange idiosyncrasies of human psychology. For any scientists it also offers up some very weird and wonderful experiments which show just how creative and dedicated the scientific method can be.


So Which Should You Buy?

If you had to pick only one, I would fall on the side of The Self Illusion every time. While Quirkology offers a general approach to the weirder sides of psychology that is doubtlessly entertaining, it's anecdotal approach and huge subject matter leaves it feeling a little jumbled and unfocused. The Self Illusion, on the other hand, hangs around a central concept and while it uses an anecdotal style and an approachable tone to keep things interesting too, it nevertheless manages to take you on a proper journey. With Quirkology things can feel a little repetitive and forgettable, but with The Self Illusion you feel, in the end, like your beliefs have been challenged and that you have learnt something valuable about how our minds work.

In the end, I think that I found Quirkology a little dull in comparison because I had already read another far superior work by Richard Wiseman along the same quirky-theme: Paranormality.Here, his style and the subject matter thrive because they are anchored to a central theme and I thoroughly recommend it: in fact I reviewed it earlier on the blog.

If you're looking for a good psychology book to sink your teeth into, The Self Illusion is sure to be a great book to have at your side that you'll keep going back to again and again.

Mary Tudor

Bloody Mary has been an urban legend for as long as teens enjoy terrifying one another. 

The story goes that if you go in a dark room, look at yourself in the mirror, and chant he name a set number of times, the murderous ghost will be summoned in the mirror and - in some cases - will even mark you for death.
It's uncertain where the name comes from - does it reference the Tudor Mary I, or another murderous woman? - but in the end that matters far less than the power of the legend itself as, when kids look at the mirror,often they will see a strange apparition...

So what or who is Bloody Mary?

Thankfully for all traumatised teens, Bloody Mary can be explained by science and it reveals a fascinating insight to how our brain functions and how we, as humans, try to organise our sense of self. In the end, its nothing more than our brains mistranslating the information of our eyes.

How to 'summon' Bloody Mary

Either do this yourself or, if you're feeling rather wicked, ask your friend to stand around half a metre in front of a mirror. Makes sure that a dim light  (eg a candle) is directly behind them and turn off all other lights.

The key to the bloody Mary illusion is focus, which is often why 'Bloody Mary' is said to work when her name is chanted repeatedly. Get your friend to stare at their own reflection in the darkness and, given enough time, they will start to experience the spooky illusion. According to Giovanni Caputo in his article 'Strange-face-in-the-mirror-illusion' for Perception magazine, around 70% of people will see their face as becoming horribly distorted, to the point where they may look older or even that it is the face of another person with dark holes for eyes and mouths. It's no wonder that the urban legend of the ghost or demon of Bloody Mary was created to explain this creepy phenomenon!

Bloody Mary by theDURRRRIAN

Giovanni described the reason behind this as being due to how your brain pieces your face together. Our sight is not a continuum of one stable 'photo', but instead they move around constantly, picking up pieces of information which our mind then pieces together and stabilises. If we saw the world as we truly perceive it, then we would be beset by horrible motion sickness and an overload of sensory information, so the mind instead creates a relatively stable patchwork quilt of images that we perceive as fluid reality. However sometimes this process can be disrupted or distorted when something causes our mind to function a little less efficiently. In this case, the dimness of the light (or the flickering of a candle), combined with the focus and sense of creeping dread that staring at our own reflection produces, disrupts our own perception of ourselves, what we look like, and how our face is patched together into one image. And so 'Bloody Mary' is born in the surreal image that our confused brain creates.

Things can get even creepier when  this is combined with neurological conditions such as 'mirror misidentification'. It is unlikely that you have this condition, of course, but occasionally it can appear in lesser forms. TH - a 77 year old Australian man - suffered from the neurological condition quite acutely, despite otherwise being healthy. Whenever he would look in a mirror he described the man looking back at him as a 'dead ringer' for himself, but not himself. Unsettled, TH explained this by assuming that the man was a neighbour in his apartment complex, when in fact his brain was simply missing a process in connecting his sense of self with the image in front of him, despite his reflection being exactly the same as it should have been. Similar psychological processes can be seen to explain phenomenon such as out of body experiences, for example. Perfectly healthy people can often experience a form of dissociative identity disorder, often in periods of high stress.

If you're feeling in a spooky mood and like me, despite all scientific know-how, you're STILL too chicken to try this yourself, then why not check out the Supernatural episode of 'Bloody Mary' instead? It's a good 'un and entirely fictional. Woohoo!

Sources
-'The Ritual', Paranormality: Why we believe the impossible, Richard Wiseman,(2011)
-The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, Bruce Hood
-Bloody Mary art by theDURRRRIAN on Deviantart

Things are very rarely what they seem.
 
Whatever your opinions on the paranormal - be it ghosts, portents or spoon-bending - it's clear that there is a lot more at work than the simple telling of fantastical stories. Even if you believe in the supernatural, it's unlikely that you are liable to designate every medium as the genuine article, or every ghost as a genuine echo of a life long passed. The internet and TV are brimming with shows on things that go bump in the night or individuals who are more than happy to take your money to show off their gifts. If not all of them are the Real Thing (or, indeed, any of them) then why do we buy so enthusiastically into their tricks? What supports their industry and why, given the right circumstances, do we even believe in the paranormal ourselves, unprompted?

Richard Wiseman approaches these questions with a brilliant mix of personal experience, academic knowledge, and an approachable laugh-out-loud snark that doesn't turn into full-out sneering. While it would be too easy to hold up the banner of "SCIENCE!" and use it to insult those who subscribe to the paranormal without further explanation, Wiseman instead takes the approach of focusing on what the psychology of paranormality is and how, through people's natural draw and experimentations in the supernatural, it actually taught science some amazing facts about our minds that we might never otherwise have known. He is critical of those who use their knowledge to deliberately fool other people, but always has a respect for the skill and knowledge involved to do so. While some more innocent believers may be a little irrational or annoying (see the 'reincarnation of Catherine Howard' who followed them around on one of their experiments), he nevertheless gives them some respect.

Whatever your beliefs in the supernatural, this book is well worth a read. For those who don't believe, the book is a fantastic insight into the psychology of our minds that allows us to perceive such spooky goings on as we do. For those who do believe, this insight shows how you can separate out the fakes from the potentially genuine.

Prof. Richard Wiseman

The book is very approachable in its style and for a non-fiction book has a nice narrative quality that leads you through all the short sections that make up each chapter. There are little exercises you can do at home to try out your own weird-and-wibbly skills. The gimmick that really made me smile was the Q.R Readers scattered throughout. These symbols can be scanned with your smart phone and will instantly take you to a video of a study that is mentioned in the book. If you don't have a smart phone don't worry - he also has included the website addresses themselves.

Some of the topics on offer are:

• Testing a 'psychic' dog
• Fortune Telling
• Out of body experiences and how to have your own
• The psychology of spoon bending and other magic tricks
• How two young girls and an apple on a piece of string created a whole new religion
• The power of cults
• How to contact the dead
• The tale of the talking mongoose in the Isle of Wight
• Ghost-hunting and how a group of psychologists almost shook a house to pieces
• Hypnotism, brainwashing and the psychology of persuasion
• Did Abraham Lincoln foresee his own murder? 
• The remarkable world of sleep science
• The instant superhero kit

And many more.

It's well worth a look for anyone interested in psychology or the supernatural, why not give it a go?