photo of New York Times journalists: janeb13 on Pixabay
“hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a nonstop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave” - Janel Comeau, mastodon, January 25, 2024.
I was thinking about someone I had known quite well for decades, and was shaking my head at the really strange bits of nonsense they were sharing online. The person in question is an adult, well educated, with steady employment, who had slipped into a condition I privately think of as whackadoodle. I may have been unkind, but I was not wrong.
Quite abruptly the impact of misinformation struck me.
We use information to learn about the world in which we live. Each of us has a personal composite sense of reality, shaped by our experiences. Our sense of what is real is built up from a lifetime accumulation of learning experiences. A portion of that reality will be a set of culturally agreed upon concepts and a portion is idiosyncratic, or particular to the individual. Then there is a wider rang of globally accepted truths. For example, global concepts include science and technology that are responsible for bridges staying up everywhere. Cultural concepts may not be universally shared. The Australian aboriginal concept of dreamtime is a reality for that group, but not elsewhere. Finally, there is the idiosyncratic and highly personal set of ideas of the ‘lucky hat’ variety.
In the case above, that person seemed to believe the strange things they were saying. It was all very real to them. Their belief was idiosyncratic, and neither culturally nor globally accepted as truth. And yet, they had lost the distinction between what they thought was real and what the much wider global community considered true.
The ideas my whackadoodle friend espoused are shared amongst a group of like minded individuals online. It does not confer upon them a separate cultural identity; they are similar only in this very small set of ideas. But ideas can spread widely online, and be accepted without ever undergoing any testing in the real world. Somewhere along the line some stray bits of information led to the idea. What if that information was wrong, poorly grounded in reality, or a deliberate bit of misdirection?
Reality testing, a concept developed by Freud, is a process that helps us see a situation for what it really is, rather than what we hope or fear it might be. It is the process by which we crosscheck what we think might be real with what we know is true. It is a crucially important process.
So, what if the crosschecking involves going back to the same sources that brought you the strange idea in the first place. That may not bring any additional clarity, but there will be validation. For example, Friend A tells you mutual Friend B has said something unpleasant about you. You are doing some reality testing if your response is to talk to Friend B, or even Friend C, seeking more information. You may also work it through by yourself and conclude, no, Friend B did not/could not have said that. If, however, your response is merely to ask Friend A is that really true, and Friend A repeats, over and over, yes it is true, well you are not reality testing; you are in an echo chamber.
That roughly is how misinformation works. It has the potential to subvert healthy reality testing, which is a conscious process of critical thought. The thought is, hold on, that can’t be true. Without that, you end up with quick and mindless reactions, and those are the very bread and butter of social media. Eliciting a fast response is the goal of anyone who wants to seize your attention with charm, authority or fear. They prefer that you react without thinking.
Alternatively, you could think without reacting. You can ask questions, check statements against your own experience and be willing to question what you have been told. Then talk to someone else and get some feedback.
In small doses, odd ideas used to be politely referred to as eccentricity. But the current problem with misinformation is the sheer scale of it. Excessive misinformation carries the risk of interfering with accurate reality testing, which depends on the reliability of information.
Our conscious minds operate in a way akin to journalists. A journalist observes an event. They collect facts and compose a narrative based on the questions who, what, where, when and why.
Our minds collect and organize information the same way, acquiring facts and building connections between things to create explanations. As the narrative becomes more complex, unconscious processes step in to set the narrative into a wider context of individual knowledge. At this point, multiple links form between new information, developing narratives and old learning, linking them all together in a complex web of cross correlations and associations. That part of the process is automatic and unconscious. The end result is a durable grasp of a topic.
The unconscious end of the process is not fact finding, it is fact integrating. The unconscious is more like an editor. The editor takes a different perspective. It is in charge of folding the material the journalist brings to it into the bigger picture it holds in memory. The unconscious in effect builds a personal version of reality. The whole process depends on the quality of information gathered at the conscious front end.
What if the original information is incorrect or incomplete? No one has perfect knowledge, so it is inevitable that voids of information, bias, misunderstandings and internal conflicts will develop.
Eric Topol discusses misinformation about the pandemic in his recent interview with John Howard, author of We Want Them Infected:
I write columns on substack. There are occasions when I get feedback from others. I can usually see the thread between what I wrote and someone’s take on it, but sometimes I can discern no connection at all. I end up asking myself, how did they get that out of what I wrote? A colleague told me of the same sort of experience. His doctoral thesis had been written up in the press but, he told me, “They got it completely wrong. What they wrote was the opposite of what I said.”
In graduate school, I watched two different students in two different classes get up and do presentations on a topic. Usually, in such seminar classes, the presenter’s topic was background material for their theses. On these two occasions, I watched the student being challenged in class for errors they had made in analysis. These were really big errors, obvious to everyone but themselves. The in class discussions addressed the problems. Neither of the students accepted the feedback. Neither proceeded in the program. Each had been told of a fatal flaw in their work and, in one case I know of, left the program rather than adjust their ideas.
The unconscious feeds information forward to our conscious selves in lumps that have specific attributes. It feels real and believable. The recall is immediate. You feel sure you have the answer. After a good night’s sleep, the student does well on the test because the information is available to them quickly and hangs together in a meaningful way. Information flows back easily when it has first undergone unconscious consolidation.
These are the hallmarks of unconscious information processing. It is experienced as immediate, real and true. Retrieval of what we now call knowledge flows efficiently and easily, as needed. In common parlance, you are in the zone.
This also means that you are at the mercy of whatever your unconscious serves up to you. It only knows what it has learned through you. You, in turn, accept it because it comes from you. The call is coming from inside the house.
The implications for too much misinformation are clear: it may result in distortions in personal beliefs about reality.
Critical thought takes effort, but it is worthwhile. First of all, it improves memory. If you stop and think about what you learn, that information is likely to be retained more accurately and more efficiently. Another benefit is that the initial extra consideration improves the quality of subsequent decisions. It is why the advice from Maya Angelou, “When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time”, is so helpful. People really will show you who they are. Pay attention to what you are seeing, not what you think you are seeing. Do not just react, consider.
One can think of the conscious mind as the journalist, out there gathering the facts and developing a narrative. Who, what, where...but where does that leave unconscious processing? It has a role something like the editor. Yah, kid, I know you told me the facts. But lemme give you the big picture. Here’s the real story you’re gonna write. (Well, that’s my admittedly dated idea of an editor).
The journalist has a choice: accept the editor’s version and write the story he has been told, or go back out there, collect more information and do some more thinking. If the journalist does not do their job, the editor will do it for them.
The problem arises when the editor rewrites the stories for the front page and they are not true.
If you want a reliable editor, you need to teach it. You do that by setting aside the quick reactions and doing some reality testing. If not, the editor responds for you and tells you what the real story is. The editor can be wrong. Unfortunately, the editor’s version is also the one you believe.