The Information Diet Read online

  Politics is the area in which scientists have studied the psychological causes of bias the most. It’s easy to get people to self-identify, and universities tend to have more of an interest in political science than in other realms of social studies. But you can also see the results of this kind of bias in areas other than politics: talk to a Red Sox fan about whether or not the Yankees are the best team in baseball’s history, and you’ll see strong bias come out. Talk to MacBook owners about the latest version of Windows and you may see the same phenomenon.

  We’ve likely evolved this way because it’s safer. Forming a heuristic means survival: watching your caveman friend eat some berries and die doesn’t make you want to conduct a test to see if those berries kill people. It makes you want to not eat those berries anymore, and to tell your friends not to eat those berries either.

  Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber took reasoning and turned it on its head. After all, if all the evidence around reasoning shows that we’re actually pretty bad at using it to make better choices, then maybe that’s not reason’s primary function. In their paper “Why do humans reason?,”[43] they argue instead that “reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.” Mercier and Sperber argue that our minds may have evolved to value persuasion over truth. It certainly is plausible— human beings are social animals, and persuasion is a form of social power.

  The seeds of opinion can be dangerous things. Once we begin to be persuaded of something, we not only seek out confirmation for that thing, but we also refute fact even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. With confirmation bias and Nyhan and Reifle’s backfire effect in full force, we find ourselves both addicted to more information and vulnerable to misinformation for the sake of our egos.

  This MSNBC Is Going Straight to My Amygdala

  Neuroscience is the new outer space. It’s a vacuum of promise and fantasy waiting to be filled with science and data. There’s no greater, no more mysterious, no more misunderstood organ in our bodies than our brains. If one weighed the pages of mythology around the brain against that of all scientific papers ever written about it, the scale would likely tip towards myth.

  The fields of psychology and neuroscience are filled with misinformation, disagreement, untested hypotheses, and the occasional consensus-based, verifiable, and repeatably tested theory. And so it’s a struggle for me: on one hand, I’m preaching about information diets, but—in trying to synthesize my own research in the field—I run the risk of accidentally feeding you junk information myself. On the other hand, so much of both fields is applicable to an information diet that it’s impossible not to draw on them.

  Banting had an advantage on me. When he wrote his Letter on Corpulence, the Calorie was a unit used to measure the energy consumption of steam engines. Science had not scratched the surface of what he’d touched on yet. I’m writing in the midst of the dawn of science in this field; we know some, but not a lot. It’s as scientifically accurate to say, “This MSNBC is going straight to my amygdala,” as it is to say, “This ice cream is going straight to my thighs.” Only, now we actually have more information and more accurate research about how ice cream actually affects your thighs.

  Let’s start with some acknowledgement that our brains are not exactly like the digestive and endocrine systems. Direct comparisons tend to be ridiculous: the rules for how our minds store and process information are different from how our bodies store and process food. Food consumption has immediate effects: drink an extraordinary amount of water, and you may get a fatal case of water intoxication. The same is not true for information; few people have died directly from reading too much PerezHilton.com in a given day.

  Cognitive processing does, however, cause physiological changes just like our food does—only not in the same way. Up until a few years ago, it was thought that the human brain became fixed at some point during early childhood. Now science has shown that this isn’t the case; our brains constantly adapt and change their physiological structure. Every time we learn something (according to neuroscientists), it results in a physiological change in the brain.

  This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity, and a quote from Dr. Donald Hebb sums it up: “neurons that fire together, wire together.” More explicitly, Hebb says:

  “Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or “trace”) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability.… When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”[44]

  The human brain is constantly adapting to experiences and the choices the mind makes. In London, taxi drivers must pass a comprehensive exam known as “The Knowledge,” which requires them to instantly create routes for passengers without the use of a GPS or a map. It’s considered the world’s most comprehensive taxi driver’s test, and it takes up to four years to prepare for and pass it.

  According to scientists at the University College London, this is why London cab drivers have a differently shaped hippocampus than “regular” people.[45] The hippocampus is important to the brain’s ability to move short-term memories to long-term memory and to help with spatial navigation, the skills the cab drivers in London need the most. As a cab driver exercises this part of the brain more, the brain adjusts and lends more neurons to the region. When that happens, old circuits are replaced by new ones.

  That’s one example of how doing things changes the physical composition of the brain. What about just reading something? Could something with a lower cognitive load—like watching your favorite television program— alter your brain’s structure?

  The answer is likely yes. Every time you learn something new, it results in a physiological change in your brain. In 2005, in the paper “Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain,” Quiroga et al. found that a single cell in the human brain fired off only when a picture of Jennifer Aniston alone was shown to a test subject. Another, distinct neuron showed up when the subject was shown a picture of Halle Berry, another for a picture of the Sydney Opera House, and another for the Baha’i temple. [46]

  They even found a correlation between the neuron that fired off when a picture was viewed of the common landmark or celebrity, and the string of letters representing the corresponding name. In other words: a picture of the Sydney Opera House fired off the same neuron that seeing the string “Sydney Opera” did.

  But that’s about memory. What about beliefs?

  Dr. Ryota Kanai and some colleagues at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience took self-described liberals and conservatives and studied their brains via fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). They found something remarkable: the liberal brains had structural differences in the anterior cingulate cortex—the region of the brain responsible for empathy and conflict monitoring.[47] Conservative brain structures, by contrast, had enlarged right amygdali—the part of the brain responsible for picking up threatening facial expressions and responding to threatening situations aggressively.

  The science is admittedly sketchy. Kanai’s test group was rather limited— just a small group of students. It also doesn’t explicitly prove that environmental factors had anything to do with the increased sizes of the respective brain regions; this could be genetic.

  That said, I contacted Kanai and asked him if these differences in brain region sizes could be the result of media consumption and other environmental factors. Here’s what he had to say:

  “From our study, it’s hard to resolve the chicken or the egg causality of brain structure and political orientation. I think this needs to be further explored with additional empirical work. As you suggested, exposure to politically tinged informatio
n could have influenced people’s political opinions, and it would be very interesting to see if such changes are reflected in brain structure. This is an empirical question we have to answer by more experiments.”

  I also contacted another respected neuroscientist in the field, Dr. Marco Iacoboni at UCLA, to see what he had to say:

  “I think it’s plausible, although unprovable at this stage. I mean, any decision we make is based on neurophysiological activity, it doesn’t come from the gods. If people, on average, become more or less liberal, in some way something must have happened in their brain. The tricky issue is the chain of causes and effects.”

  Whether or not media consumption could physically alter your brain to be more partisan is unknown. But what’s known is that whenever you learn something new, the result is a physiological change in the body—just like whenever you eat. Another similarity is that we’re not in direct control over what changes get made to our brains, and where.

  Search Frenzy

  Back in 1954, psychologist James Olds found that if he allowed a rat to pull a lever and administer a shock to its own lateral hypothalamus, a shock that produced intense pleasure, the rat would keep pressing the lever, over and over again, until it died. He found that “the control exercised over the animal’s behavior by means of this reward is extreme, possibly exceeding that exercised by any other reward previously used in animal experimentation.”[48] This launched the study of brain stimulation reinforcement, which has been shown to exist in all species tested, including humans. At the heart of brain stimulus reinforcement is a neurotransmitter called dopamine.

  Dopamine makes us seek, which causes us to receive more dopamine, which causes us to seek more.[49] That jolt you feel when you get a new email in your inbox, or hear the sound of your cell phone’s ding? That’s dopamine, and it puts you in a frenzy. This used to be helpful: our dopamine systems helped us, as a species, to find resources, acquire knowledge, and innovate. But in an age of abundance, there are new consequences.

  Dopamine receptors often put us in a loop. With all the inputs available to us today—all the various places where notifications come about: our email boxes, our text messages, our various social network feeds, and blogs to read—our brains throw us into a runaway loop in which we’re not able to focus on a given task at hand. Rather, we keep pursuing new dopamine reinforcement from the deluge of notifications headed our way.

  We got this way because of evolution. We’re wired to seek. For thousands of years, those that sought information got to live longer, got to have sex, and pass on their genes. We’re information-consumption machines that evolved in a world where information about survival was scarce. But now it’s abundant. With cheap information all around us, if we don’t consume it responsibly, it could have serious health consequences.

  Chapter 5. Welcome to Information Obesity

  I remember when, I remember

  I remember when I lost my mind

  There was something so pleasant about that place

  Even your emotions have an echo in so much space

  And when you're out there without care

  Yeah, I was out of touch

  But it wasn't because I didn't know enough

  I just knew too much

  Does that make me crazy?

  Does that make me crazy?

  Does that make me crazy?

  Possibly

  —Gnarls Barkley

  Confident Ignorance

  In 2011, comedian Jon Stewart stated that Fox News viewers were “the most consistently misinformed” viewers of the media. It set off a bit of a controversy, and Politifact, a reputable fact-checking organization run by the St. Petersberg Times in Florida, jumped on the story.

  They pointed to public polling from Pew and the University of Maryland— reputable pollsters—that found that viewers of shows like the O’Reilly Factor were actually just as knowledgeable about politics (through correct answers to questions like “Who is the Speaker of the House?” and “Who is the president of Russia?”), scored as more highly informed than average media viewers, and were in roughly the same league as viewers of the Daily Show, PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio.

  Stewart responded by apologizing to Politifact for being misinformed, but then fired back with a laundry list of news stories that Politifact itself stated that Fox had gotten wrong: headlines like “Texas Board of Education May Eliminate Christmas and the Constitution from Textbooks” and “Cash for Clunkers Will Give Government Complete Access to Your Computer.”

  The truth is, they’re both right, and pinpoint our new kind of ignorance: one that comes from the consumption of information, not the lack of it. The new ignorance has three flavors—all of which lead us to information obesity: agnotology, epistemic closure, and filter failure.

  Agnotology

  Robert Proctor is an historian at Stanford University, and the first historian to testify against the tobacco industry. Through his study, he coined the term agnotology to describe what Big Tobacco pushed on society in the later half of the twentieth century, and what the coal, petroleum, steel, and other industries through the American Enterprise Institute and the national Chamber of Commerce are doing to us now. He defines agnotology as the study of culturally induced doubt, particularly through the production of seemingly factual data. It’s a modern form of manufactured ignorance.

  Agnotological ignorance does not affect those who don’t tune in. It affects those who do. At the University of New Hampshire, Professor Lawrence Hamilton polled 2,051 people across different regions in the United States. He asked them how informed they were about climate change, where they stood on the issue, and what their political party was.

  The results shouldn’t be surprising if you’ve read this far: those who claimed to know the most about climate change (as a result of consuming news or scientific data) had the most divergent opinions of its cause. Those who claimed to know very little about climate change were closer together in their opinions.

  In 2008, Pew found a similar result around the climate change debate: 19% of Republicans with college degrees believed that global warming was happening because of human activity, versus 31% for Republicans without college degrees. Eighty-five percent of Democrats with college degrees believed that global warming was happening because of human activity versus 52% of those without degrees. The more informed someone is, the more hardened their beliefs become; whether they’re correct is an entirely different matter.

  Epistemic Closure

  The CATO institute is a right-leaning, pro-business, libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. The offices of CATO are not lined with people holding signs that say “keep your government hands of my Medicare”—but rather with smart people who tend to believe that market forces can settle things more effectively and efficiently than government regulations. While they’ll find more comfort at the cocktail parties on the right, these politicos tend to hang out by themselves, unable to find an intellectually honest home (or bar) in either party. Most Republicans identify with libertarians. But not all libertarians identify with Republicans.

  Julian Sanchez is one of those folks from CATO who is probably too smart and too honest to get invited to too many cocktail parties on the right or on the left. In early 2010, Sanchez described a problem he saw with the right:

  “One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)”[60]

  Climate change is a perfect example of epistemic closure: science is liberal; climate change is from science; thus climate change is a liberal consp
iracy. Every news outlet that reports on it must also be corrupted by liberal influence, and thus can be dismissed. But the left succumbs to epistemic closure too.

  Look at the left’s unyielding relationship to organized labor: no institution with that much money is unquestionably good, yet you’ll find many a left-wing operative in Washington looking at you sternly if you question a union’s motives. Talk with a liberal about former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s idea that teachers ought to be kept on the payrolls based on their performance, rather than their seniority, and you’ll find yourself in a screaming match pretty quickly.

  With its general distrust of pharmaceutical companies, the left is still listening to the likes of Jim Carey and Jenny McCarthy on the now-settled question of whether measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination causes autism. (It doesn’t.) The left still bristles at the question of nuclear energy, though for every person that dies from nuclear energy, 4,000 people die from coal production.[61]

  Epistemic closure is a tool that empowers agnotological ignorance. As certain information is produced, all other sources of information are dismissed as unreliable or worse, conspiratorial.

  Filter Failure

  You don’t need the liberal or conservative media to make you ignorant. It can come from the production and consumption of information from your friends, and the personalization of that information. The friends we choose and the places we go all give us a new kind of bubble within which to consume information. My experience of delusion on the Dean campaign wasn’t just about my media consumption, but also the association with people who thought, consumed, and believed exactly as I did.