Tag Archives: science

Fragments of Reality seen through Media’s Mirror

Colorful paper fragments radiating from scientific diagrams against a dark cosmic background

We live in a real world, with real issues, trying to make real decisions that will have real consequences. The problem with all that is that it’s getting difficult to determine what is actually real.

For the past three centuries, science has been the driver of reality. It was a systematic quest to discover objective truth, beyond refute. As such, it overturned old beliefs that were formed over millennia based on religion and tribal affiliation. Before science, beliefs were how we dealt with things we could not understand. The problem with that was there was no way to debate belief. I had what I believed, and you had what you believed. As such, our collective perceived reality was fractured along the fault lines of what we believed. There was no universal understanding of what was “real.” Many wars were fought and many people died because of incompatible beliefs.

Beliefs are the default way we make sense of the world. It takes a lot less of the brain’s processing power to simply believe something than to question it and seek to verify it in some provable way. The enlightenment and the adoption of science represented a huge leap forward in human development by moving our understanding of the world from the lowest levels of cognition, based solely on what we could see or hear, to a more rational, mutually agreed upon, perspective. It allowed us to rise above beliefs and start to create a common sense of reality based on verifiable facts. It also unleashed our ability to innovate by building on a solid base defined by scientific discoveries.

Most of the last 300 years has been marked by science slowly replacing beliefs as the lens through which we view the world. But that progress has been systematically eroded over the past 3 decades and I suspect that the biggest culprit in this has been media. Yes, the same media most of us work in, write about and analyze. The very same media we both create and consume. If we are looking for someone to blame for the current state of the world, perhaps we should look in the mirror.

It’s media – our media – that has reversed the tide from embracing science back to building a bulwark of our beliefs. Today, our understanding of what is real has not only become fragmented, it has been split asunder, with a yawning chasm in the middle. Science used to supply the middle ground of reality. Today, many ignore science as an inconvenient truth.

Here’s the most frightening thing about that. Those ignorant of science are in charge of consequential things, like healthcare, social programs, environmental protection agencies and national defense. As astrophysicist Adam Frank said in a recent essay, “Now we live in a time when science denial inhabits the highest levels of power and receives broad acceptance.”

But for those who choose to ignore science, an alternate reality has to be presented. If that reality happens to align with pre-existing beliefs, it’s a much easier sell. And it’s exactly that human foible that has been seized upon by all types of media because, as it turns out, polarizing for profit is a pretty sweet gig. It has massively driven up advertising revenues for media companies. Some – admirably – still try to cling to the journalistic standard of trying to tell the truth. Others have rushed headlong into making a business of portraying alternate realities based not on science, or the truth, but on profit projections. If you were to look for the single biggest factor leading to the sorry state of the world today, it would not be Donald Trump, or MAGA, or any political movement. It would be media’s deliberate abdication of its responsibility to tell the truth because there are other – more profitable – alternatives.

We have to do better than this. Maybe – just maybe this week’s show of solidarity from all the major networks, including Fox News, in protest of the banning of CNN, MSNow and Politico from the White House because of their reporting of events that challenged Trump’s Alternate Reality will – finally – be a step in a more truthful direction.

Face Time in the Real World is Important

For all the advances made in neuroscience, we still don’t fully understand how our brains respond to other people. What we do know is that it’s complex.

Join the Chorus

Recent studies, including this one from Rochester University, are showing that when we see someone we recognize, the brain responds with a chorus of neuronal activity. Neurons from different parts of the brain fire in unison, creating a congruent response that may simultaneously pull from memory, from emotion, from the rational regions of our prefrontal cortex and from other deep-seated areas of our brain. The firing of any one neuron may be relatively subtle, but together this chorus of neurons can create a powerful response to a person. This cognitive choir represents our total comprehension of an individual.

Non-Verbal Communication

“You’ll have your looks, your pretty face. – And don’t underestimate the importance of body language!” – Ursula, The Little Mermaid

Given that we respond to people with different parts of the brain, it makes sense that we use part of the brain we didn’t realize when communicating with someone else. In 1967, psychologist Albert Mehrabian attempted to pin this down with some actual numbers, publishing a paper in which he put forth what became known as Mehrabian’s Rule: 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice and 55% is body language.

Like many oft-quoted rules, this one is typically mis-quoted. It’s not that words are not important when we communication something. Words convey the message. But it’s the non-verbal part that determines how we interpret the message – and whether we trust it or not.

Folk wisdom has told us, “Your mouth is telling me one thing, but your eyes are telling me another.” In this case, folk wisdom is right. We evolved to respond to another person with our whole bodies, with our brains playing the part of conductor. Maybe the numbers don’t exactly add up to Mehrabian’s neat and tidy ratio, but the importance of non-verbal communication is undeniable. We intuitively pick up incredibly subtle hints: a slight tremor in the voice, a bead of sweat on the forehead, a slight turn down of one corner of the mouth, perhaps a foot tapping or a finger trembling, a split-second darting of the eye. All this is subconsciously monitored, fed to the brain and orchestrated into a judgment about a person and what they’re trying to tell us. This is how we evolved to judge whether we should build trust or lose it.

Face to Face vs Face to Screen

Now, we get to the question you knew was coming, “What happens when we have to make these decisions about someone else through a screen rather than face to face?”

Given that we don’t fully understand how the brain responds to people yet, it’s hard to say how much of our ability to judge whether we should convey trust or withhold it is impaired by screen-to-screen communication. My guess is that the impairment is significant, probably well over 50%. It’s difficult to test this in a laboratory setting, given that it generally requires some type of neuroimaging, such as an fMRI scanner. In order to present a stimulus for the brain to respond to when the subject is strapped in, a screen is really the only option. But common sense tells me – given the sophisticated and orchestrated nature of our brain’s social responses – that a lot is lost in translation from a real-world encounter to a screen recording.

New Faces vs Old Ones

If we think of how our brains respond to faces, we realize that in today’s world, a lot of our social judgements are increasing made without face-to-face encounters. In a case where we know someone, we will pull forward a snapshot of our entire history with that person. The current communication is just another data point in a rich collection of interpersonal experience. One would think that would substantially increase our odds of making a valid judgement.

But what if we must make a judgement on someone we’ve never met before, and have only seen through a screen; be it a TikTok post, an Instagram Reel, a YouTube video or a Facebook Post? What if we have to decide whether to believe an influencer when making an important life decision? Are we willing to rely on a fraction of our brain’s capacity when deciding whether to place trust in someone we’ve never met?