The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [68]
I first met Mullis at a social gathering after a conference several years ago. After a few beers loosened both of our tongues, he was only too happy to regale me with stories about his close encounter with an extraterrestrial (a “glowing raccoon” he says), his belief in astrology, ESP, and the paranormal (he says he doesn’t “believe” but he “knows” they are real), his skepticism about global warming, HIV, and AIDS (he doesn’t believe that humans cause global warming or that HIV causes AIDS), and his unadulterated endorsement of just about any claim that is routinely debunked in Skeptic magazine—claims that 99 percent of all scientists reject. I remember sitting there, thinking, “I can’t believe this guy won a Nobel Prize! Are they just giving those things away to anyone these days?”
Well, now I think I know why Kary Mullis is a creative genius who also believes weird things: he has his pattern-detection filter dialed up to wide open, thereby availing himself to a wide variety of patterns, most of which are nonsense. But every now and again … It may be that 99 percent of scientists are skeptical of what Kary Mullis believes, but 99 percent of scientists never win a Nobel Prize.21
I documented a similar effect in my biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer (with Charles Darwin) of natural selection.22 Wallace was a brilliant synthesizer of masses of biological data into a few core principles that revolutionized ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary theory. In addition to being a pathbreaking scientist, Wallace was also a firm believer in phrenology, spiritualism, and psychic phenomena. He routinely attended séances and wrote serious scientific papers defending the paranormal against the skepticism of his fellow scientists as vociferously as he proffered natural selection over the views of his creationist colleagues. In hindsight, Wallace was ahead of his time in defending women’s rights and in wildlife preservation, but he was on the wrong side in the anti-vaccination campaign that he helped lead in the late nineteenth century. He got himself into a legal entanglement with a flat-Earth defender—after proving to the lunatic that the earth really was round Wallace spent years in court trying to collect the prize money that was offered for the debate. Wallace fell for a scam surrounding a “lost poem” of Edgar Allan Poe’s (allegedly written to cover a hotel bill in California), and even eventually broke with Darwin over the evolution of the human brain, which Wallace believed could not be the product of natural selection. He had what I call a heretic personality, or “the unique pattern of relatively permanent traits that makes an individual open to subjects at variance with those considered authoritative.” Wallace’s patternicity filter was porous enough to let through both revolutionary and ridiculous ideas at the same time. Perhaps, we might speculate, the gain on the anterior cingulate cortex of Mullis and Wallace was turned down, thereby enabling their creative genius to emerge, along with their propensity for paranormal piffle.23
There is, in fact, good evidence to support the hypothesis that the anterior cingulate cortex is our error-detection network. Studies show, for example, that the ACC in particular becomes very active during the famous Stroop task, in which the names of colors are presented to subjects in either the same or a different color than the name denotes. The task is to identify the color of the letters only. When the name of the color and the color of the letters are the same then identifying the color of the letters is easy, but when the name of the color and the color of the letters are different, identifying the color of the letters is greatly slowed by the cognitive conflict inherent in the task. This is, in essence, an error-detection task.24 Another example is a go/no-go task in which subjects are to press a button when an A appears on a screen in conjunction with an X but not in conjunction with other letters. When a letter combination similar to AX is used—such as AK