did you know that Australia doesn't exist the government lies to us really it's clearly a conspiracy theory how can anyone believe that this question is actually deeper than it seems to answer it we first need to understand how our brains interpret the word and form our perception of [Music] reality the human brain gets a constant flow of information and its main job is to make sense of it it does this by finding connection between events in the environment that's how we learn connecting thunder and lightning smoke and fire Shakir and Lane it's totally natural but
sometimes our brain can link things that are not really related creating Superstition and false belief being a bit superstitious is natural too though in one study monkeys had to learn which pictures were better than others based on arbitrary ranking if they chose correctly they got to treat but here a Twist sometimes there was no established ranking and the treats were giv at random guess what the monkeys still created their own rankings even when there wasn't this shows that seeing connections where there are none is a byproduct of how we learn however according to other study
conspiracy theory Believers tend to form stronger superstitions the participants were looking at a series of random coin flips and they were asked if they could see any pattern people who believed in conspiracy theories were more likely to see a pattern and they were more confident they could have predicted the next flips spoiler they couldn't you might argue that most people even those who believe in conspiracy theories can usually tell real patterns from fake ones so something about conspiracy theory restricts our normal learning process so what makes our brains confidence that some connections are real the
answer is quite simple direct evidence supporting the existence of the connection and the process of updating our expectation based on new evidence is called reinforcement learning for example imagine you never tried ice cream you might assume it could taste good and this is going to be your primary expectation when you try it and realize that it tastes great that would be your collected evidence and it would update your expectation that ice cream is tasty next time you eat it it is well established that the brain signals this update through releasing a molecule called dopamine dopamine
is released every time that reality exceeds our expectation something called positive prediction error dopamine help us learn from rewards like ice cream tasting good or avoiding bad things like stepping on a rake at least for some of us if dopamine reinforces our beliefs could it also be responsible for believing in conspiracy theories scientists have studied this by artificially increasing dopamine levels in people and seeing how it affects their learning people with higher dopamine levels were more likely to see pattern in random images and words in random letter combinations but this didn't change much for those
who already believed in conspiracy theories true most people don't participate in crazy experiments to to increase dopamine every day but there are some conditions in which the brain actually can make too much dopamine like in psychosis and paranoia so it seems that too much dopamine can make people see connections that aren't real which might explain the mechanism Behind The Conspiracy Theory beliefs so what exactly about the conspiracy theories causes our brains to produce more dopamine first conspiracy theories are designed to grab our attention cues that are potentially important for us like strats from war conflicts
political scandals deca's new girlfriend can all increase our dopam levels second they offer simple explanation for complex issues in fact all conspiracy theories use common methods to simplify the reality such as reducing the number of possible explanations blaming a single personal group and creating an Us Versus Them battle third conspiracy theorist trigger strong emotions and they appeal to Ender distrust and fear the engaged parts of our brains are less rational leading us more quickly to inter conclusions for confirmation bias it makes us look for information that supports what we already believe for example if you
think a certain theory is true you will notice things that support it and reject things that don't so next time you hear a wild conspiracy theory remember it's not just about believing the unbelievable our brains are wired to find patterns and rewards sometime leading us astray but if it's true and everyone is possibly a victim of a new conspiracy theory do we stand any chance of seeing things clearly that's actually a good question some researchers studied the trending patterns of a well-known conspiracy theory on Twitter what they found out the best ways to fight a
conspiracy theory is a constant fact checking and the deletion of specific tweets to prevent the spreading understanding the brain and our instinctive behaviors can help us navigate a world full of information and misinformation stay curious and skeptical
