You Aren’t Going Crazy: The “Continuity of the Nervous System” in High-Pressure Situations

Speaker 0:00

Good day. Welcome to Mindpilot. Today we have a special guest that we've had a number of times on Mindpilot, and that is Dr. Matthew Sharps. This is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps. Thank you for joining today. So, Dr. Sharps, you have a new book out, uh, and it's focused on the forensic view. Can you tell us a first of all what the name of the book is?

Speaker 1 0:31

Yeah, sure. I uh do a monthly blog for the magazine Psychology Today. It's called The Forensic View, in which we apply the way we do psychology in a criminal investigation to a variety of things, mainly in the criminal justice world. But the full title of this book is actually The Forensic View, Investigative Psychology, Law Enforcement, Space Aliens, Exploration and the Nature of Madness. You might wonder why you'd cram that many topics into one book or even onto one planet. But the point here is that the way you do a criminal investigation involves this rather specific logical type of analysis. And you might be seen as cynical or skeptical, but in general, you're in effect almost almost taking a Cartesian view. What you're doing is doubting things, looking at them not with abject skepticism, but just to see if they're actually true in real-world terms. What we find is that the techniques used in a criminal investigation from the standpoint of a an investigative psychologist apply not just to the realm of law enforcement or the realm of criminal investigation, but also to other things, to the investigation understanding of paranormal sightings, things like Bigfoot and the UFOs and the rest of the cryptological zoo there, to questions of exploration. That seems a little bit odd, but if you think about it, explorers and scientists are eyewitnesses to whatever they're looking at, and frequently those eyewitness accounts are interpretive. Think about poor Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean, okay? He comes in on his ships and damned if he didn't see mermaids, and there they were bobbing in the water, these mermaids. And Columbus saw them. He literally saw them, but he writes that they weren't as attractive as you might have expected. Now what he was looking at were West Indian manatees. Columbus also didn't find them seductive either. Let's hope nobody does. But the point is nobody Columbus had ever met knew what a manatee was, and neither did he, but he did have a mythological background for mermaids, and he sees these perfectly normal, innocent sea mammals chomping away on their seaweed, he decides he's looking at mermaids. The same thing happens as we see in the book, in the sciences, and also in psychology, in the way we conceptualize the I'm using the artichaic term here, madness, because what actually do you call this? Everything, every term seems to be offensive to someone, whether you say mental illness, whatever you say, well, that offense will change the nature of the way you interpret the psychology. That's what the book is about, really, how we see and interpret the world around us, taking in this case a forensic view.

Speaker 3:18

Wow. That is quite a broad range of topics that coalesce on eyewitness.

Speaker 1 3:27

Exactly so.

Speaker 3:28

So this podcast is primarily for first responders working in different areas of that. How might this book be useful to them?

Speaker 1 3:39

Aaron Powell Well, we discussed a great deal of uh of um a great many topics that I also discussed to some degree, although in a modified and much, much more diminished way, space requirements on my Forensic View blog are are are fairly, fairly uh inflexible. They have to be. But what we can see here, for example, is how approaching um criminal investigation, how approaching it with reference to an understanding of the psychology involved can really be helpful for the officer. Good example. Okay, you think about the height of a suspect. It's hugely important. There was a big kafuffle a little while back about some poor witness who is victim, actually, and he uh estimated the guy's height as four inches higher, taller than it was. Well, does that mean he's he's evil? Does that mean he's lying, et cetera, et cetera? When we start looking at the human ability to understand height, one of the things I report here in the book is the fact that when we asked people in experimental settings, we've got good control here, we asked them to estimate heights. Um, when we ask them to estimate by number, well, they'll give us a number, five foot eight, six foot, four, five foot four, whatever. And it's usually wrong. But then we asked the same person, okay, was the person tall or short? Well, fair enough, the six footers are gonna be tall, the five foot four, you might consider them short or shorter, certainly. We didn't find that at all. People are gonna tell us the six footers are short, they're telling us people five foot three are tall. The verbal and the arithmetic, if you will, the mathematical estimates, didn't have anything to do with each other at all. How can we be so lousy at making estimates of height? Well, this really is pertinent to law enforcement, even though it doesn't sound like it is. The explorer Magellan, his ships were the first to go around the world. He didn't make it, but his ships did. Well, the point is that in Patagonia down in South America, they encountered giants. These giants were so huge the Spaniards only came up to their waists, they said. And that wasn't because they saw them at a distance. One of these poor giants went with Magellan's boys out into the Pacific. They were there starving right there with him, okay? Well, these giants were of a particular tribal people down there that range about six feet tall. There's no they weren't giants in any conventional sense at all, but people looking at them with the expectation, my goodness, they're tall, start making these tremendous overestimates. You get another one, the first peoples to see the Grand Canyon first excuse me, the first Spanish explorers, I were guided by native peoples, of course, to the Grand Canyon. They were estimating towers down there in the Grand Canyon. I think I've seen the actual towers, so nobody knows exactly where they were. But it's about about the height of a man. They managed to climb down to him. They were taller than cathedral spires. So the point is this. We tend to think, hey, seeing is believing. We see something, the witness saw something. If the witness isn't lying, then by God, what they saw is what they saw. But the mind can turn a m uh a mermaid, excuse me, a an excuse me, a manatee into a mermaid. The mind can turn a six-footer into a five foot fiver, the mind can turn a blonde into a brunette, a t-shirt into a sweatshirt. All these factors are critically important, both in a criminal investigation, but also in who in whom you arrest in the first place. We have a variety of that kind of consideration in the book.

Speaker 6:56

There's quite a bit of research on eyewitness ID in a various um dimensions. Can you talk a little bit about some of the problems of eyewitness ID?

Speaker 1 7:08

Aaron Powell Absolutely. For one thing, when people are making an eyewitness identification, they're often in tremendous stress. The physiology of the stress response means that we have less less resources, really, less mental resources going to the parts of the brain, the frontal frontal lobes, the prefrontal cortex, where we make a lot of our interpretations and our considerations. So we may very well decide we've seen something that we haven't seen. Then that pattern becomes part of our memory. The problem there is that people tend to think of memory as if it were generally accurate. Now everybody knows they forget stuff, but a way of considering memory I often think of, and I talk about this in the book, is it's almost like those really good jigsaw puzzles, you you can't get them anymore. Those really good jigsaw puzzles, you can't get them anymore. They're made like out of hardwood or something. And they were so good, but it was so well put together, when you put the thing together, you could hang it on the wall, right? Well, if you took one of those, and let's say it's a picture of a barnyard or something, you turn it upside down and give it a good shake, well, pieces fall out, and then you put the puzzle back down. It still looks like a barnyard. There's a few details out, but that's what people think of forgetting as, okay? You remember your vacation, you remember the palm trees, you remember the beaches. Well, you don't remember your seat number, but you don't expect to. But that's not how memory works at all. Okay. Almost a hundred years ago, a a British psychologist named Barlett demonstrated that memories actually change in three directions. First of all, they get shorter. Well, that makes sense, you forget your seat number. But that means you only have the core of the memory. If you've traveled enough in the tropics, you may remember the palm trees, but were was that in in the Bahamas or was it in Mexico? Was it in Hawaii? Where do you see that? You may forget that. You may just have the core of the memory. The third part is that memory changes in the direction of personal belief. If we think we've seen something, then generally that is what we are willing to defend to the death that we've seen. And we could, you know, I know polygraphs obviously aren't admissible in court, but we could polygraph the heck out of you. We can do the interrogation again and again and again. And by God, you saw, I'm making this up, but you saw the manatees rob Columbus, okay? Whatever you saw is is what you saw. And people believe it. And confident witnesses tend to be very convincing to juries. So this these are some in a nutshell. We had talk in great detail about this both in this book and in other books and papers I've written. But the gist of it is this memory is not inflexible. It is not adamantine. It changes. It changes with time. We know again, talking about the things in the book. We know that every time you go through a memory, well, you're going to make some mistakes in that memory, okay? But we demonstrated experimentally that those mistakes then become part of the memory. Now, what I mean by that, I'll give you a very concrete example. In one of our studies, uh we asked people, okay, what did you see in this aspects of a specific crime scene? And we get about three and a half correct answers for every bad one, okay? So people are making about one mistake out of four. That's not good, but well, we can maybe live with it. The problem is the next time we asked them, we were getting one and a third correct responses for every mistake. By the third time, we were getting slightly more mistakes than correct answers. Every time people made the mistakes as they went through the memory, those mistakes became part of the memory. And I know we did not test this, but I can virtually guarantee you that if you'd given those people after time three a polygraph, they would have been sworn up and down that their mistakes were real memories because we expect that. It's part of our personal belief that our memories really reflect what we see in the world. And we'd have a lot of trouble functioning with confidence if we didn't have that belief. The only problem is that belief is wrong.

Speaker 10:41

Didn't you do a study where you asked people uh about looking at a crime scene and then you asked them what happened next?

Speaker 1 10:51

Aaron Ross Powell Yes, we did. So we have a crime one of our scenes, and we do we created these scenes with the help and advice of our law enforcement uh partners and friends, okay. So we make sure what we're doing is realistic out there. And one of our scenes we have uh and we could we with the one of the beauties of this research is we can vary things. We can put in a man or a woman as the victim or the assailant, we can make the environment more or less cluttered, we can vary the weapon. You get the idea, okay? Well, anyway, in these scenes, we use a static photograph. And we asked people, and we weren't expecting much out of this when we started, but boy, what we got. We asked people, okay, tell us what you remember happening next. Now there's only one possible explanation, one possible answer to that. Dude, it's a photograph. Nothing happened next. All I saw was a photograph. I have no idea what the hell happened next. Okay, and as we did these studies, we recognized that it's fully possible. If people didn't understand what we were saying, they might have thought we were saying, tell us a story, Grandpa. Okay. So we changed the language of our questions to make absolutely certain that our respondents knew we were asking not for a made-up story, not for an extrapolation, not for a prediction, but for what did they remember happening next? And the only possible answer is I don't remember anything. All I saw was a static photograph. They told us. Some of these were pretty simple mistakes. Some of them were real real Lulus, so to speak. In one of our scenes, we have a ladder against the side of a building. Well, one of our respondents had the assailant grabbing the poor victim by the neck and dragging her up the ladder, and presumably across the rooftops. Okay, we lose it after that. One of them had a the bad guy's buddy driving up at a car, and they have vague allusions to explosions. We don't know if this is true, but one of my uh students said that duplicated a movie that she'd seen the night before. The guy's basically it's kind of like you know, you see a movie and then you dream some of the characters from that movie. Well, if if if this is true, if my student was right, they saw the movie and suddenly part of that movie became part of their reality. One of my personal favorites, and I'm sorry I don't have the actual number here. It's in the book. I don't remember it exactly. But one of my personal favorites is a very nice lady. She had our witness, she was very confident, right? Confident, uh, attractive people. Okay. Confident, credible, attractive people tend to be believed by juries. Okay. And she was confident. There was nothing in her manner that indicated she wasn't credible. She was attractive. That's an important lesson. If you're ever accused of a major crime, make certain you're accused by only very ugly people. That's essential. Okay? But anyway, here's this credible, confident witness. But you've met people who are confident as all hell and they're still kind of stupid, right? Okay. But anyway, she's confident as all hell. And what do you remember happening next, ma'am? What do you not not tell us a story, Grandma, but what do you remember happening next? And she says with great confidence, she turned and faced him in a violent manner within a certain number of feet, okay? No, I'm not sure what a violent manner is. Um, it's a photograph. She doesn't turn or face him at all. And as to the number of feet, imagine a jury listening to what they say it's 21 feet or 18.5 feet. They're going to go, wow, she must really be sure about that. Wow, she's right. She gave us a number. It's like she was there with a tape measure. Um, it's complete and utter crap. But I can guarantee that would have been enough crap to put somebody in prison. So it turns out that the way people remember is is not what the way most people think of it. And the way we treat memory, including in criminal investigations, is also not what we really believe. Sorry, it's what we believe is going on, but it's not what's really going on.

Speaker 14:27

How might this impact an officer who maybe they used force, then they had an IA, internal affairs investigation. And then they're interviewed months after the event. How could this affect it? They're watching the news, they have all this other input. How can that affect memory? Aaron Ross Powell Oh, tremendously.

Speaker 1 14:52

Police officers are they're trained, but they have the same kind of nervous system as everybody else. They don't give you a different kind of brain when you get out of the academy, right? The memory process is going to be similar. And memories decline over time. The longer you give it, the worse the memory is going to be. The less feature intensive that memory becomes, also discussed in the book here, the less you get these good details, and then where you have general we refer to them as gestalts, right? General rather broad, vague categories of action, okay? Rather than the person who was punched in the jaw, we go to uh they were hit in the face, and then we get to they were hit. Okay? So the time goes by, but also the officer is going to go over and over and over what he or she saw in their head. And they're also going to go over whatever was on the news, and anyone listening to this is probably where the news is often not particularly favorable to the police officers. The story will get worse and worse. You may start to doubt, well, is that what I really saw? My goodness, they're implying that I didn't see that, right? Uh hostile um uh interviews and and um hostile interviews and interrogations, possibly on the part of internal affairs, possibly on the part of opposing uh attorneys, and less hostile ones in terms of your Department of Liability Reduction folks, in terms of your own lawyers. By the time you're done, you've had a lot of really quite emotional or pragmatically driven accounts of that memory crammed into your head on top of the memory that's already there, in a system that tends to change in the direction of just bar brevity and personal belief. And as we've seen earlier, the human memory system is perfectly possible of incorporating errors as if they were the actual memory. There's another problem, too. If the memory is of a tactical action, there's a good bet the police officer was in a high state of arousal at that time, with consequent reduction of resources to the prefrontal cortex. That means the initial interpretation may not have been terribly precise. But as we go through this, more and more of our interrogators demand precision. And it's perfectly possible for us to start to incorporate that precision, and then that precision becomes a memory. One of the things the human brain does is try to make sense out of the world. And if we're telling a story that doesn't seem to make sense, we're perfectly possible of putting in logical connections, and nobody's lying by putting in logical connections. This must have followed that. When in fact it is not. That's another factor. It's called state dependency. The fact is that if you're in a similar state, when you learn something, when you experience something, and when you testify about it, your memory's going to be better. Well, in courtrooms, there's nobody gonna tell you a courtroom is relaxing. Okay, they're highly arousing states, but uh they're not as resous they're not as arousing as somebody putting a gun in your face. So we have the factor of affective state. We're not talking here about emotions in any in any sense the person might go, oh, well, I don't worry much about emotions, I'm trained. We're talking here about the basis of the brain, okay, the neurohormonal state, okay, the the chemistry, really, with reference to when that memory was formed and when you're dragging it back up. That makes a huge difference. So all these factors to put this way, any officer or or attorney or investigator defending officers, or for that matter, prosecuting them. Well, I don't want to get into my own biases. I have run into very few cases where the police were not telling the truth, let's just put it that way. But the fact of the matter is that as this information comes in, the officer's story may very well change in ways that may have been the officer's best uh best uh investigators. I think it's very important for any officer, anybody uh any attorney, any investigator involved with officer actions, be aware of these psychological factors. And one of the things I tried to do in the first the book is divided to part one and part two. Part one is about law enforcement investigation. Part two is where we get into Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and the explorations and the science and all the psychology, all that good stuff. Part one, I I tried to make it yeah, these are relatively brief essays strung together. I tried to make it very clear and very concrete as to exactly what's happening in the brain in criminal situations and when we're witnessing them and when officers are having to deal with them.

Speaker 19:07

You have actually testified a number of times on now you witness uh ID issues. Could you give a couple of examples of this kind of phenomena?

Speaker 1 19:18

Aaron Powell Well, yeah, there's been quite a few of them. Um getting into specific cases, um, which I want to go into a lot of detail here. We had a case um years and years and years ago where the weapon was absolutely a large police type automatic. So you can think of something like a Beretta M92 series, something like that, maybe a Smith and Wesson M MP. So the average person can't probably tell these big boxy guns apart. But you ever wonder why so many people who can afford a twelve hundred dollar handgun are sticking up a liquor store for twenty bucks in a bottle of jack? What the hell's going on? Well, I've seen I mean once I gave a talk to a large, very large uh organization of police officers, and I mentioned this, and I had like twelve or fifteen people lined up during the break. It was almost like confession in a church, okay? That they, oh my God, I've done this. Because there you are, trying to handle the crime scene, trying to handle all the people who ran away at first because they didn't want to be witnesses. And now the TV people show up, they've all come back to try to be witnesses, and that happens. Sometimes they start to sing, for God's sake, okay? But you're asking them what kind of gun was it? Oh, and the people go, Oh, I don't know anything about guns. And that's pretty much everybody. Okay, well, so the officer will sometimes reach down, point to his or her weapon, or take her weapon out, pointing it carefully away, and say, Did it look like this? The person goes, Yes. Because what they recorded is not, okay, the Babetta M92 uh full vertec edition that would nine millimeters or something. They didn't record that. They have some kind of gun. What you've just done is contaminated your field situation. What goes to the investigators, or if you are the investigator, um, what goes to your investigators is utter crap. They're looking for somebody running around at their armed with a cold 45, and the actual weapon was a derringer. Okay? But anyway, in this particular case, the weapon started out as a large police type automatic. Well, it turned out it couldn't have been that. So then it wound up turning into a snub-nosed revolver. And then it appeared that the actual death wound was a stab wound. Suddenly there was an ice pick and the gun was lost completely. Well, then it turned out for reasons we need not go into, no, it wasn't a stab wound. The actual death wounds, actual mortal wounds, were inflicted by a handgun. So she so our witness goes back to, well, some kind of gun, but I don't know what. Well then they turned up a weapon that did match on a couple of ballistics is a much I don't want to get into it because I'm no expert, but ballistics is very difficult science. Um there was some question as to whether this weapon really matched on what basis, but uh that's the gun. Our witness was as certain of that as she had of the previous three weapons. Okay. So you you run into this sort of thing all the time, and you run into a variety, a variety of other Psychological influences I also discuss in detail in the book. Sometimes, of course, people are simply lying. But psychological aspects enter into that as well. And understanding that will assist any officer, I think. Not that we're trying to replace police experience and expertise, obviously, with psychology. That's not the point. The point here is to augment what the investigators know, not to replace it. But having that extra information can be awfully damned handy. And I've seen that in in a number of cases in my own personal experience as a as a consulting investigative psychologist.

Speaker 22:35

So for our listeners, they might be wondering how would your discussion at Bigfoot and looking at Mars, uh, et cetera, be beneficial to them?

Speaker 1 22:50

Well, uh I remember uh being camping out in uh Utah with a friend of mine and his his his his uh girlfriend, and they were both from East Coast cities, she'd never been out of a city, when overnight she she saw a deer that first she believed was a bear, and then she saw it again, she was absolutely certain it was Bigfoot. Okay. You can see a large animal running around in the woods. If you know animals, you're going, yeah, it's not only a bear, it's a cinnamon-colored black bear. Yeah, they're all over Yosemite, for example, okay? But no, by God, she had Bigfoot. She was an eyewitness to Bigfoot. Could have happened to me. Okay, we live in a place where there are mountain lions. Mountain lions are very scarce and skittish animals, okay? I've seen the tracks a couple of times, and but only one actual lion, and he was crazy. It's a very, very old lion, probably had the mountain lion equivalent of some form of seen al dementia. He was staggering across the lawn with this sort of horrible skin condition, gray and brown fur, okay? Well, there's a particular kind of animal. It's almost up there with Bigfoot, okay? It's the American Black Panther, okay, and it's out there somewhere according to all these wonderful TV shows where people with truly interesting hats explain all the weird things they've seen in the woods. Well, the point is that poor mountain lion got ti he was making this long trip across the yard, and he lay down under a tree to take a nap. Well, there's brilliant sunshine in this part of the world. Damned if my eyes didn't turn him jet black. There he was under that tree. My God, I could have seen the American Black Panther. I could have gotten on ancient monsters or monsters aliens or whatever the hell it is. They might have put me up in a hotel for a couple days, why not, yeah? And explained, yep, I had a Black Panther sighting, and there are no Black Panthers in America. Till the poor old guy got up and walked off, and he turned back into an ancient mountain lion with a skin condition. He wandered off into the woods, as with the adventures we have with mountain lions out west. He wandered off into the woods where he probably took another nap. But it's easy to interpret these things as a big foot of the mountain lions. UFOs, my God, there's UFOs all over the place, and they're usually the planet Venus. This is all eyewitness memory, it really is. And what explorers saw? Captain Lewis of Lewis and Clark. He didn't see a black panthe, he saw a tiger. Okay? A little extra help from some stripey bushes. I could have seen a tiger too, but the poor guy was halfway across Montana. His troops were starving, and he was fairly desperate to get the hell out of Montana, okay? And suddenly he sees a damn tiger. Well, if you see a tiger scampering around Bozeman today, it's a little odd, isn't it? But there were there wasn't any Bozeman. There weren't, you know, certainly no McDonald's. And this poor hungry explorer, well, by God, Thomas Jefferson wanted interesting animals out here. He had a prior framework for finding, ah my God, he's found the American tiger. And all these are examples, very good examples, of exactly what we see, and this is really the point of the book, one of the main points of the book, of a forensic view. It's exactly the same as psychology. Whether you're an eyewitness to manatee mermaids or the American Black Panther, or a automatic that turns into a revolver that turns into an ice pick. It's the same psychological dynamics. If we understand those, we make fewer mistakes.

Speaker 26:00

That sounds like a great book for first responders. I have read it. It's a fabulous book. I absolutely love it. But then I also understand I'm married to him. But I wouldn't be saying that if I didn't really think that. And as I was reading it, I was thinking about my 25 years working with all of you and thinking about what an amazing book this might be, especially if you are any way involved in best investigations, whether you're in detectives or you're doing investigations for other reasons in law enforcement. So any other finishing thoughts, Dr. Sharps?

Speaker 1 26:38

Aaron Ross Powell Well, I think the main thing is the continuity of the nervous system. We tend to separate officers from the general public. Uh anybody who's been in criminal investigation, you tend to separate the smart people from the less smart people in your mind. But there is continuity in the human brain. The processes we see here, we're going to see something like them someplace else. Whether it's c criminal investigation or you think you saw the Klingons, or you think you saw Bigfoot, or you know, what whatever it is that you think you saw, you want to take that forensic view, make an analysis in aggregate of the actual data with reference to what your brain is probably doing to those data. That's really ultimately, I think, the major point of the book, this continuity of the nervous system, how it works across a vast number of settings, ranging from law enforcement through all the other topics in that rather extended title.

Speaker 27:32

Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Thank you. Well, remember, you have the right to be happy. You have the right to have a good life. Thank you for joining us today. This is Dr. Jana Price-Sharps at MindPilot.