Today's journal was centered on an excerpt of a talk given by Michael Shermer at the 2006 TED meeting. Here's the link, for those interested in viewing (the excerpt I showed in class begins at the 9:00 minute marker) 

 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things.html

I wrote the following writing prompts to the left of the slide on which the video played:

Watch and listen to the video and think about what you want to believe.

Can you hear the back-masked message?

What does this have to say about how susceptible we are to suggestion? 

So, if you haven't watched the video, here's a summary:

Shermer plays a section of "Stairway to Heaven" forward, then backward, then asks the audience to identify the "secret message," then displays the the text of the supposed "secret message" while replaying the section backwards again. 

Here's the first unsurprising news: The first time it played through backwards, my students couldn't understand it and took it as gibberish, but the second time through, they, like Shermer's TED audience, were able understand the words clearly. This, of course, makes Shermer's point that we look for patterns and once the sections of our brain that respond to sensory stimuli are "primed" we can rapidly build and cement patterns and meaning to that which is patternless and meaningless.

Here's the second unsurprising news: Many of the students had already heard the rumor that Zep's music was laced with secret Satanic messages and figured it was probably true.   In any case, the "believers" also couldn't understand the "words" at first, but when shown them were even more convinced of their initial belief. Alternatively, those who considered the whole thing a bunch of hooey had their beliefs confirmed as well.

So here's the interesting bit: The students who hadn't heard of either proposition became more convinced that Zep intentionally placed secret Satan-loving messages in their music after hearing the evidence that clearly showed how easily our brains our tricked. One young lady, who read her entry aloud, commented on how "scary" the presentation was and that she was now concerned about Satanists in the music industry. She was going to go home that evening and begin looking for ways to play her CDs backwards to look for more secret messages. In the discussion that ensued, I asked them to consider why we believe what we believe and why we are so easily taken in by these things. 

The answer, I discovered, was obvious when posed the following question: What is cooler, that Zep is a bunch of Satanists who are trying to convince the world to join them or that playing a record backward makes weird sounds and if we work a little, we can make whatever we want of them?