Kylie Minogue and the Gorilla Experiment

To a large extent, we see and hear what we expect to see and hear. As newborns we're hit with a tidal wave of experiential data, a screaming torrent of raw sensory information that we have to learn how to deal with, and our brains' main coping strategy is to scrunch itself up until it's found ways of shutting out most of the din.

As infants, we initially lose neurons at an alarming rate until the remaining pathways can mimic (and to some extent synchronise with and predict) external datapatterns. We construct progressively more complex predictive mental models for how the outside world works, and increasingly live within our own models. We experience what we expect to experience, unless there's such a glaring mismatch that it can't be ignored.

It's a matter of data-reduction and enhanced reaction-times. We coast along, our experience being steered by sensory data but not dictated by it. If you're sitting on a chair, you don't suddenly jolt every few seconds and exclaim, "Chair!" – once the chair's been accepted you assume that it's still there until you're told otherwise. This internal secondary reality also compensates for the significant processing delays that happen in our brains – so that we think that we experience the world in real-time – by starting to react unconsciously to our internal models' predictions, before we're consciously aware of what we've seen. We live our lives from moment to moment in a state of continual anticipation.

Sometimes random data tickles our expectation-engine – when a black bin-bag blowing in the wind in the corner of an alley momentarily triggers an expectation of seeing a black cat, we don't just interpret the movement as possibly belonging to a cat, we actually see and remember the cat (until we look a second time and realise that it's just a refuse bag, and the rogue memory gets shredded).

These models act as perception filters and error-correction filters for what our brains allow us to register as reality. Information that's not compatible with the model (or not relevant) simply doesn't register on our consciousnesses, it gets stripped out as anomalous data and jettisoned before we have a chance to become fully aware of it.

The usual example for this is the basketball experiment, conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in the 1990s, but unfortunately, if I explain what the experiment is, it'll spoil it for you. If you don't already know about it, don't read anything else about it until you've watched this video and tried to count just the number of basketball passes made my the people in the white shirts. Then read the analysis.

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The Gorilla Effect is now considered a classic, but what most psychologists might not realise is that in 1991, someone had already done a large-scale version of the experiment, using the UK's music broadcasting networks.

In '91, Kylie Minogue was still widely seen as a squeaky-clean pop songstress, freshly out of Neighbours, warbling heavily-processed Stock Aitken and Waterman lyrics over generic (and slightly cheesy) SAW chunka-chunka backing tracks.And that's when someone at the Minogue team decided to slip the f-word into one of the singles, three times, to see who noticed. Nobody did.

The single was called "Shocked" and charted at number 6.

" Shocked by the power, ooh-ohh, shocked by the power of love.
You got me fucked to my very foundations, shocked by the power, shocked by the power ..."

Whattt???

Uncharacteristically for SAW lyrics, “fucked to my very foundations” was actually a pretty great line for a pop song. Alliterative an' everything. I'd have been proud of it. And maybe that's why someone decided to leave it in.

Whether it was an ad-lib, like Atomic Kitten's alternative “You can lick my hole again” soundcheck version of their single, I don't know. But that's the version of "Shocked" that actually got broadcast, over and over again, on TV and on the radio. In a country that was obsessed with the F-word being used on music programmes, in which the Sex Pistols had made their careers by effing on Bill Grundy's show, and Jools Holland was suspended for accidentally let it slip on a live trailer for "The Tube" in 1987, and every Madonna single was eagerly being pored over by the UK press for possible naughty words or double-entendres that people could declare themselves outraged by, la Minogue got away with repeatedly standing up on Top of the Pops [a bit after ~7pm], and apparently singing her little heart out about how she was "fucked to my very foundations", three or four times per appearance, without anyone hearing it.

If you get hold of the more recent "Ultimate Kylie" compilation, the audio's different. They've either changed the recording or used a different version in which The Kylie is definitely singing "rrucked", with a pronounced "rr" rather than "fucked", with an "ff". But go back to contemporary broadcast recordings of the single ( thanks, YouTube! ), and yep – it's different.

The "Kylie" version of the gorilla experiment might be one of the biggest mass-media psychological experiments ever to take place, but unless you can get hold of contemporary recordings of radio and TV broadcasts, you might be forgiven for thinking that it never happened.

Black Holes are Rude (in French)

English-language physics textbooks (before the mid-1970's) tend to give the impression that everyone had agreed that black holes couldn't radiate. It was supposed to be mathematically proved. Done deal.

But there's a slight geographical cultural bias. Not all countries' research communities adopted the idea of the perfectly-non-radiating black hole with the same enthusiasm. The French theoretical physics community in particular seemed not to like black holes very much at all.

And this was probably at least partly because in French, the term for "black hole" – "Trous Noir" – is slang for "anus".

Now, imagine what that must do to a serious talk on black hole theory delivered in French. To have to give a 45-minute lecture on how things that disappear into a black hole can't be retrieved, including topics like the proof that that "black holes have no hair", and its relationship to the hairy ball theorem. How the heck do you teach this subject without your students snickering?

So the French approach circa 1960 seemed to be to hunker down and wait for the new fashion to blow itself out (err...), after which normality could be restored. And it happened. The Wheeler black hole got assassinated by Stephen Hawking in the 1970's with his presentation on Hawking radiation.

But the English-speaking physics community kept using the term "black hole", even though technically, horizon-bounded objects under QM were now known NOT to be black holes in the Wheeler sense of the word. They weren't black, or holes. Maybe we kept the phrase because we didn't want to admit we'd screwed up, maybe we kept it because of the historical habit of physicists to completely ignore the literal meanings of words when it suits them, and maybe ... we simply liked upsetting the French.


Thanks to Hawking radiation, if you teach black hole theory in French you now have the unenviable job of addressing a room full of students on the subject of black hole emissions, and hoping that nobody thinks its funny to start making quiet comedic fart noises at comically appropriate moments.

Perhaps the smart thing to do is to take this opportunity to come up with a whole new name for a "QM black hole". Call it something like an "Etoile Hawking" (a "Hawking Star"). It's two extra syllables, but it solves the problem.

Curvature is Important

Curvature allows us to comprehend views of reality that can't otherwise be seen, or appreciated without an understanding of a few basic principles. Curvature allows connections and interrelationships and juxtapositions that you may find it impossible to see if you don't have the necessary mind-set.

This doesn't just apply to theoretical physics, mathematics and abstract logical structures. it also applies to real life.

Let's suppose that we're signwriters, and we have a famous department store as a client. They'd like an impressive curved sign over their main entrance, proudly displaying their name. Wouldn't it be awful if we neglected to take into account how that curved set of letters looked from different angles, and accidentally built a sign that said a Very Rude Word?

At this point you're probably remembering the fictional Great Big Sign in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker" series ... the one built by Sirius Cybernetics that when collapsed to half its original size, spelt out the message "Go stick your head in a pig" ... you're probably thinking that I'm about to describe some tortured hypothetical example that would never really happen in real life ... some crazy laboured combination of store name and typeface and sign geometry that would be so improbable that it'd never ever happen.

And so, sceptical reader, I invite you to examine this real-life department store sign:

It's for a store called T J Hughes. Naturally, above the store's entrance we see the words T J HUGHES proudly displayed, in large red capitals. It's on a corner, and the letter sequence follows the curve.

If we turn the corner, cross the road, and look back at the sign, we still see the final “S” facing us, and to its right we see in white, slightly shrunken by perspective, the reversed white backsides of the letters H, J and T. Unfortunately, the letter J is very narrow, and the curved base of the letter is out of sight. So the J looks like an I, and although the H and T are seen reversed, they're symmetrical and still look like a perfectly normal H and T.

At this point you should be able to take a wild guess at the problem.

Here's the photo:

That's right. Seen from the right, the sign above their storefront really does say

Unfortunate, no?

This isn't a doctored photograph. The shop is real, and the sign has been there for an awfully long time. Here's the store's website, its location on Google Maps and their wikipedia entry. This really happened.

Like the title says, curvature is important. Ignore it at your peril.