Pigeon Robots: The Neurology Behind Conspiracy Theories

By Sophia Watson

The human brain continuously constructs beliefs to reduce uncertainty and impose coherence on a complex world. I experienced this while procrastinating during a lecture. I came across a Nature article, titled ‘Has the mysterious ‘compass’ organ of birds been found at last?’. However the subtitle piqued my interest with ‘Multiple lines of evidence suggest that pigeons sense magnetic fields by detecting electric currents in their inner ears.’ It is often assumed that scientific literacy protects individuals from implausible beliefs, yet even well-trained readers can momentarily entertain ideas as absurd as pigeons being government robots.

The language used in the article may offer part of the answer - words such as ‘compass’, ‘magnetic fields’, and ‘electric currents’ are incredibly mechanistic, instantly evoking images of miniature engineered mechanisms rather than living organisms. It’s not difficult to see how such terminology conjures distorted understandings of their physiology and more to the point, raises the question of how anyone could ever actually believe that pigeons are robots?

This article explores that by examining how the brain forms and stabilises beliefs, from a neurological approach as opposed to a sociological, political or psychological one, which is more often discussed.

In a 2021 review, neuroscientist Włodzisław Duch (2021) proposes conspiracy theories may arise from a distortion of memory. His Rapid Freezing of High Neuroplasticity (RFHN) model suggests that increased emotional arousal (stress and anxiety) temporarily increases neuroplasticity, making the brain more receptive to new information. Therefore, when faced with a large volume and range of input (e.g. doom scrolling on social media), the brain attempts to reduce uncertainty by reflecting associations between different inputs, even when they are weakly linked. While this process can decrease emotional arousal and restore a sense of stability, it may lead to distortions of the relations between ideas. These distortions are reinforced by repeated, poor quality memory reactivations. For example, repeated exposure to simplified memes can strengthen false associations, even in the absence of strong supporting evidence to these claims.

Understanding how belief patterns in the brain are formed and how they become distorted seems to be the favoured approach to this puzzle.

In a 2024 fMRI study, Gerchen at al. (2024), investigated how the brain responds when individuals evaluate the truth of conspiracy theory statements and they found that disbelief of these statements was associated with stronger activation in the retrospinal cortex (RSC) and pyrahippocampal gyrus (PHC) - areas which are known to have an important role in the perception of stability and consistent actions. The authors propose that conspiracy theories are therefore more likely to be believed when the circumstances are deemed unstable or uncertain, and interestingly, they also found the effect varied with individual differences in political orientation and baseline conspiracy mentality.

The spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation is rife across the internet, which is news to no one. However, it opens us to many fascinating questions on how beliefs from, judgements are made, and our own personal interpretations of information. Furthermore, awareness of how our brains develop beliefs does a lot in protecting them from flying away with such ideas that pigeons are robots.

References

Duch, W. (2021). Memetics and neural models of conspiracy theories. Patterns, 2(11), p.100353. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100353.

Gerchen, M.F., Glock, C., Weiss, F. and Kirsch, P. (2024). The truth is in there: Belief processes in the human brain. Psychophysiology, [online] 61(7), p.e14561. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14561.