Science, Perception, and Belief: The Strange Case of Percival Lowell
Matthew J. Sharps
Percival Lowell was a great astronomer of the last century, whose personal wealth allowed him to build a splendid observatory, the discoveries of which have been important to the present day.
Yet despite all of his scientific success, Lowell is mainly remembered today for his one big failure: his descriptions of the nonexistent Canals of Mars.
In Lowell’s day, Earthly canals between major bodies of water were wonders of the world, creating commercial success of epic proportions. When Lowell, among other astronomers, turned his telescopes to the desert planet of Mars, he found exactly the sort of place that canals would be amazingly useful to putatively thirsty Martian inhabitants; and canals were exactly what he saw.
The problem being, of course, that there’s not a canal to be seen anywhere on Mars.
The astronomer Schiaparelli was among the first to publicize these nonexistent hydrographic features, in his native Italian language, as canali– ditches. But the cognate factor was irresistible to Lowell and some of his contemporaries, and so the “ditches” of Mars, the most spectacular of which is the Valles Marineris system, became canals. Literally. Artificial canals, presumably dug into place by little green Martian civil engineers, presumably with little green Martian civil engineering degrees. Many eminent scientists, including Lowell, spilled a great deal of ink in defense of that extremely dubious hypothesis.
Yet it made sense. The Martians obviously lived on a desiccated, desert world, as revealed by Lowell’s excellent telescopes. Therefore, of course, they would dig canals in an attempt to save their civilization from the desert sands; and perhaps we could help them.
All sorts of plans were launched or considered, including the idea of digging huge ditches in the Sahara desert, topping them off with kerosene, and lighting them in the shape of letters. Possibly we could spell out HI, THERE! or perhaps LET’S BE BUDDIES! The content of the intended messages was never entirely clear, to say nothing of the language in which to send them; but it was obvious, to Lowell and to other serious scientists of the day, that the Martians were real, they were thirsty, and they needed our help.
The problem was that about sixty years later, the Americans launched the Mariner Mars missions, which photographed the living hell out of Mars from orbit without finding a single Canal. The Mariners found natural, rather ditchy features like the Valles Marineris; but not a single artificial canal, nor a Martian to dig one.
What had happened with Lowell and company, the Canal observers? Were they simply liars?
No, they were not. The real answer was that they had human nervous systems.
Human nervous systems tend to configure our perceptions in terms of what we expect, not necessarily in terms of what is actually there. We see this in the forensic world of eyewitness memory all the time. We also see it very frequently in realm of paranormal observations; but the same mental processes may operate in the physical and life sciences, too. In our minds, the mighty and crooked Valles Marineris may very well be rendered in terms of straight, narrow, intelligence-based Canals.
This is an important insight, emphasized by the Gestalt psychologists of the last century and by more recent research in my own laboratory; our human nervous systems tend to straighten out and connect the elements we may perceive in various configurations, especially in unfamiliar landscapes for which we have no prior frameworks for understanding, such as the features of an alien world like Mars.
These perceptual processes are important for pareidolia, the imposition of meaningful interpretation on ambiguous stimuli. Pareidolia is normally considered in terms of the false perception of human facesin other kinds of stimuli, but it works just as well in the connection and reconfiguration of elements of an alien canyon system into a Martian equivalent of Panama or Suez.
But, for Lowell, there were other factors in play as well; and these may arise less from the bases of perception than from the social and personal bases of cognition.
Once Gestalt perceptual principles went to work for Lowell, straightening Martian ravines and connecting Martian craters, social and personal factors took over. Lowell and his colleagues, believing in Martian engineers, incorporated this belief into the interpretation of their own Canal perceptions. As has been repeatedly demonstrated in other psychological venues, their shared group belief was held more strongly than their individual convictions; and that group belief was increasingly strengthened as they found themselves in opposition to other groups of scientists who disagreed with the Canal theory.
As animosity between the pro-canal and anti-canal factions increased, commitment within each group increased correspondingly. This was of course accompanied by increased emotional investment. The resultant cognitive dissonance, in which enhanced emotional investment may cause us to believe increasingly in even the most tenuous of beliefs, also reared its head; and in the grip of all of these factors, Lowell was unable to entertain any source of his Canal observations other than the diligent efforts of hypothetical Martian engineers. Lowell held these beliefs to the point that he dismissed one of his most valuable scientists, A.E. Douglass, from his observatory post for suggesting that the canals might exist in the mind, rather than in Martian physical reality.
So, as I’ve discussed in several articles elsewhere, we can see the genesis of the nonexistent Martian canals in the combined influence of human perceptual, cognitive, and social psychology. In the case of Lowell and his colleagues, these factors combined in particularly powerful ways, influencing competent and even outstanding scientists to observe and interpret phenomena that simply did not exist in physical reality.
But do we really need that level of psychological power to obtain these effects?
In a recently published experimental study, my research students and I exposed college-student respondents, generally with no interest or investment at all in astronomical matters, to a slightly-blurry picture of Earth’s moon at “supermoon” approach. This bright, round object was recognized by none of them as the Moon, but we told them, quite truthfully, that it was “a planetary or lunar object” photographed in our solar system. We told some of them that authorities in science and engineering believed they had seen surface features, including artificial constructions, up there (also quite true- if you watch cable TV, you will frequently find quite a number of PhD’s willing to lose all scientific credibility as they proclaim the existence of the Moon People).
Now, all that our respondents actually saw was a featureless white blob. We could have used an illuminated ping-pong ball if we hadn’t been concerned with the need to present a genuine “planetary or lunar object.” Yet, on this featureless blob, our generally uninterested research respondents saw things.
They saw colors. They saw rays of light. They saw mountain ranges, hills, buildings, and even the “canals” of Lowell’s imagination. They didn’t even need experts to tell them that these things might be real. Our UFO-conscious society, in which the word “astronomy” is more likely to conjure up images of Vulcans and Klingons than equations of orbital dynamics, provided all the social support they needed. About one third of our respondents “saw” alien technology and/or geographic features where none existed at all.
Those who tended toward a higher level of dissociation, essentially an ability to detach oneself from immediate reality, and perhaps entertain more supernatural ideas, were especially prone to finding these nonexistent lunar structures; but no high-pressure factors of cognitive dissonance, or antagonism toward other groups of dissenting scientists, such as confronted Lowell, were needed to produce these effects. Faced with Space Things, lots of people begin literally to see and interpret other appropriate Space Things which simply do not exist.
It is important to realize that those respondents who exhibited dissociative tendencies did so at a subclinical level. No mental illness was present or involved in this study at all, any more than it was in the work of Lowell and other respected astronomers. This is a critically important point; these were all perfectly normal people, the same kinds of people who may pursue careers in the sciences, or who have interests in the paranormal or who may believe they have observed paranormal phenomena. These were perfectly normal people; and our results indicate that a large proportion of perfectly normal people, given the right context, may believe that they’ve observed phenomena which don’t exist at all.
This is important for scientists and nonscientists alike, and obviously for anyone with an interest in paranormal phenomena. Lots of things which were originally believed to be paranormal have been scientifically substantiated since their original observation. The tribes of hairy people of 18th and 19th century Africa turned out to be the gorilla troops of the 20th. In at least one instance, the Loch Ness Monster turned out to be an aerial image of a school of salmon. Christopher Columbus’ mermaids turned out to be Caribbean manatees, although as the Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself admitted, “they were not as beautiful as they were painted.” But, as he further said, “to some extent they have a human appearance on the face.” Pareidolia again.
But whether our interest lies in the normal or the putative paranormal, we need to understand the bases of observation and interpretation, whether present in physical or mental reality. We must have a reasonable idea of whatever it is that we’re actually observing and interpreting. This understanding lies in scientific psychology, in an empirically-based understanding of the ways in which perception and cognition operate in social and personal context.
Percival Lowell rejected psychological explanations of the Martian canals in his own day; but he was a great scientist. I suspect that if he lived today, he would be entirely in favor of the empirical efforts of experimental psychology to understand the human bases of observation, interpretation, and understanding.
This article is Copyright Dr. Matthew J. Sharps, all rights reserved. It was initially published in The Next Truth magazine, Editor Maria Anna van Driel.