# Ep10 "Why is it so hard to spot a counterfeit bill?"

An episode of [Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1677842672), 29 May 2023, 36 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/534dc725-2971-42a1-b1bf-afaa0107416e/7b7c0dd2-ed87-4352-be18-b011006eaa38/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=bee00526-7528-4581-b6b6-afaa01083a3d

What do charlatans have to understand about human perception? Why are you so bad at recognizing a real penny among fakes? What did Eagleman have to do with the redesign of the Euro, and why did he campaign to the European Central Bank that all their bills should be blank with a single hologram in the middle? In this episode, explore the crossroads of perception and deception. Brief appearance from special guest Adam Savage.

## Transcript

[0:05] Speaker 1: What do counterfeit bills have to do with brains? And
[0:09] Speaker 1: why is it so hard for you to recognize a
[0:12] Speaker 1: real penny? And what does this have to do with
[0:15] Speaker 1: the building on the fifty euro bill recently getting replaced
[0:20] Speaker 1: with the face of the goddess Europa And what did
[0:23] Speaker 1: I have to do with that? And why did I
[0:25] Speaker 1: campaign to the European Central Bank that all bills should
[0:29] Speaker 1: be blank with a single hologram in the middle. Welcome
[0:36] Speaker 1: to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.
[0:39] Speaker 2: I'm a neuroscientist, and you might wonder how a neuroscientist
[0:43] Speaker 2: got involved in studying counterfeit money. Ll hang tight, because
[0:47] Speaker 2: in this episode we're going to see how all these
[0:51] Speaker 2: issues intersect. The most pervasive mistakes that we make is
[1:02] Speaker 2: believing that our visual systems give us a faithful representation of.
[1:07] Speaker 1: What's out there. We think of our vision the way
[1:10] Speaker 1: we think of a movie camera, like it's just capturing
[1:13] Speaker 1: the information from the world. But there are a whole
[1:16] Speaker 1: bunch of simple demonstrations that can quickly disabuse you of
[1:21] Speaker 1: this notion. For example, imagine that I show you two pictures.
[1:26] Speaker 1: I flash one, then it goes off, then the second
[1:29] Speaker 1: one comes on, then it goes off, then the first
[1:31] Speaker 1: one comes back on, and so on, So it alternates
[1:34] Speaker 1: between pictures A and B, and it looks like it's
[1:37] Speaker 1: the same picture. But let's say I let you know
[1:40] Speaker 1: that there is a difference between the pictures, and your
[1:44] Speaker 1: job is simply to spot the difference. Well, if you've
[1:47] Speaker 1: ever played these sorts of games before, you know how
[1:51] Speaker 1: surprisingly difficult it can be to tell the difference between them.
[1:56] Speaker 1: It turns out that we are really blind to changes
[1:59] Speaker 1: in scene, and these can be quite large changes. So
[2:03] Speaker 1: you might have a big statue that's present in the
[2:06] Speaker 1: background of one photo and not the other, or a
[2:10] Speaker 1: jeep or an airplane, and the difference goes unseen. You
[2:15] Speaker 1: can see some demos of this at eagleman dot com
[2:18] Speaker 1: slash podcast. So what happens is that your attention slowly
[2:23] Speaker 1: crawls over the photograph and you analyze the interesting landmarks
[2:28] Speaker 1: until you finally detect what is changing. And once your
[2:32] Speaker 1: brain has latched on to the appropriate object, then the
[2:36] Speaker 1: change is trivial to see. But this happens only after
[2:40] Speaker 1: a pretty exhaustive inspection. This is what's known as change blindness,
[2:47] Speaker 1: and it highlights the importance of attention, which is to say,
[2:52] Speaker 1: to see an object change, you have to attend to it.
[2:56] Speaker 1: And what an experiment like this surface is is that
[2:59] Speaker 1: you're not actually seeing the world with the rich detail
[3:04] Speaker 1: that you implicitly believed you were. In fact, you're not
[3:08] Speaker 1: aware of most of what's hitting your eyes. So imagine
[3:12] Speaker 1: you're watching a short film with a single actor in it.
[3:15] Speaker 1: He's cooking an omelet, and the camera cuts to a
[3:19] Speaker 1: different angle as the actor continues his cooking. Surely you
[3:24] Speaker 1: would notice if the actor changed into a different person, right,
[3:29] Speaker 1: But in studies, two thirds of observers don't. In one
[3:33] Speaker 1: really astonishing demonstration of change blindness, random pedestrians in a
[3:38] Speaker 1: courtyard were stopped by an experimenter and they were asked
[3:42] Speaker 1: for directions, So they start giving directions, and at some point,
[3:46] Speaker 1: as the unsuspecting person is in the middle of explaining
[3:49] Speaker 1: this workmen carrying a door walk right in between the
[3:54] Speaker 1: two people, and unbeknownst to the pedestrian, the experimenter is
[4:00] Speaker 1: stealthily replaced by a confederate who's been hiding behind the door.
[4:05] Speaker 1: So the people are swapped, and after the door passes,
[4:09] Speaker 1: a new person is standing there and the majority of
[4:12] Speaker 1: subjects continue giving directions without noticing that the person they
[4:17] Speaker 1: were talking to is not the same one that they
[4:20] Speaker 1: were talking to. In other words, they were only encoding
[4:25] Speaker 1: small amounts of the information that was hitting their eyes.
[4:28] Speaker 1: The rest was assumption. Now, neuroscientists weren't the first to
[4:34] Speaker 1: discover that placing your eyes on something is no guarantee
[4:38] Speaker 1: of seeing it. Magicians figured this out long ago, and
[4:42] Speaker 1: they perfected ways of leveraging this knowledge. So by directing
[4:46] Speaker 1: your attention, magicians perform sleight of hand in full view.
[4:52] Speaker 1: Their actions, their hand motions should give away the game,
[4:56] Speaker 1: but they can rest assured that your brain process it
[5:00] Speaker 1: is only small bits of the visual scene. It's not
[5:04] Speaker 1: everything that's hitting your retinas. And by the way, this
[5:07] Speaker 1: limitation of our vision helps to explain the colossal number
[5:11] Speaker 1: of traffic accidents in which drivers will hit pedestrians who
[5:16] Speaker 1: are in plane view, or they'll collide with cars that
[5:19] Speaker 1: are right in front of them. Sometimes you'll even see
[5:22] Speaker 1: stories where a car intersects with a train on the track.
[5:27] Speaker 1: In some of these cases, the eyes are in the
[5:29] Speaker 1: right place, but the brain isn't registering the stimulus. Vision
[5:35] Speaker 1: is more than looking Now This is all an example
[5:39] Speaker 1: of a larger point, which is that we're not generally
[5:42] Speaker 1: aware of what's going on until we ask the question. So,
[5:47] Speaker 1: for example, what is the position of your tongue in
[5:51] Speaker 1: your mouth right now? Once you're asked the question, you
[5:54] Speaker 1: can answer it, But presumably you weren't aware of the
[5:57] Speaker 1: answer until I asked the question. Why does the brain
[6:02] Speaker 1: work this way because your brain generally doesn't need to
[6:06] Speaker 1: know most things. It simply needs to know how to
[6:10] Speaker 1: go out and retrieve the data when it needs it.
[6:13] Speaker 1: It perceives things on a need to know basis. You
[6:17] Speaker 1: don't continuously track the position of your tongue in your
[6:21] Speaker 1: consciousness because that knowledge is only useful in rare circumstances.
[6:26] Speaker 1: So again, you're not aware of much of anything until
[6:30] Speaker 1: you ask yourself about it. What does your left shoe
[6:34] Speaker 1: feel like on your foot right now? What pitch is
[6:37] Speaker 1: the hum of the air conditioner in the background. Just
[6:41] Speaker 1: like with change blindness, we are unaware of most of
[6:45] Speaker 1: what should be obvious to our senses. It's only after
[6:48] Speaker 1: we deploy our attention onto small bits of the scene
[6:53] Speaker 1: that we become aware of what we were missing. And
[6:56] Speaker 1: before we engage our attention. We're typically not aware that
[7:02] Speaker 1: we're not aware of those details. So not only is
[7:04] Speaker 1: our perception of the world a construction that doesn't accurately
[7:08] Speaker 1: represent the outside, it's weirder than that because we have
[7:12] Speaker 1: the false impression of a full, rich picture, when in
[7:17] Speaker 1: fact we only see what we need to know and
[7:21] Speaker 1: what we ask questions about, and we don't see anything
[7:23] Speaker 1: more than that. Now, this is a topic I'm going
[7:26] Speaker 1: to return to in many episodes, but for now I
[7:30] Speaker 1: want to ask what this has to do with the
[7:33] Speaker 1: economic currencies on this planet. So the scene is Lima, Peru,
[7:42] Speaker 1: a little before dawn. There's a bunch of houses and buildings,
[7:46] Speaker 1: and suddenly fifteen hundred Peruvian police officers and US Secret
[7:52] Speaker 1: Service agents storm the doors. This was called Operation Sunset,
[7:57] Speaker 1: and it was the finale of a long running inventstigation
[8:00] Speaker 1: aimed at reducing the flow of counterfeit US dollars from Peru.
[8:05] Speaker 1: They brought down six plants that had presses and plates
[8:10] Speaker 1: and negatives and piles of fake one hundred dollar bills,
[8:14] Speaker 1: and in just the past few years, counterfeit notes worth
[8:17] Speaker 1: more than seventy five million dollars have been confiscated in Peru,
[8:22] Speaker 1: and this is just one of lots of countries where
[8:25] Speaker 1: you have fraudsters who are cooking up fake dollars, And
[8:28] Speaker 1: it's essentially impossible to estimate the volume of counterfeit banknotes
[8:33] Speaker 1: passing through the US economy. What you find is that
[8:36] Speaker 1: the authorities claim they've captured most of the fakes, and
[8:40] Speaker 1: the counterfeitters claim exactly the opposite. Anyhow, counterfeiting is a
[8:45] Speaker 1: problem that faces every major player in the currency game.
[8:50] Speaker 1: Russia seizes counterfeits in the range of two hundred million
[8:53] Speaker 1: rubles per year. China captures five hundred million fake yu.
[8:59] Speaker 1: A few years years ago, India terminated their five hundred
[9:03] Speaker 1: and one thousand rupee notes, and this was at least
[9:06] Speaker 1: partially because of the rising concern about forgeries and their
[9:10] Speaker 1: inability to stem that. In Venezuela, the inflation was so
[9:14] Speaker 1: bad that it became worthwhile for fraudsters to bleach the
[9:19] Speaker 1: ten bole of oar bill and use the paper to
[9:22] Speaker 1: forge notes in other currencies. So it turns out there
[9:44] Speaker 1: are counterfeitters everywhere, and they're busy pushing fake banknotes into
[9:50] Speaker 1: streets and squares in every major city. You may wonder
[9:54] Speaker 1: how I came to care about counterfeits, given that I'm
[9:57] Speaker 1: a neuroscientist. Well, what happened is some years ago I
[10:01] Speaker 1: was giving a presentation at a brain science conference, and
[10:05] Speaker 1: afterwards I was approached by this guy and we started talking,
[10:09] Speaker 1: and I was surprised to learn that he was working
[10:11] Speaker 1: for the European Central Bank. And I was surprised because
[10:14] Speaker 1: it wasn't clear to me why someone like that would
[10:17] Speaker 1: be at a highly academic neuroscience conference. As it turns out,
[10:22] Speaker 1: his job was to find a solution to Europe's counterfeiting problem.
[10:27] Speaker 1: Their problem was that the EU comes across hundreds of
[10:32] Speaker 1: thousands of fake euro banknotes every year, mostly in the
[10:36] Speaker 1: form of twenties and fifties. At the heart of the
[10:41] Speaker 1: issue is the fact that governments spend millions creating security features.
[10:47] Speaker 1: So while we're talking, take out a twenty dollars bill,
[10:50] Speaker 1: or whatever country you're in, take out a high value bill.
[10:52] Speaker 1: They all have similar security features. Now, if you look
[10:56] Speaker 1: at it, you'll see that as you tilt the note
[10:59] Speaker 1: slightly back in fourth there's color changing ink. So the
[11:03] Speaker 1: color changes here of let's say the twenty and now
[11:06] Speaker 1: if you hold this up to the light, what you'll
[11:09] Speaker 1: see is a water mark that's otherwise invisible to you.
[11:14] Speaker 1: You can't see it normally, and it's not printed on
[11:16] Speaker 1: the front or the back, but it's printed on an
[11:18] Speaker 1: intermediate layer and on euros, and actually on the one
[11:22] Speaker 1: hundred dollars bill. What you see are holograms. So when
[11:26] Speaker 1: you angle this and change this, it moves around slightly
[11:30] Speaker 1: and appears to be three D. And you'll also see
[11:33] Speaker 1: colored strips that display the value of the note. And
[11:37] Speaker 1: if you happen to have an ultraviolet light, turn that
[11:41] Speaker 1: on and hold the bill under it, and you'll see
[11:43] Speaker 1: that the bill turns very colorful. You've got all these
[11:47] Speaker 1: invisible fibers in it that fluoresce under ultraviolet. So a
[11:51] Speaker 1: piece of currency is a bustling collection of security devices.
[11:57] Speaker 1: The problem is that no one pays attention to these
[12:01] Speaker 1: security devices. People who pass notes around in daily transactions
[12:06] Speaker 1: don't typically pause to examine them carefully. The special ink,
[12:11] Speaker 1: the watermark, the strip, the fibers, the hologram. These are
[12:16] Speaker 1: very expensive security features and they are a totally wasted
[12:21] Speaker 1: effort because counterfeit bills get passed from person to person
[12:25] Speaker 1: and no one ever notices these or notices if they
[12:30] Speaker 1: are badly rendered. Do you know how counterfeit bills almost
[12:34] Speaker 1: always are found at the banks? And that's because real
[12:38] Speaker 1: notes have one more feature, they have machine readable code
[12:42] Speaker 1: in the bill. Counterfeitters can do a good job making
[12:45] Speaker 1: a counterfeit, but they can't make the machine readable code,
[12:48] Speaker 1: and that's why the bank catches those. But the counterfeiters
[12:51] Speaker 1: don't need to do that because their bills get passed
[12:54] Speaker 1: around and no one ever notices. And this problem of
[12:59] Speaker 1: inattention led the European Central Bank to explore a simple question,
[13:04] Speaker 1: could banknotes be better designed so that the person on
[13:08] Speaker 1: the street would be more likely to notice when something
[13:11] Speaker 1: was amiss? And for that they finally started to think
[13:15] Speaker 1: about neuroscience. And that's how I got involved, because as
[13:19] Speaker 1: our understanding of the brain has developed over recent decades,
[13:22] Speaker 1: neuroscience has forged insights into a range of fields from
[13:27] Speaker 1: early education to consumer behavior to government policy, and modern
[13:31] Speaker 1: brain science has wide ranging applications, particularly when it comes
[13:36] Speaker 1: to understanding the ways in which our perceptions of the
[13:40] Speaker 1: world are inaccurate. In the case of banknotes, the questions
[13:44] Speaker 1: were straightforward, what details do we notice or not notice?
[13:49] Speaker 1: And why? What features could be better designed? To be
[13:53] Speaker 1: brain compatible of all the anti counterfeiting measures that the
[13:58] Speaker 1: government takes, which ones work, and how could their efforts
[14:01] Speaker 1: be better spent. So the man at the conference eventually
[14:05] Speaker 1: contracted with me to help them figure out the question
[14:08] Speaker 1: how should Europe redesign their bills? So we signed a
[14:12] Speaker 1: bunch of security documents and then I flew to the
[14:15] Speaker 1: headquarters of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. Now
[14:19] Speaker 1: this was very cool because although the building was just
[14:22] Speaker 1: a boring government building, I was beeped through a badge
[14:26] Speaker 1: protected door, and then another, and then another, and we
[14:31] Speaker 1: finally arrived at this small inner room at the heart
[14:35] Speaker 1: of the building, and there were all these piles of
[14:37] Speaker 1: money of euros, mostly twenties and fifties, and they were
[14:41] Speaker 1: all counterfeit. Each pile had some feature that distinguished it,
[14:46] Speaker 1: whether that was the way they had done the shiny
[14:49] Speaker 1: foil or the way they had done the watermarks or whatever,
[14:53] Speaker 1: and this is how the bank arranged them. Now, many
[14:56] Speaker 1: of these forgeries were quite good. If you weren't paying
[15:00] Speaker 1: super close attention, the kind of attention no one ever
[15:03] Speaker 1: really pays to money, you couldn't tell there was anything
[15:06] Speaker 1: amiss with most of these forgeries you could tell under
[15:10] Speaker 1: ultraviolet light. But if you didn't have that, there was
[15:13] Speaker 1: really nothing that would even make you think to pay
[15:16] Speaker 1: extra attention. And here's a weird fact that I learned
[15:19] Speaker 1: there in the vaults. These really good forgeries, they always
[15:24] Speaker 1: have a slight error in them. And think about why
[15:28] Speaker 1: this is weird. You've got a otherwise amazingly well done
[15:33] Speaker 1: counterfeit bill, but it's got an error. For example, there
[15:37] Speaker 1: are essentially perfect counterfeits of the American twenty dollars bill.
[15:42] Speaker 1: But if you look at the number two, the way
[15:46] Speaker 1: that the bottom of the two spreads out what's called
[15:49] Speaker 1: the trumpeting in font language, it's just slightly wider than
[15:54] Speaker 1: it is on a real bill. So what's going on
[15:56] Speaker 1: with that? How can you get the whole bill right
[16:00] Speaker 1: but not get that little detail right? And there's actually
[16:02] Speaker 1: one more part to this mystery. There's only one mistake
[16:06] Speaker 1: on a bill and no more than that. And the
[16:08] Speaker 1: answer is it's not a mistake. It's on purpose, and
[16:11] Speaker 1: it's because counterfeitters need a way to distinguish their own
[16:16] Speaker 1: bills from the real ones. This is so they don't
[16:19] Speaker 1: spend their real money accidentally. Okay, so some of these
[16:22] Speaker 1: bills were almost perfect with this single tiny change, But
[16:26] Speaker 1: that's not the part that's interesting. What's interesting is that
[16:30] Speaker 1: most of the counterfeits were not as expertly done as
[16:34] Speaker 1: you might expect. On almost all of them, the part
[16:38] Speaker 1: where the color changing ink normally is didn't actually change color,
[16:43] Speaker 1: and on others the water mark had been hand drawn
[16:47] Speaker 1: really poorly, and in one pile of notes, the silver
[16:51] Speaker 1: hologram had been impersonated with a glued piece of shiny
[16:56] Speaker 1: material from the seal of a compact disc case. Many
[17:00] Speaker 1: of the notes had essentially none of the actual security features.
[17:05] Speaker 1: But the surprising thing is this, to get a counterfeit
[17:08] Speaker 1: into circulation, most counterfeiters don't bother to go through the
[17:13] Speaker 1: trouble of making an almost perfect one. Why because it
[17:17] Speaker 1: makes almost no difference. Almost no one in the general
[17:21] Speaker 1: public notices a bad forgery. People will stuff the notes
[17:25] Speaker 1: into their wallets, and they'll pass them on, and the
[17:28] Speaker 1: notes spread like a virus through the population. Because as
[17:32] Speaker 1: banknote users, we are surprisingly unobservant. We just don't pay
[17:37] Speaker 1: attention to the bills in our hand. The government spends
[17:41] Speaker 1: an incredible amount on security features, and we don't even
[17:46] Speaker 1: look at it now. The ECB tried to tackle this
[17:50] Speaker 1: problem by hosting public awareness campaigns where they encourage people
[17:55] Speaker 1: to stop and look carefully at what they were holding.
[17:59] Speaker 1: The coach failed. People wouldn't put in the effort. Governments
[18:04] Speaker 1: cary enormously about security features and the population doesn't. So
[18:08] Speaker 1: the Central Bank now wanted to try a different tack.
[18:12] Speaker 1: They wanted to work out what the human visual system
[18:16] Speaker 1: actually notices and why there was no point spending a
[18:20] Speaker 1: massive amount on security features that are only noticed by
[18:24] Speaker 1: security experts. And that was the beginning of a long
[18:27] Speaker 1: relationship I had with the ECB. For legal reasons, they
[18:31] Speaker 1: couldn't manufacture or mail to me counterfeit bills, and so
[18:36] Speaker 1: I had to figure out how to make pseudo bills myself. First,
[18:42] Speaker 1: I had to get approval from my university for this
[18:45] Speaker 1: very unusual study, and then my students that I set
[18:49] Speaker 1: to work. As it turns out, it's not that difficult
[18:51] Speaker 1: to make a rough counterfeit now. It happens that I
[18:55] Speaker 1: was recently talking with my friend Adam Savage of MythBusters fame,
[18:59] Speaker 1: and it turned out but that he also has done
[19:02] Speaker 1: lots of forgeries of things not illegally, but legal versions
[19:06] Speaker 1: of making replicas of all kinds of wonderful things. So
[19:10] Speaker 1: before I tell you about my experiences, I wanted to
[19:12] Speaker 1: ring up Adam to hear about his. So, Adam, you've
[19:19] Speaker 1: done some countershitting. Tell me about that?
[19:22] Speaker 3: Ha ha. Right, I don't want to brag that I've
[19:26] Speaker 3: done some counterfeiting, but I'm obsessed with the idea of replication.
[19:31] Speaker 3: That's one of my main practices here in the cave,
[19:34] Speaker 3: and so like. Just for instance, recently, I obtained a
[19:37] Speaker 3: really lovely replica of one of Leonardo da Vinci's coticies.
[19:42] Speaker 3: This is known as the Paris manuscript A, and I've
[19:45] Speaker 3: been slowly spending a couple of weeks making a completely
[19:48] Speaker 3: accurate cover for it, based on the information from the
[19:52] Speaker 3: collection that it's since so I've been printing up the
[19:54] Speaker 3: cover full size of and having the collection stamps made,
[19:58] Speaker 3: and I'm gonna slowly make this thing indistinguishable from the original.
[20:02] Speaker 3: So that's the kind of counterfeiting I really dig is
[20:04] Speaker 3: the experiential counterfeit.
[20:06] Speaker 1: Oh that's amazing. Now let me ask you this. Do
[20:09] Speaker 1: you find that if there are changes things you don't
[20:13] Speaker 1: get perfect? Do you find that people don't notice those.
[20:18] Speaker 3: People's threshold for what they notice is it's an interesting
[20:24] Speaker 3: mixture because you can kind of bypass some of their
[20:28] Speaker 3: filters with the right amount of aging, or even sometimes
[20:32] Speaker 3: a smell will just have someone bypass all their filters
[20:35] Speaker 3: from what they can see. So it's really different object
[20:39] Speaker 3: by object about what the threshold is for what lends
[20:42] Speaker 3: what feels like an experience of veracity.
[20:47] Speaker 1: Have you ever tried counterfeiting money? Is that something you've
[20:49] Speaker 1: ever tried?
[20:50] Speaker 3: Uh? I have made so behind me here on my
[20:53] Speaker 3: desk pieces in my collection, and it's the bank box
[20:56] Speaker 3: from the Borne identity, and this is the act bank
[21:00] Speaker 3: box from the Bourne identity. I bought it empty, but
[21:03] Speaker 3: one of my long term plans is to actually fill
[21:06] Speaker 3: it full of original bills or correct bills. And this
[21:11] Speaker 3: is made easier by the fact that a lot of
[21:13] Speaker 3: the bills that were in the Boorne identity bank box
[21:15] Speaker 3: are now euros, and so those original currencies, the real
[21:21] Speaker 3: it's the frank et cetera, are no longer extant, and
[21:24] Speaker 3: so I get suitably and appropriately nervous even doing Google
[21:29] Speaker 3: searches about replicating money. But to me, your job of
[21:33] Speaker 3: actually trying some counterfeits to see what work sounds like
[21:36] Speaker 3: an absolute dream come true for me. I was like
[21:38] Speaker 3: I was born to be a pen tester.
[21:54] Speaker 1: Okay, so back to my counterfeiting contract. So the notes
[21:58] Speaker 1: that we made in the lab had no security features
[22:01] Speaker 1: like holograms or color changing ink, because that wasn't precisely
[22:04] Speaker 1: what we were studying. We were studying how much somebody
[22:08] Speaker 1: would notice if we presented them with a bill with
[22:11] Speaker 1: a particular design, and we let them examine it and
[22:15] Speaker 1: turn it around in their hands, and then we took
[22:18] Speaker 1: it back and we handed them another note, and that
[22:21] Speaker 1: other note might have some change that was made to it,
[22:25] Speaker 1: and we asked them, is this the same bill or
[22:28] Speaker 1: a different one? In other words, how much do they
[22:31] Speaker 1: remember about the note that they just examined. Now, you
[22:35] Speaker 1: might expect that if you get to examine a note carefully,
[22:38] Speaker 1: it's not going to be any problem to see when
[22:40] Speaker 1: something changes, But you'd be shocked at the limits of
[22:45] Speaker 1: our observation and our memory. Take a simple experiment run
[22:50] Speaker 1: by the psychologists Raymond Nickerson and Marilyn Adams in nineteen
[22:54] Speaker 1: seventy nine. What they did is they showed people fifteen
[22:57] Speaker 1: different drawings of the US penny, and one was the
[23:02] Speaker 1: actual penny, while the other drawings were manipulated versions where
[23:06] Speaker 1: you had the date in a different place, or you
[23:09] Speaker 1: had the slogan changed, for example, United States of America
[23:14] Speaker 1: instead of in God we Trust. And fewer than half
[23:18] Speaker 1: the participants could identify which one was the correct penny.
[23:23] Speaker 1: Although the participants handled pennies almost every day of their lives,
[23:28] Speaker 1: they hadn't paid attention in the way they thought they had.
[23:33] Speaker 1: Experience doesn't translate into expertise. Why not. It's because we
[23:40] Speaker 1: only see what we closely attend to. So imagine you
[23:44] Speaker 1: catch a glimpse of a man and a woman having
[23:47] Speaker 1: a picnic in a park. All you actually see is
[23:50] Speaker 1: something like man, woman food. With time, as you crawl
[23:55] Speaker 1: the scene with your attentional systems, you'll incorporate more details.
[23:58] Speaker 1: Oh they've got bulls of suit. It's a checkered blanket
[24:01] Speaker 1: that's a little unusual. There are hills in the background,
[24:05] Speaker 1: and with more time you'll notice, Oh, his spoon is
[24:08] Speaker 1: slightly bent, or she's wearing a silver necklace, or the
[24:13] Speaker 1: encircling trees are buckthorn. But we incorporate more detail into
[24:18] Speaker 1: a scene only if we pay more attention and we
[24:21] Speaker 1: ask more questions. And as I said before, it's like
[24:25] Speaker 1: this with all of our senses. What is the feeling
[24:28] Speaker 1: of your pants on your left kneecap right now, or
[24:32] Speaker 1: the feeling of your shirt on your shoulders. As soon
[24:35] Speaker 1: as you ask these questions, you can become aware of
[24:39] Speaker 1: the answer, but you didn't know until you queried. So
[24:42] Speaker 1: our visual sense is not like a camera that's taking
[24:46] Speaker 1: in the complete scene. Instead, we see only the details
[24:50] Speaker 1: that we go out to seek. And this is the
[24:52] Speaker 1: issue with the banknotes. We may glance at one to
[24:57] Speaker 1: verify that it matches the general template expecting, but we
[25:01] Speaker 1: don't scrutinize the details. And that's why the European central
[25:07] Speaker 1: banks campaign to stop and pay attention to money it
[25:12] Speaker 1: just didn't work. We don't attend to things that sufficiently
[25:16] Speaker 1: fit our assumptions. We believe we already know the note
[25:21] Speaker 1: in our hands.
[25:23] Speaker 3: I recently had a fake bail passed to me in
[25:26] Speaker 3: New York City. I was getting a hot dog, which
[25:31] Speaker 3: was four bucks, and I gave him a ten, and
[25:33] Speaker 3: he gave me what looked like a one and a five,
[25:36] Speaker 3: except the five was I'm on the street, right, I'm
[25:40] Speaker 3: just I put it in my pocket. I get back
[25:42] Speaker 3: to my room. The five was actually a discontinued old
[25:45] Speaker 3: five thousand yen Japanese note.
[25:50] Speaker 1: Exactly.
[25:51] Speaker 3: We had Matt respect for him for handing that directly
[25:54] Speaker 3: to me.
[25:55] Speaker 1: That's amazing because you're a guy who pays so much
[25:58] Speaker 1: attention to what's there, and even for you, you expect
[26:01] Speaker 1: you're getting a five back, and so your brain fills
[26:04] Speaker 1: in all the blanks and you just take it and
[26:06] Speaker 1: you go, well, I mean, you know.
[26:08] Speaker 3: It's a difficult problem to solve when you realize that
[26:10] Speaker 3: we regularly interact with bills that are ancient and are
[26:14] Speaker 3: filthy and like soft leather and brand new, and they're
[26:18] Speaker 3: crisp and smell totally differently and look totally different. When
[26:21] Speaker 3: you hold those two up against each other and you think,
[26:24] Speaker 3: I've got to get someone to be able to parse
[26:28] Speaker 3: that both of these are real, that's that's a complicated
[26:31] Speaker 3: problem to solve.
[26:33] Speaker 1: What the EU Opinion Union does is they have all
[26:35] Speaker 1: these security features in their bills. They spend so much
[26:38] Speaker 1: money for these security features, and no one ever notices.
[26:44] Speaker 1: So my job is to figure out which elements of
[26:46] Speaker 1: the banknotes were noticed and which weren't, and to make
[26:49] Speaker 1: recommendations for next step. We performed a series of experiments
[26:54] Speaker 1: for over a year and in the end it became
[26:57] Speaker 1: obvious to me what needed to be done. So in
[27:00] Speaker 1: my final presentation to the European Central Bank, I put
[27:03] Speaker 1: forward evidence that the watermark on the euro should be
[27:08] Speaker 1: a face instead of a building. Why it's because the
[27:13] Speaker 1: human brain is massively specialized to recognizing faces, but it
[27:18] Speaker 1: has little neural real estate devoted to buildings. You can
[27:24] Speaker 1: see a building and then you can see a building
[27:26] Speaker 1: that looks sort of like it, and you really can't
[27:28] Speaker 1: tell the difference. Maybe you can't if you're an architect,
[27:31] Speaker 1: but the rest of us just wouldn't notice. And forged
[27:35] Speaker 1: water marks are generally hand drawn, and that's because it's
[27:39] Speaker 1: this intermediate layer and you need to do that by hand.
[27:43] Speaker 1: And it turns out that if you draw a building,
[27:46] Speaker 1: even if you do a really lousy job, no one's
[27:49] Speaker 1: going to catch the difference. Your brain just doesn't care
[27:52] Speaker 1: that much about the exact details of a building. But
[27:56] Speaker 1: contrast this with faces. We have a ton of brain
[28:00] Speaker 1: territory devoted to faces. Think about the difference in the
[28:05] Speaker 1: faces of the people you see every day. The length
[28:08] Speaker 1: of the nose, the distance between the eyes, the shape
[28:11] Speaker 1: of the lips. These are really subtle details, but we're
[28:14] Speaker 1: super sensitive to picking up on these. Now, this is
[28:17] Speaker 1: of course for human faces. You presumably couldn't tell that
[28:20] Speaker 1: much difference between the faces of twenty different German shepherd dogs.
[28:25] Speaker 1: They all sort of look alike to you. But now
[28:27] Speaker 1: put yourself in the position of the dog. Presumably humans
[28:31] Speaker 1: look mostly alike to it. But the details we are
[28:34] Speaker 1: so sensitive to, like the hairline and the cheekbones, and
[28:37] Speaker 1: the length of the nose and the exact position of
[28:39] Speaker 1: the ears and all that stuff, would mean nothing to
[28:42] Speaker 1: the dog. But we are incredibly sensitive to these tiny,
[28:47] Speaker 1: tiny differences. And this is why it's so much easier
[28:51] Speaker 1: to spot an imperfect face than an imperfect building. And
[28:56] Speaker 1: this is why the ECB decided to change the watermark
[28:59] Speaker 1: on fifty year D bill from a building to a face. Now, unfortunately,
[29:05] Speaker 1: they had an implementation challenge, a political one, which is,
[29:09] Speaker 1: how can they get all the different countries to agree
[29:13] Speaker 1: on one person's face. What nationality were they going to choose?
[29:16] Speaker 1: The Italians were going to want Michelangelo, the British would
[29:20] Speaker 1: want Shakespeare, the French would want Napoleon, and so on.
[29:23] Speaker 1: That's why they had originally chosen a building, because that
[29:26] Speaker 1: circumvented the argument. But now there was a reason to
[29:30] Speaker 1: choose a face. So finally someone suggested that instead of
[29:34] Speaker 1: fighting it out between historical heroes, they should just settle
[29:39] Speaker 1: on the mythological Princess Europa, after whom Europe is named,
[29:44] Speaker 1: and so the new fifty dollars note with her face
[29:47] Speaker 1: rolled out in twenty seventeen. Now that move is a
[29:51] Speaker 1: step in the right direction, but since they chose a
[29:55] Speaker 1: mythological face with no single correct version, it's slightly less
[30:00] Speaker 1: useful than a face everyone would recognize, like if they'd
[30:04] Speaker 1: used Juliete Bnotia's face or Benedict Cumberbatch's face. But anyway,
[30:09] Speaker 1: it was a good start. But that was only my
[30:11] Speaker 1: first recommendation. I then recommended that all euro banknotes should
[30:16] Speaker 1: be the same size, the way that American bills are.
[30:20] Speaker 1: Why because that would at least get people to look
[30:23] Speaker 1: at them a bit longer to see what they're dealing with.
[30:26] Speaker 1: Right if you're handing someone an American bill, they have
[30:29] Speaker 1: to stare at it for some hundreds of milliseconds longer
[30:33] Speaker 1: just to register what in the heck they're holding, because
[30:36] Speaker 1: there aren't other clues from size, whereas in Europe you
[30:40] Speaker 1: grab a bill and you know much faster if it's
[30:43] Speaker 1: a twenty or fifty or whatever, and as a result,
[30:46] Speaker 1: you pay even less attention to what is written on it. Now,
[30:50] Speaker 1: there are advantages to the blind community in having bills
[30:54] Speaker 1: of different sizes, but now you can do three D
[30:58] Speaker 1: printing on bills, and so the blind community no longer
[31:02] Speaker 1: needs different sizes to be able to tell what bill
[31:05] Speaker 1: they're holding. Now, the council told me that while they
[31:08] Speaker 1: took my point, there was no way they were going
[31:10] Speaker 1: to make all the bills the same size. Why it
[31:13] Speaker 1: wasn't just because they'd have to retool the mints where
[31:16] Speaker 1: they print the bills, but more importantly, they'd have to
[31:19] Speaker 1: retool all the vending machines in Europe, and this was
[31:23] Speaker 1: an impossible amount of work, which got me thinking about
[31:26] Speaker 1: the way that things get ensconced. They get calcified into
[31:30] Speaker 1: place by some historical trajectory, and then it becomes too
[31:35] Speaker 1: hard to change it, like the way that we use
[31:37] Speaker 1: the imperial measuring system in America, where it's not based
[31:42] Speaker 1: on tens, and therefore it's very difficult to convert between
[31:45] Speaker 1: different units, like we have twelve inches equally a foot
[31:48] Speaker 1: or sixteen ounces is a pound. And when I was
[31:51] Speaker 1: a kid, there was a big push to teach both
[31:55] Speaker 1: the imperial and the metric systems at the same time
[31:58] Speaker 1: so that we could slowly make the transition into something
[32:01] Speaker 1: that made more sense. But it just proved too hard
[32:04] Speaker 1: to change because the imperial measurement system got calcified into place,
[32:10] Speaker 1: and then you can't get rid of it. So anyway,
[32:13] Speaker 1: the European Central Bank acknowledge that I had a point
[32:16] Speaker 1: about the bill size, but they concluded it would just
[32:19] Speaker 1: be too much work to retool everything. So they asked
[32:23] Speaker 1: for my next recommendation, and here was my chance to
[32:27] Speaker 1: deliver my clincher. This was a sense that had been
[32:31] Speaker 1: creeping up on me for the entire year that I'd
[32:34] Speaker 1: been studying the problem of counterfeiting. The heart of the
[32:38] Speaker 1: problem is that notes are jam packed with decorative features
[32:43] Speaker 1: that have nothing to do with the security. So you
[32:46] Speaker 1: have pictures of trees and patriots and birds and flags,
[32:50] Speaker 1: you have swirling colors, and no one notices the security
[32:53] Speaker 1: features because of all these distractions. So I told them
[32:58] Speaker 1: that a piece of current, see a bill, should be
[33:01] Speaker 1: a blank, white piece of paper with a single hologram
[33:06] Speaker 1: in the middle. That's it, nothing else on it. A
[33:09] Speaker 1: counterfeiter wouldn't be able to replicate that without serious specialized equipment,
[33:15] Speaker 1: and the person in the street wouldn't be distracted by
[33:19] Speaker 1: all the detailing that has nothing to do with the security.
[33:23] Speaker 1: So they agreed with my recommendation in theory, but they
[33:26] Speaker 1: rejected it on the grounds that there's too much cultural
[33:31] Speaker 1: momentum in the design of banknotes. In other words, people
[33:35] Speaker 1: expect notes to look a certain way. Currencies are supposed
[33:39] Speaker 1: to impress the viewer with the regal power and artistic
[33:45] Speaker 1: talents of the ruling body, and apparently no government wants
[33:50] Speaker 1: to appear unregal and unartistic when compared to another government.
[33:55] Speaker 1: And so the experiment came to a close. The building
[33:58] Speaker 1: got changed to a face, which was a good start,
[34:01] Speaker 1: but so much about the rest of currencies is stuck
[34:04] Speaker 1: in place. So we'll see what happens with the future
[34:08] Speaker 1: of digital exchanges like PayPal or Venmo and the future
[34:11] Speaker 1: of crypto, but it appears that for now paper money
[34:15] Speaker 1: is sticking around almost everywhere on the planet. So it's
[34:18] Speaker 1: still my general hope that some government somewhere will get
[34:23] Speaker 1: this straight. And the advantage for them is they'll have
[34:26] Speaker 1: massively less counterfeiting to drag on their economy. So if
[34:30] Speaker 1: you're going to start a new country, take this podcast
[34:33] Speaker 1: as my free advice for how to do your bills.
[34:36] Speaker 1: Effective solutions from science can sometimes bump up against tradition,
[34:40] Speaker 1: but if we really care about tackling a problem, we
[34:44] Speaker 1: have to move beyond adherence to custom. The human visual
[34:48] Speaker 1: system is never going to notice security features that are
[34:51] Speaker 1: buried in other details, and if you give your brain
[34:54] Speaker 1: any excuse to believe it knows what's out there, it
[34:58] Speaker 1: will take shortcuts and make extra assumptions. So this episode
[35:03] Speaker 1: repeats a theme that you're going to hear many times
[35:06] Speaker 1: on this show. Whenever you want to improve society, you
[35:10] Speaker 1: have to do your best to understand the details of
[35:13] Speaker 1: the brains that comprise that society. That's all for this week.
[35:22] Speaker 1: To find out more and to share your thoughts, head
[35:25] Speaker 1: over to Eagleman dot com slash Podcasts, and you can
[35:29] Speaker 1: also watch full episodes of Inner Cosmos on YouTube. Subscribe
[35:33] Speaker 1: to my channel so you can follow along each week
[35:36] Speaker 1: for new updates until next time. I'm David Eagleman and
[35:40] Speaker 1: this is Inner Cosmos.

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