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