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COGNITIVE
JIU-JITSU
© 1999 by Jim Hogshire
Thieves, kidnappers, cops, and other fans of brute force don't mind breaking the law. They don't mind breaking bones. They sure don't mind breaking down doors to get at you or your stuff. Steep walls and barbed wire won't deter such goons anymore than steel vaults stop bank robbers.
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The best protection against this type of foe is to hide. Crazed Vandals can't steal your collection of Hummel figurines and drag your daughters off to be sold into slavery if they think there's nothing in the place!
Of course, even the dumbest goon has eyes and ears. Sometimes he'll bring metal detectors and specially trained dogs to sniff out your valuables. These are indeed problems to creating a find-resistant hiding place, but they are not impossible to defeat.
The subtle art of camouflage (a.k.a. "hiding") substitutes a kind of cognitive jiu-jitsu – the Japanese art of disabling an adversary using his own strength and weight – for the sheer strength of thick walls. The stash itself is of secondary importance when considering a hiding place. Hiding things requires a mix of science and intuition is more than a clever trap door or a one-way mirror. To find a good hiding place you've got to consider who is looking – and consider his or her point of view.
Cognitive and mental limitations on perception influence thinking and behavior as much as social and emotional forces. Sensory organs and the brain itself work in measurable, predictable ways that can be used to create the sort of effects magicians and psychologists use every day. Human perception, especially visual perception, has been studied enough that certain psychological "constants" have been noted. Cognitive psychologists speak of the "law of proximity," "law of similarity," "law of good continuation," and so on. For example:
- People tend to see continuous lines as belonging to a single edge. In fact, the psychological need for "pattern recognition" is so strong it seems impossible to perceive something as random or just coincidence. People will "connect the dots" – even if the dots are meaningless. Disrupting patterns is almost a definition of camouflage. The amorphous leaf-and-dirt colored blobs on a soldier's uniform make his man-shaped outline far less conspicuous.
- According to the "law of proximity," things that are physically near each other are perceived to belong together. Good use of this concept can provide a misleading context to the searcher and keep your hidden stuff safe. Also, unless obviously "out of place," most things are assumed to be "where they belong."
- "Good continuation" describes how people will mentally complete partial images in logical ways. The old arrow-through-the-head gag works because of a perceptual tendency to perceive the straight line of an arrow, even if that is clearly impossible. It is also easier to recognize things we already "know." That's why so many hiding techniques depend on making something look like something else.
Hard-wiring in the Brain
There are also physical limitations to perception. In vision, for instance, there is only one part of the retina that can truly see things in sharp focus – the fovea. Anyone looking at something will situate themselves so the image falls in this area.
The best protection is to hide. Crazed Vandals can't steal your collection of Hummel figurines and drag your daughters off to be sold into slavery if they think there's nothing in the place.
Eye fatigue begins in only .002 seconds, which is why the eye constantly makes tiny and quick jumps (called "saccades") at a rate of 4-5 jumps per second. It is only between these jumps that visual information is transmitted to the brain. No information gets through during the jumps. It's impossible to really stare at anything for long without compromising perception. Getting someone to stare at something narrows his or her field of vision.
The central portion of the retina is most sensitive to color and certain ones are more readily perceived than others. Green, for example, is easiest to perceive. Peripheral vision is geared toward detecting shape and movement – especially movement. Movement is so compelling that if the corner of your eye catches sight of a train under way, you feel as if you are moving. The animal instinct to pay immediate attention to sudden disruptions in the environment (flash! bang!) can be used to derail a searcher's concentration.
Another way to occupy (and thus waste) a searcher's mental capacity is to pit the brain against itself. Here again, neuroscience gives us some concrete suggestions. For example, light flashing at three times per second (3 hertz) excites certain areas of the brain in just about everyone. An EEG machine shows this "spiking," but the brain's activity is not noticed by the subject himself. Other specific frequencies can attract and hold portions of the brain's subconscious attention, too. Some frequencies even cause seizures in susceptible individuals. So a strobe (or even a light behind a fan blade) flashing at, say, 7 hertz might interfere with a searcher's concentration – without his ever knowing it. A flashing frequency at around 4 or 5 hertz might mimic the frequency of the eye's saccades and further inhibit a searcher's ability to see much.
This is where perception is most vulnerable to subversion. An active subconscious is a real nuisance to anyone trying to analyze a complex scene. And, once started, subconscious thinking is hard to suppress. And so many things can trigger subconscious thought! Smell is particularly effective for this purpose – the scent of bubble gum, burning leaves, or rotting meat that forces an unrelated, but captivating, train of thought. Sounds, including music, can stimulate the subconscious enough that it nearly obliterates conscious thinking. Ever been lost in a daydream? To effectively work this angle, take a tip from the experts (advertisers and politicians) and play to crude emotions – fear are the best.
- Dedicated searchers will wade around inside septic tanks if necessary, but, like everyone else they'd prefer to avoid doing such unpleasant or uncomfortable things. A thing might be unpleasant all by itself, (feces, hardening mucus, used tampons, etc.) or it might trigger psychic discomfort – fear or embarrassment. Unpleasant sensations are especially distracting if accompanied by an irresistible fascination.
- Pornography (the kinkier the better) is great for getting people's attention. Some men cannot help but react to it. Whether they like or dislike it is immaterial. Porno gets their attention and hogs it. Same goes for any "Satanic ritual" paraphernalia found around the house. Lots of people are spooked by this kind of thing and it preys on their minds, seriously affecting their thoughts. All sorts of powerful, symbolic red herrings can distract searchers, leading to flawed lines of thinking and wrong conclusions, deflecting attention from whatever you've concealed, keeping it safe.
Always consider cultural, and other social biases when hiding something. And do not ever forget the human ego.
That person ransacking your home has emotional needs, too, you know. He wants – even needs – positive reinforcement just like other people. His self-image is at stake here so you must cater to that and provide the right blend of carrots and sticks so he won't find what you've hidden. Again, keep the searcher's point of view in mind.
Who is the searcher anyway? Is it your mom? A thief? The police? How does the searcher view himself and the search? What's the motivation? What's the expected gain? This is important because, in the end, the searcher's identity and expectations will determine the method and intensity of the search as much as anything else.
Police won't respect your expensive or fragile property whereas your mom probably will. Then again, mom can always return for another look, while cops get just one search warrant, and that's it. Mom might feel a little bad about snooping, and there are probably things she'd rather not find so her search may not be too intense. Her tendency might be to see the benign, innocent side of things. Police aren't like that at all. Police expect to find evidence of a crime (usually a specific crime) and will interpret everything in a way that supports their expectations.
Cops see themselves as in the right. They have no misgivings about what they're doing, and blame their victim for any harm they may do. Their self-image is on the line while they are on duty. Cop peer pressure, cop boss pressure, and cop ego require them to be successful and never get caught making a mistake. They have incentives to find what they came for and they have super permission to do it, so the search can get intense... for the thing they came for.
What are they looking for and what are their preformed ideas about what and how they'll find it? If police come for drugs, they'll probably miss any illegal wildlife (such as eagle feathers or an ivory amulet), unlicensed radio transmitters, maybe even counterfeiting equipment! But it means they'll suspect anything and everything of being drugs that they perceive could be drugs. If they can't find drugs, they have a serious problem: they can either admit failure (fat chance!), start lying, or even plant something. This cop needs your help, pronto, or he could cause a lot of trouble!
A cop's need to be right, combined with natural laziness suggests two ways to handle this – although both mean "giving" them something.
Psychology suggests that after an initial psychological "pay-off," subsequent pay-offs have got to be better than that to motivate the continuation of a behavior. All the cop needs is something to make his search "successful" and he stands a good chance of stopping if he doesn't immediately get another, incrementally larger pay-off. That's why it's worth it to give them something – even a bit of their quarry – to protect the rest. It's also possible to allow searchers to find something that looks and feels like a suitable prize when it really isn't – a mistake they don't discover until later... much later. There are other variations on this tactic – all of them playing directly to the searcher's need to succeed.
Every search has a time limit. Once police have spent a few hours ransacking someone's house, they have to leave. A second search warrant is highly unlikely. (In fact, one of the best places to hide anything is in a freshly searched house!) Knowing this, waste their limited time by increasing mental fatigue and fostering "habituation" to the search scene. The longer a person looks at a scene, the more his awareness of his surroundings decreases. He's already looked at everything a couple of times. Soon, he's seen everything. This feeling of familiarity joins his preconceived ideas about how things are supposed to look, making it easier to reinforce his observation, which is (hopefully) that the search is over – a dud.
Although police searchers are trained to do things like look up, they cannot avoid preconceived images of what is being sought, what it looks like and the places it must be. For a long time, U.S. Customs officers cleared a lot of cocaine that had been mixed into a plastic mixture and formed into – in one case – dog kennels! This clever idea uses the inspector's belief he knows what he's looking at. Cocaine, he knows, is a white powder, not a solid black plastic material in the shape of a Porta-Potty!
The subtle art of camouflage substitutes a kind of cognitive jiu-jitsu – the Japanese art of disabling an adversary using his own strength and weight – for the sheer strength of thick walls. Opium has been smuggled in two interesting ways. One method used opium dissolved in water as dye for "batik" printed cloth. Here again is a case of what an inspector sees and how different that is from what he knows opium looks like and how it must be packaged. Opium has been openly "smuggled" in unsealed containers, without any special disguising at all. Perhaps it got by inspectors because it was so obvious. Opium, they knew, is not so blatantly imported. It's found in hidden compartments. Perhaps they connected the dots and concluded the stuff must be something else. There really is such a thing as "hidden in plain sight."
Which brings up another important psychological/behavioral trait: People believe labels. Like a newspaper headline, the label helps cue them what to think... and what not to think. If the bottle says "Valium," then the cop knows it's not children's aspirin! Or amphetamines for that matter. Right?
This tendency to make assumptions based on labels (or some other outer characteristic that does essentially the same thing) is very powerful. I know a guy who carried his heroin with him in a prescription bottle. When a cop caught him jumping a subway turnstile, he naturally took the opportunity to rummage through the contents of our hero's pockets. The cop never opened the bottle! Good thing, too. Instead of neat round tablets of legal medicine, the bottle was full of smack in dime bag glassines.
A related phenomenon is the heavy influence of one or another "authority." More frequently than is comfortable to think about, an authority's opinion is truer than reality. Erroneous, but authoritative information, will be believed over observed – but conflicting – information. If the stern airline captain tells his yammering co-pilot the wings are sufficiently de-iced, the co-pilot changes his mind, even at the risk of his own life. This is exactly what happened on a Florida-bound commercial jetliner that crashed into a freezing river in Washington, D.C.
Another way to occupy (and thus waste) a searcher's mental capacity is to pit the brain against itself. Authority doesn't have to wear a dashing uniform, either. Most authorities are friends or colleagues, including that ubiquitous character known as "the boss" who is, naturally, "always right." But not as right as technology. Even a boss has less real authority than a pocket calculator – or any other sort of computer. Anyone who participates in modern public life in America today knows that information from a computer carries more weight than personal observation. If the bank says you're broke, you are. If the grocery store scanner rings up a 29-cent can of caviar, well, then it must be on sale.
Maybe the most powerful authority is known as "most people," or even, "the majority." The rule of the mob, er, majority rules, is even thought to be a good thing and is taught to children in schools across the land. When adults do this it is sometimes called "democracy" or something similar. When teenagers practice it, it is called "peer pressure," however.
Behavioral experiments in peer pressure show people will change their own observations to conform with a majority – to avoid confrontation. If the group insists the ball is orange, few individuals will argue for long that it's red – even if that is what they see. Other, more extreme experiments, show people will obey authority to an astonishing, even gruesome extent – especially if they are allowed to act as part of a group, obeying the orders of a doctor, a prison guard, or some other stereotypical manifestation of authority. In real-life, war's authoritative blessing transforms otherwise reprehensible and criminal acts into something good and noble – almost to the point of holiness.
This war mentality permeates the already hierarchical (authoritarian) world of today's para-military cop, where "authority" has even greater meaning. The cop's feeling he is above the law and all-powerful makes him less likely to back down from a bad decision creating a dangerous situation for everyone involved. But for you, it is a situation to turn back on the searcher. Such arrogance is almost assured to blind them to more than a few things. It is in these blind spots you can hide almost anything and carry out your subversive, unholy activities.
- If searchers are working in a group, you can take advantage of another phenomenon of "partial report," which is the problem of perceiving something without being able to name it. This happens a lot if a person looks at a number of things, then turns away to list them out loud. Invariably, some things are left out of the list. The searcher sees things but cannot articulate them accurately. Beware, he can still make use of information he didn't report, by his co-searchers won't.
- Multiple sensory input causes confusion and can seriously distort perception. Because vision usually dominates all other senses, including hearing, it is most likely to trump all other information and be perceived as reality. Test subjects holding a rectangular object, who are also tricked into thinking the object they see is a triangle, will misinterpret tactile information and "feel" a triangle! Seeing really is believing!
Cops see themselves as in the right. They have no misgivings about what they're doing, and blame their victim for any harm they may do.
Building a Good Hiding Place
There are plenty of clever hiding places, but the good ones work because they take advantage of the built-in human flaws in perception and cognition. They make use of the constraints anyone has on his abilities to see and to process information, and the circumstances of the search. No hiding place is perfect for every situation, but there are some concepts to keep in mind when constructing a hide.
- Hollow out things that are supposed to be solid – chunks of metal, porcelain, even rocks. It's something of a chore, but a big, nondescript rock can be hollowed out then cemented back together. Almost no one thinks of rocks as hollow.
- Use things that are supposed to be sealed – canned goods, light bulbs, even a tube of toothpaste are all candidates. How about fruit? A banana, an apple, a pear, even a bunch of grapes could be modified.
- Turning things that are supposed solid into a liquid. Most drugs and other illicit substances can be dissolved in legal-looking liquids and later retrieved by evaporation, filtration, etc.
- Make something that's usually short and squat into something flat and thin. Things that are supposed to be a single unit (a statue, for instance) can be broken down into several pieces and then scattered around.
- Whenever possible change the thing's color, shape, place it is normally found, and especially its position. A lava lamp lying on its side can be almost invisible... especially to someone looking for a lava lamp! This technique takes advantage of the searcher's pre-formed expectations.
- Things that are already "empty" or "full" can be made otherwise. How about that pot of cold coagulating stew on the kitchen stove? There is a lot of room just under its lardy surface for anything you want. How about hiding things in the walls of a strongbox? Once the box is opened, it's been inspected, right?
- Some things supposedly have no interior, like a painting... unless the thing you're hiding is in the paint or the canvas!
The "perfect" hiding place will change an object's expected form, then put it where it is not usually found, placed at an unusual angle in a place that is difficult to inspect – preferably where there are lots of distractions and chaos.
Of all the things to hide, information lends itself to the most inventive solutions. Besides memorization there are codes and microdots and techniques of embedding text into a picture or even another text where it can't be read or even recognized, without knowing just how to do it.
The "perfect hiding" place will change an object's expected form, then put it where it is not usually found, place at an unusual angle in a place that is difficult to inspect. The most difficult thing to hide is probably people. Humans are big things that require air, food, water, even companionship. They excrete waste material, make involuntary noises, give off smells and it's hard to really alter their shape or divide them into pieces for later reconstruction. Remember this when setting up an underground railroad.l
One Last Thing
Other Ideas
The "Authority Effect"
"Have a cookie, won't you, officer?"
Cops
Self Image
The Subconscious
In the Eye of the Searcher
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