This is the Tasmanian Mock Walrus.
It’s an Australian marsupial around ten centimetres long.
It’s mating call resembles the purr of a cat and it has the temperament of a hamster.
Or… does it?
The Tassie Walrus was first reported in the Orlando Sentinel on the first of April, 1984.
They wrote that it ate cockroaches and made an ideal pet.
So ideal that dozens of people called the newspaper asking where they could buy their
mock walrus.
Why are some people so easily fooled?
The effectiveness of a lot of pranks lies in the power of suggestion.
Back in 1965, the BBC aired an interview on April Fools Day with the man who invented
“Smellovision”.
He told viewers the smell of chopped onion and coffee were being transmitted through
their television sets… and viewers called in to mistakenly confirm they could smell
them.
In a 2008 study, participants were given a either a 5 or 90 dollar glass of wine while
they were in an fMRI machine.
But they weren’t told that both were actually the same $90 glass.
Researchers found the self-reported pleasantness score was greater for those who had the wine
labelled $90 compared to the wine labeled $5.
And this higher score corresponded to increased activity in an area of the frontal lobe (mPFC),
important for top-down processing, decision making and reward comparison.
Sometimes we let our sensations guide our perceptions, and in the case of smell-o-vision,
even our logic stinks.
Our brain can fool us because it has different ways of processing stimuli.
Bottom-up processing is where we perceive reality objectively based on stimulus.
And top-down processing is where we drive our own reality based on our perceptions.
Our frontal lobe’s predisposition for top-down processing is why we can be so easily fooled.
Of course the motivation to avoid being fooled differs from person to person.
The fear of being a sucker is called sugrophobia.
High sugrophobes are vigilant and skeptical of situations, and low sugrophobes may not
even realise they’ve been fooled.
There are pros and cons to being too trusting or untrusting so you shouldn't always pity
the fool.
Regardless of where you lie in your capacity to be tricked, I still think the cockroach-eating
Tasmanian Mock Walrus would make a great pet.
For my next episode I want to answer some of your questions.
So ask me whatever you like about science, BrainCraft or myself down in the comments
or over on Twitter.
And if you don’t already, subscribe to BrainCraft for a new brainy episode every Thursday.