(The 21st episode arrived on Friday early episodes can be watched free with ads.) Outside of the sci-fi fan base, however, they don’t appear to be causing a ripple in America. No trade barriers or worries about state secrets here: The 30 episodes of “Three-Body” are premiering on Rakuten Viki in the United States, with subtitles in English (among many other languages), on the same day they appear in China, where they are reportedly setting viewing records for Tencent’s WeTV streaming service. In the meantime, little attention is being paid in the United States to an ambitious Chinese series, “Three-Body,” that has beaten Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” to the screen. Comments about appropriation and cultural sensitivity will start to pour in minutes after the episodes are posted. Which makes it a little amusing that, 17 years after the story was first serialized, the books are about to get more attention than ever because of a big-budget American adaptation, due later this year on Netflix. The highly acclaimed trilogy of Chinese science-fiction novels collectively known as “Three-Body,” in which Earth is threatened with invasion by technologically superior aliens, is generally understood to reflect historical Chinese anxieties about Western domination. The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.This review contains spoilers for the novel “The Three-Body Problem” and the television series “Three-Body.” There’s no way around it. This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before.

Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. “Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true.

Incognito by david eagleman