Consciousness

Deepak Chopra issues a hilarious "challenge" to James Randi over consciousness

oracknows — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 22:42:14 +0000

Deepak Chopra issues a hilarious "challenge" to James Randi over consciousness

Deepak Chopra isn't very happy right now. In fact, he appears downright pissed off right now, particularly at skeptics, so much so that he's issued a hilariously fatuous "challenge" to James Randi (a.k.a.) The Amazing Randi on You Tube entitled Deepak Chopra's One Million Dollar Challenge to Skeptics:

Yes, apparently with The Amazing Meeting (a.k.a. TAM) less than four weeks away, Chopra is looking to stir the pot a little bit with his usual blend of Choprawoo about consciousness and mind-body dualism and how nasty skeptics can't accept the paranormal and the healing powre of "intent." It's at this point that I can't help reminding my readers (or at least pointing out to the newbies) that I was the one who originally coined that term nearly eight years ago and have been using it regularly since then to the point that long ago I came up with the only response ever needed to Choprawoo. Of course, having come up with that response doesn't mean that I can't go above and beyond what is needed when the mood strikes me, and right now the mood strikes me because this is more than just Choprawoo. It's pissed off Choprawoo, and that's a spectacle I haven't seen in a very long time. Somehow, even though Chopra's broadsides against skeptics and atheists in print are clearly angry, actually seeing Chopra read such a broadside on video takes it to a whole new level of stupid, even beyond that of his infamous two-part Rise and Fall of Militant Skepticism. Basically, his pique seems to derive from his self-important belief that skeptics should take his ill-informed speculations seriously. We don't. For obvious reasons.

The video is over five minutes of pain to anyone with a shred of critical thinking skills. As is usually the case with any criticism Deepak Chopra levels at "skeptics" and, in particular, Richard Dawkins, whom Chopra really appears to despise, it's chock full of logical fallacies, appeals to other ways of knowing, and major misunderstandings of science that could take textbooks to explain. The first thing, however, that struck me about Chopra's manner in his "challenge" was just how smug and arrogant Chopra is.

Chopra starts out declaring that he's issuing a "challenge" to the Amazing Randi and "all his so-called militant atheist friends and professional debunkers." This alone tells you that he understands little about Randi, because if there's one thing about Randi it's that he's not a "militant atheist." Indeed, if anything, he's sometimes criticized by those who are more "militantly" (for lack of a better word) atheist because he has consistently said that he's more about scientific skepticism than he is about atheism, although he is an atheist. As for Randi's colleagues, one wonders whom he means besides Richard Dawkins (a man who, although he has appeared at TAM, isn't exactly closely associated with James Randi or his foundation, JREF). Perhaps he means Jamy Ian Swiss, a good friend of Randi's who a couple of years ago drew the ire of certain real militant atheists for giving a rabble-rousing speech at TAM in which he downplayed and dismissed atheism as far as the skeptical movement goes and emphasized scientific skepticism. Maybe it's those colleagues of Randi whom Chopra meant.

If there's one thing Chopra's video reminds me of, more than anything else, it's not Randi's million dollar challenge, which it's obviously meant to mirror. Rather, Chopra's "million dollar challenge to skeptics" reminds me, more than anything else, of Jock Doubleday's "vaccine challenge." You remember that oldie moldy antivaccine trope, don't you? Basically, it's an obvious publicity ploy in which Doubleday challenges "an M.D. or pharmaceutical company CEO, or any of the 14 relevant members of the ACIP" (the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices)...

...agrees to drink a body-weight calibrated dose of the poisonous vaccine additives that M.D.s routinely inject into children in the name of health. The mixture will include, but will not be limited to, the following ingredients: thimerosal (a mercury derivative), ethylene glycol (antifreeze), phenol (a disinfectant dye), benzethonium chloride (a disinfectant), formaldehyde (a preservative and disinfectant), and aluminum.

It's the sort of challenge that other antivaccinationists have made in other forms, such as this challenge from antivaccine loon Viera Schiebner (whom we've met before when she made the despicable claim that shaken baby syndrome is a misdiagnosis of vaccine injury) to Simon Chapman. In other words, it's a transparently obvious challenge that the person making the challenge knows is incredibly unlikely to be accepted and, if it is accepted, has a bar for being met that is virtually impossible to meet and frequently morphs as anyone tries to accept the challenge.

Chopra's "challenge" is cut of much the same cloth, but it's even worse.

Why is it worse? Simple. The "challenge" as stated is impossible to meet, and I'd be willing to bet that Chopra almost certainly knows it's impossible to meet. Think about it. Chopra starts out by saying:

Dear Randi: Before you go around debunking the so-called "paranormal," please explain the so-called "normal." How does the electricity going into the brain become the experience of a three dimensional world in space and time. If you can explain that, then you get a million dollars from me. Explain and solve the hard problem of consciousness in a peer-reviewed journal, offer a theory that is falsifiable, and you get the prize.

Of course, the big problem with this challenge is that Chopra doesn't lay down concrete conditions, other than an article in a peer-reviewed journal. What does he mean by "explain and solve the hard problem of consciousness"? What sort of "solution" would be adequate for him? He doesn't provide criteria so that an objective observer could reasonably determine whether Randi has met the challenge or not. This is very different from Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, in which the person accepting the challenge and skeptics conducting the challenge have to agree before the testing ever occurs on specific criteria that must be met for the challenge to be met. Both sides have to sign off. Here, it's just Chopra blathering on, as he is wont to do, about a nebulous "challenge" without letting himself be pinned down over the criteria that, if achieved, would indicate a successful meeting of the challenge. It's disingenuous—hell, it's dishonest—in the extreme. Chopra's not a stupid man, although he is arrogant and has apparently forgotten whatever he had learned of the scientific method in his training. He must know this.

Next, to make sure there's absolutely zero chance of Randi's meeting the challenge, Chopra makes it virtually impossible to do by setting conditions that eliminate the tools necessary to do it. He begins by telling Randi that he's "bamboozled" (word choice intentional, I'm sure, in an ill-fated attempt to sound clever by throwing one of Randi's favorite words back at him) by the "superstition of matter." (I wonder if that's anything like the enigma of steel. Maybe it is.) Then he delves into an astoundingly obvious observation that serves, as is so frequently the case, as the basis for Choprawoo:

You don't realize that everything we experience as the physical world is actually a perception, and that perception is the result of an experience in consciousness. And we have no idea how that happens. If I ask you to imagine a sunset on the ocean right and you have the experience—somewhere—then explain to me where that picture is. And don't just give me a neural correlate, or NCC, as it's called. Neural correlates of consciousness are well known, but they're not enough of an explanation for how we experience the world, how we experience color, taste, sound, form...any perception. You can't explain it. Texture, solidity, you cannot explain it. You can't even explain how do we have perception or experience of our own body, or our thoughts, intuition, insight, imagination, creativity, cognition, self reflection. And once again, neural correlates are not causation. So when I ask you to think of that sunset, there was a neural correlate, but it wasn't there until you had the experience or had them simultaneously or one before the other. Doesn't matter. You had intention. Explain to me intention.

F*&king magnets, how do they work?

Chopra's fame and wealth, of course, is largely based on his books, videos, and speaking tours in which he promotes the idea of a "conscious" universe. His woo and medical quackery both assume mind-body dualism and that we can influence the universe with our mind, specifically our "intent" (hence his reference to "explaining intent" directed at Randi). Indeed, he has even attacked the theory of evolution on multiple occasions, because he believes that we can control our own evolution with our consciousness. He bases these concepts on a huge amount of abuse of quantum theory, even beyond that of many woo-meisters coupled with abuse of neuroscience. It’s clear to me that Deepak Chopra does not understand any of it on other than the most superficial level. Indeed, he mangles the hell out of it, as I’ve explained time and time and time again over the last four years or so. He takes quantum physics, abuses it and the findings of scientists like Einstein, Pauli, and Heisenberg, and lumps the result together to claim that there is some sort of “universal consciousness,” claiming that the physical world is an “illusion.” Or, in this case, apparently, our perception is illusion. So the universe can be anything we imagine it to be. At least, that's the way I've interpreted Chopra's blather over the years.

Yes, it really is that facile and puerile. If you don't believe me, let me go back to something he wrote eight years ago:

The physical world can’t deliver God, not because God doesn’t exist, but because the solid, physical world is an illusion–as quantum physics proved long ago–and one must look inside consciousness itself to find what God is about. If God is a universal intelligence, that will turn out to be a fact. It won’t be superstition. It won’t be derived from the Bible or the Koran.

Yes, as Steve Novella put it, Chopra is the Magic Man. As Jerry Coyne describes he is a pseudoscientist par excellence, pointing out that, contrary to Chopra's many pronouncements, photons do not have consciousness, nature does not have a mind, the moon is there whether humans see it or not, and intelligence is not inherent in nature, but a product of naturalistic evolution.

Later in the video, Chopra delivers yet another howler, saying "experience is experience, whether it's so-called 'normal' or whether it's so-called 'paranormal,' and we don't understand either of them, OK?"

Of course, no one's claiming that paranormal experiences aren't "experiences." What skeptics argue, with good evidence, is that the explanation for paranormal experiences is not in the supernatural but the natural, just as explanations for seemingly "miraculous" healing from alternative medicine like homeopathy or reiki virtually always have a more plausible explanation that does not rely on magic. And I'm talking about magic magic (as in mystical magic), not stage magic, or illusions performed by magicians.

Overall, his video is nothing more than a massive appeal to ignorance, a claim that, because science doesn't know anything about consciousness then Chopra's pseudoscientific views must potentially be valid explanations. It's a perfect example of what Dara Ó Briain described in one of his more famous comic bits in which he said:

Science knows it doesn't know everything. Otherwise, it'd stop. Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

That's exactly what Chopra specializes in, filling in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to him. In his case, the fairy tale is that the universe is conscious, and the tools he uses to try to convince you of the fairy tale include abuse of quantum mechanics and neuroscience, neither of which he understands.

Maybe that's why Chopra's been showing up on Twitter since his video was posted with Tweets like this in response to JREF's characterization of his video.

@RichardDawkins needs the support of a stage magician fir his credibility @jref @ElSatanico @gorskon @SLSingh

— Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) June 15, 2014

Not surprisingly, Chopra couldn't hold his own and retreated ignominiously:

Will take a break now from engaging with stage magicians . All the best guys xxx @geekpharm @ElSatanico @gorskon @jref

— Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) June 15, 2014

Same as it ever was.

Chopra uses the words of science, demanding from Randi and his "cronies"—tsk, tsk, what happened to all that demand for "civility," Deepak?— peer-reviewed publication and a falsifiable "theory" (although his using the word "theory" when he really means "hypothesis" is a dead giveaway that he doesn't understand the scientific method), but it's clear that it is nothing more than a stunt, and a particularly sad and pathetic one at that. He even descends to calling Randi and skeptics "self-appointed vigilantes for the suppression of curiosity and imagination and legitimate science."

Again, same as it ever was.

oracknows Sun, 06/15/2014 - 18:42

You can’t explain it. Texture, solidity, you cannot explain it.

I'm pretty sure Huang-po sorted this out quite some time ago.

"Texture, solidity, you cannot explain it."

Sounds like someone has been reading the same book as Bill O'Reilly.

Julia Sweeney nails it:

I was so intrigued with this quantum mechanics that Deepak refers to over and over and over again in his books, that I decided to take a class in it.

And what I found is-Deepak Chopra is full of shit!

The real question may be whether Chopra would accept a spiritual challenge. Dharma combat at 108 circlings or something.

Ah....The blathering's of yet another insecure V.H.S, Oprah made, Deity. (Rod Serling should narrate).....

Just a note. The shirt that Chopra is wearing reads, in latin characters "Az cheta vseki den." Which is Bulgarian for "I read every day." A very odd t-shirt. There are only about 10 million Bulgarian speakers in the world, but other Slavic language speakers could figure it out. Nevertheless, I would think that the message has limited appeal. Weird.

The one thing I learned from that video is not to wave your hands right into the webcam when recording a message on your 'puter, or wag your finger in anger, because the foreshortening makes them look like huge grotesque flippers.

This kind of "challenge" that Chopra and his ilk make to promote their world-views can also backfire as the anti-vaccer and virus-denialist Stefan Lanker currently learns in Germany. Lanker made a challenge where he offered 100000 euros for proof of the existence of the measle virus, which was taken on by the medical doctor David Bardens who showed the existence of the virus by multiple peer-reviewed publications. Lanker, of course, did not pay up, so Bardens sued him for the money. The case went to court and all trials by Lanker to get the case dismissed and add additional requirements for the virus proof to be acceptable were shot down by the judge. So, now the court named an expert witness (a virology professor) to determine if the measle virus exists based on the state-of-art of medical / scientific research. I would say it doesn´t look good for Lanka... :-)

Having said this, I don´t believe that Lanka will pay the money in the end. He will (hopefully) loose the case, go through several appeals, possibly declare bankruptcy to not pay, but already the case caused a stir and a number of newspaper articles about him and the anti-vaccine movement - none of it positive for them. But if I am wrong and Dr Bardens get the money then he plans to use it for a vaccination campaign in developing countries, made possible by " a generous donation by the anti-vacination crowd".

Poor Deepak seems bitter and a little twisted to me. If only he realized that he has created this universe full of annoying skeptics through his own thinking. If he tried hard enough, surely we would all disappear, wouldn't we?

Chopra calling someone a 'Stage Magician' - pot, meet kettle.

It must be some weird quantum thingy that simultaneously allows Deepak Chopra to be the infamous pseudo scientist AND the head of Canada Post.

Deepak Chopra's cousin is an electronics technician in Harpenden, Herts. He repaired my mother's television a few years back.

How does the electricity going into the brain become the experience of a three dimensional world in space and time.

A better question would be how does "electricity" going into Chopra's brain wind up being converted, with 100% efficiency, wasted heat energy.

militant atheist

To the likes of Deepak Chopra, this is one word, so if he thinks Randi is an atheist (and he is apparently correct to think this), then he will refer to Randi as a militant atheist. In Chopraland, there are no other kinds of atheist.

LinkedIn has occasionally exhorted me to follow certain thought leaders, Chopra among them. He does manage to simulate being a thought leader to people who don't know anything about the subjects on which he speaks as if he were an expert, but it doesn't take much knowledge to see that he is full of bull. (The other thought leaders of which LinkedIn speaks aren't quite as ridiculous--Richard Branson is also on that list--but still not anybody I'd want to follow.)

TBruce @3: Do you have a link for that quote? I'd like to steal it with attribution.

Deepak is addressing an audience of fans who - for the most part- don't have an inkling of what philosophers and psychologists have been studying/ writing about consciousness over the past few centuries-
he seems rather dismissive of NCC - and he has to be- because he desperately wants to posit a transcendental, eternal soul which oversees all perception and experience and plugs into the universal soul ( or suchlike) as a power source..

As I've said previously: whenever a woo-meister gets into hot water trying to explain his system of worldwide woo, he** dredges up soul, spirit or 'energy'***, which ultimately are un-researchable
YET that's his challenge.

Why didn't he ask the question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

** it's usually 'he'.
*** not regular energy, we study that, but mystical energy- which tends to go all quantum and timey-wimey on us.

@Eric Lund:

http://theatheistnextdoor.com/2009/07/18/julia-sweeney-on-deepak-chopra/

It's from her monologue Letting Go of God, which is also on youtube.

BTW, if Master of Quantum Time and Space Deepak Chopra is also head of Canada Post, why aren't I getting my mail BEFORE it is sent?

@ TBruce:

But he IS a Master of Quantum Time and Space!
Notice how much younger he looks in the photo @ the Canada Post.

anti-vaccer and virus-denialist Stefan Lanker currently learns in Germany.

I believe it was Napoleon who advised us never to interrupt our enemy when he is making a mistake.

not regular energy, we study that, but mystical energy- which tends to go all quantum and timey-wimey on us

You keep using that word, Mr. Chopra (and Mr. Adams, Mr. Null, and quite a few other woo-pushers). I don't think it means what you think it means. Whether the word in question is "energy" or "quantum" or any of a half dozen other words which, despite having reasonably precise scientific definitions, are abused in the service of woo.

How does the electricity going into the brain become the experience of a three dimensional world in space and time. If you can explain that, then you get a million dollars from me.

I suppose he wouldn't settle for the obvious answer that "it doesn't." Electricity going into the brain becomes the experience of ECT.

@Bend:

As one of those few Bulgarian speaker I noticed that as well. I found it rather strange.

Also, tides go in, tides go out. You can't explain that

@ Eric:

Interestingly enough, the poseurs I survey often try to convince their enraptured followers that they have studied both physics and psychology in depth ( occasionally philosophy ) which I assume is because they know that their average listener/ reader doesn't know much about these subjects so it is impress the marks by 'blinding them with science' thus words like 'quantum; and 'cognition' are tossed about like confetti.

If you look at WHAT they actually talk about in these realms, it appears that they have studied precious little themselves.
Yes, they portray themselves as providing educational services as they scoff at what governmentally sponsored schools offer children and what universities offer young adults.

I venture that the two aforementioned woo-meisters' background consists primarily of secondary school, intro courses ( I'm being kind) and pop science magazines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgoB2JMEowc

That's what I think of when I hear anything from DC.

" the solid, physical world is an illusion–as quantum physics proved long ago"

So - if a skeptic bops Chopra on the nose, any pain will be an illusion?

That scenario has the makings of a really fun challenge.

He MAY be a "Master of Quantum Time and Space" but he is NOT The Wizard of Speed and Time! http://www.wizworld.com/

"...the poseurs I survey often try to convince their enraptured followers that they have studied both physics and psychology in depth ( occasionally philosophy )..."

Meaning that they read "The Tao of Physics" or "The Dancing Wu Li Masters". Ugh.

I think I figured it out. All of what we perceive is merely illusion. Therefore, skeptics aren't actually real, but are instead a manifestation of Chopra's own self-doubt. Proof that even he doesn't believe the s**t he's shoveling.

Chopra calling someone a ‘Stage Magician’ – pot, meet kettle.

I've seen some of Randi's acts on YouTube. I find him way more entertaining.

It’s from her monologue Letting Go of God, which is also on youtube.

What I love most about that one-woman show is that it's just as much about becoming an appreciator of science and thinking critically as it is about becoming an athiest. I found it very touching and funny, in turn.

they know that their average listener/ reader doesn’t know much about these subjects

Bingo.

An analogy would be to restaurants like Olive Garden. Olive Garden is the conception people who have never encountered a good Italian restaurant have of what a good Italian restaurant should be. But anyone who has actually been to a good Italian restaurant knows better.

Likewise with Chopra. I can't claim to know any more about psychology than he does, let alone what he claims to know, since I have never actually taken a psychology course. But I do know physics, so I know that his blatherings about quantum are incoherent at best. He nevertheless sounds smart on the subject of quantum mechanics when talking to people who don't know better. Knowing this about him, I would bet, despite my lack of knowledge about psychology, that a professional psychologist would find his grasp of that subject about as tenuous as I find his grasp of physics. I have seen similar things with other charlatans, e.g., Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis (a young-earth creationist organization). Ham makes some pretty strong claims about biology and theology, with which people who know something about those subjects (e.g., P. Z. Myers and Fred Clark, respectively) strongly disagree.

For the record, James Randi is just as much of a fraud as the people he's waging war against.

Any real scientist would laugh at how dynamic his rules are.

I bet if someone did actually prove some aspect of paranormal junk to this guy, he'd say you failed the test because it took you 21 minutes instead of 20.

So – if a skeptic bops Chopra on the nose, any pain will be an illusion?

This has been a standard-issue Ch'an approach since the eighth century.

So, according to Quantum Mechanics, he can be simultaneously Wrong and Full of Shit at the same time?

Right, Eric. Exactly.

We can combat woo from simple, everyday common sense prior to exposing those ensnared to actual science.

Most psychologists tip their hats to Piaget who believed that children ( and adults) are naive scientists - esp naive physicists - as they learn about various laws through everyday experience. Gravity works. Small children learn this early. Similarly they learn about other people through interaction and develop their own theories as naive psychologists.

Everyone is a naive scientist ( some more naive than others) as observers of the world and of people: from this, we can approach plausibility and implausibility as it pertains to woo- both its tenets and how its proselytisers behave.

- If this stuff is true why has NO one else demonstrated it?
- Aren't woo-meisters motivated to impress followers in order to get respect, adulation, money?

Perpetual motion doesn't work; homeopathy doesn't work;
reiki doesn't work. Thought transmission doesn't work. If they did, many laws of reality would have to be re-thought.

Are these people REALLY so brilliant that they can overturn all of medicine, science, reality?
How likely would that be?

I think I figured it out. All of what we perceive is merely illusion. Therefore, skeptics aren’t actually real, but are instead a manifestation of Chopra’s own self-doubt. Proof that even he doesn’t believe the s**t he’s shoveling.

Except that he plainly doesn't espouse monist idealism. And he certainly doesn't chuck ontology overboard, where it belongs. Ergo, he's a supernaturalist – even more entities than naive realism.

Any real scientist would laugh at how dynamic his rules are.

Please, don't hold back. Do tell us why

people lose me when they say 'peer-review' because that's all, well, bullshit. [...] I'm pretty irritated at how often people pretend to know science and also how they love to overuse the terms empirical, peer-reviewed, and colloquial.

Douglas B. Sabo #31

For the record, James Randi is just as much of a fraud as the people he’s waging war against.

ooo...do please give us an example of Randi's fraud.

From the way you phrase it, you seem to acknowledge that nobody has come close to proving any aspect of paranormal junk, so what's your point?

Explain intention! It's verbal discrimination of action on the part of an observer (or if it is the actor, the observation is made before, during or after said act by the actor).

Where's my million bucks?

Chopra has hated Dawkins ever since Dawkins made him look like a fool in "The Enemies of Reason". I show that video in my critical thinking seminar class and the students get a big kick out of it. Every time the camera cuts to the expression on Dawkins' face the class cracks up.

Holy crap, Narad, not only does he offer that bollox to which you link BUT he also tried to sell me ashwaganda and guggulu yet!

Well in fairness to Mr. Chopra, I'm not sure I know anybody more smug and arrogant than Richard Dawkins.

Chopra is also mad at Jerry Coyne, who spoke at last years TAM.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/chopras-losing-it/

Chopra is right Richard Dawkins James_Randi ? Defeated !! Italian Authority of the State certifies a Paranormal Phenomenon http://www.rabdomanzia.com/vittoria_rabdo_menu.php

”1 MILLION € ” SENSATIONAL CHALLENGE-PRIZE: FOR PIERO ANGELA’S “CICAP” AND THE AMERICAN JAMES RANDI http://www.rabdomanzia.com/clamorosa_sfida.php

Chopra is his own worse enemy. He continues to make a silly spectacle of himself. We need do nothing, he exposes his own narrow minded ignorance. Praise the Lard!!!!

In a related story, Jay Gordon must be channeling the wishy-washy woo of Choprak. In Goron's latest flog entry (http://drjaygordon.com/vaccinations/do-our-kids-need-whooping-cough-vac…) we witness fawning fence sitting about vaccines with a noncommittal nature rivaling that of astrology authors.

@Dangerous Bacon: So – if a skeptic bops Chopra on the nose, any pain will be an illusion?

Or if he were chained into a box which was dropped into a water tank, he could simply reappear outside it, and would never be in any real danger.

Hey, Houdini did it, so it's obviously possible. Maybe not with quantum...

Even though I have heard Dara o'Brien's comment about science before it still made me laugh.

@Ken
Maybe we can convince Chopra to give a demonstration of quantum tunneling. It could be very interesting, especially if he got a running start.

Chopra is right Richard Dawkins James_Randi ? Defeated !! Italian Authority of the State certifies a Paranormal Phenomenon

Maurizio, are you sure you're not looking for this item?

Just a thought.

Oh, man: The "Short Mat" uses "Vibro-homeopathy with several Sacred Oriental Therapies."

Italian Authority of the State certifies a Paranormal Phenomenon

You'll be telling us the Vatican believes in miracles next.

his company is able to guarantee success in finding underground water

Me too, just dig until you're below the water table.

Does the observer actually affect the experiment? If this can regularly be demonstrated on the quantum and subatomic level then isn't it possible that skepticism may be an attitude of self-fulfilling prophecy? Perhaps Science should evolve a tertiary agnostic approach especially in engineering of mass opinion.

Does the observer actually affect the experiment?

That people see what they want to see is a well-known phenomenon, and it's precisely the reason why being skeptical is a necessary condition for being a good scientist. Skepticism is the best known defense against self-deception. It's easier to fool yourself than to fool others. If you haven't fooled yourself, then those others may see that you don't really believe the stuff you are trying to sell them, which may alert an otherwise gullible mark.

I'd suggest the following instead of 33 natural locations:

Bury ten 20 foot long sections of 10 inch diameter PVC pipe 5 meters below ground, parallel to each other spaced 3 meters apart. During each trial water at ambient temperature would be run through n pipes and water at 180 degrees run through 10 - n pipes, with both the number of pipes carring hot or cold water and which pipes carried hot or cold water assigned randomly prior to each new trial.

Neither the person attempting "thermal detection" nor the observers recording his selections would be aware of how many or which pipes carried hot or ambient water.

For each trial the detector would be given 30 minutes to identify which pipes were carrying hot and ambient water. Between trials the pipes would all be flushed with ambient water for 30 minutes.

Perform 10 sequential trials.

Across all trials, if the detector correctly identifies which pipes carried hot and cold water more often would be expected by chance the test would be counted a success.

akrivis,

Does the observer actually affect the experiment? If this can regularly be demonstrated on the quantum and subatomic macro level then isn’t it possible that skepticism may be an attitude of self-fulfilling prophecy?

I think that makes more sense.

Even in the macro world the observer affects the experiment by making the observation. Observation isn't passive, to measure something you have to interact with it in some way, whether by bouncing photons or electrons off it or whatever. Any physicists here please correct me if I'm wrong, but the common idea that the observer effect is some sort of telekinesis is incorrect, sadly, especially when you consider that even a non-conscious sensor can make an observation; consciousness is not required.

That said, I do find the idea that skeptics powerfully inhibit any sort of paranormal phenomena, from dowsing to therapeutic touch, through some sort of weird variant of the observer effect, quite amusing. It isn't a new idea, decades ago I'm sure I read about some experiment where skeptics got lower scores than expected on a test of psychic abilities, through sheer paranormal pigheadedness.

^To clarify, "lower scores than chance predicted".

Bend @6:

Just a note. The shirt that Chopra is wearing reads, in latin characters “Az cheta vseki den.” Which is Bulgarian for “I read every day.” A very odd t-shirt. There are only about 10 million Bulgarian speakers in the world, but other Slavic language speakers could figure it out. Nevertheless, I would think that the message has limited appeal. Weird.

Maybe he doesn't read Slavic and thinks it's something deep and meaningful?
A bit like that guy who's walking around with a tattoo in Chinese characters that tells everybody who can read it "I am menstruating". (True story apparently.)

Deepak needs the attention, otherwise he'll just wither up and die. A sad, slow, Twitter-ridden death.

And I'll give a million dollars for anyone who can disprove there is invisible rabbit called Gerald who whispers thoughts into people's minds.

I won't be too specific on the claim, or the level of proof I require and I'll change both as I see fit. Oh and it'll be my subjectivity that decides if you win or not.

I expect my prize money will lay unclaimed right next to Chopra's.

What is it with all this "if you believe it, it will come true" nonsense? Joel Osteen is the one that comes to mind as the most deluded in that thinking about thinking. Chopra is very much the same. I just have to envision something and that's it?

(Ten seconds later...)

Still no million dollars in my bank account.

It's one thing to have a vision and carry it out as part of a plan, but it's another thing to promise health and wellbeing by just thinking that my mind will magically pop it up. It's unethical and downright dangerous to try and convince people that this is something that can be done.

@Mrs. Grimble: Someone had a tattoo in Chinese that read: "Of two men who love each other, I am the woman." True story. I think.

Douglas B. Sabo http://www.zafada.us on June 16, 2014 blathered:
For the record, James Randi is just as much of a fraud as the people he’s waging war against.

Any real scientist would laugh at how dynamic his rules are.

I bet if someone did actually prove some aspect of paranormal junk to this guy, he’d say you failed the test because it took you 21 minutes instead of 20.
-----
Do you have anything other than your entirely unsupported assertions? FYI, at the adult table, "I bet" is not a form of evidence. Any real scientist would know this.

If the whole "If you simply want/believe it enough it will come true" premise were true, there would be no such thing as unrequited love.

Also, pretty much every female teen I knew in the late 60's/early 70's would have been dating a British rock star.

I'm having some allergy-related trouble with my eyes which is why for one brief shining moment I read Narad's post @50 as "“Vibrator-homeopathy."

One might suppose that an appropriate proving would employ a Magic Fingers bed, but that's supposed to provide "tingling relaxation and ease."

"all about scientific skepticism than he is about atheism"

You might want to make that 'more' rather than 'all' about...... – before he goes online challenging you to a grammar contest :-).

Oh, Ren,
You don't have a million dollars in your bank account because gaia hates skeptics. She knows you don't really believe.

Goddamn you Narad. I spent an hour on that *$&%)(*ing site! A box of blinky lights and knobs for $12,950. I am so in the wrong business . . .

So I have a testable scenario of consciousness and perception and I'm offering to conduct it in front of Deepak Chopra, God and everyone. I intentionally take a brick and drop it on Creepy Deepy's head and perceivably alter his (un)consciousness.

Siany K: That kind of violent BS does our side no good, and only feeds DC and his buddies' 'victim' narrative. Forget bricks to heads, you just shot yourself in both feet.

---

Randi does have a nasty situation in his background. Apparently his husband was arrested by the FBI for identity theft, and the victim was a school teacher in Bronx New York. Keyword search the names and you'll find the stories in regular newspapers' archives. How this was ultimately resolved isn't clear, but I would have to guess Randi and the victim 'settled out of court for an undisclosed sum,' probably in the mid six-figure range (USD). Ordinarily, an immigrant who overstayed his visa and got busted for a significant crime, would also be deported, unless someone worked some 'magic' on their behalf.

---

That said, you can always count on woomeisters to crap up what might otherwise have been an interesting exercise.

The 'hard problem' of consciousness is a real 'thing' in science and philosophy, and thus far has eluded a fully viable solution. Offering a million dollar prize for published papers with supported hypotheses, is a good way to encourage interest in the field. if some university offered the prize, with rules clearly spelled out, it would be a wonderful thing. The fact that DC did it first, only succeeds in stinking up the room and driving others away.

I wasn't about to subject myself to his video, but this quote was quite a sufficient whiff, unto itself:

'...everything we experience as the physical world is actually a perception, and that perception is the result of an experience in consciousness.' To which I can only say, AAARRGH! Perception is _not_ the _result_ of an experience in consciousness. Perception is the _cause_ of various experiences of which people are conscious. I see a silly man in a video, and I feel queasy as a result. The perception produces the conscious experience, not the other way 'round.

He would be rather more harmless had he stuck to religion as such, where assertions of animism (which, ultimately, is what he's promoting) can take their place alongside other untestable propositions. For that matter, Carlos Castaneda should have called his own famous books fiction, and thereby been acclaimed as a good writer of fiction rather than disgraced as an academic fraud.

If anyone out there had a comprehensive model of how consciousness arises in the brain, and the experimental evidence to back it up, I think they'd be much too busy looking at job offers and polishing up their Nobel Prize acceptance speech to give a crap what Deepak Chopra thought about it.

Grouchybeast FTW!

Idealism doesn't entail a mind/body dualism. That would be dualism (and materialism to a certain degree). Anyhow, Chopra explicitly rejects dualism. Not defending Chopra, I just think we should have our ontologies in order and be honest about philosophical issues.

Anyhow, Chopra explicitly rejects dualism.

He's a cosmic-minder. This is dualism and then some.

"Building on the quantum view of the cosmos, which accepts a non-local, entangled reality that includes observers as fundamental, we suggest the next natural step, a new science rooted in consciousness, one that strives to interpret the entire universe, with all its observers, all modes of observation, and all objects observed as nothing other than consciousness and it's manifestations! ... We feel a holistic science that does not separate observer from that which is observed would lead to the unraveling of the mysteries of the universe which at presently seem beyond reach, leading to an understanding of a conscious universe in which all are differentiated activities of a single field that is an undivided wholeness and in some sense bridges external reality with inner being."

^ Note also multiple minds.

Narad @73: The 'and then some' is animism: the view that all objects have attributes of mind.

DC's method appears to be: Say something that's almost OK but slightly off from consensus science, and then use it as the premise for something that follows that's basically untestable theology.

To wit:

"Building on the quantum view of the cosmos, which accepts a non-local, entangled reality that includes [observers as fundamental] [correction: includes the fact that measurements made by observers affect the objects of observation], we suggest the next natural step [that's the "and then a non-sequitur follows" part], a new science rooted in consciousness [which would be a good thing if it was objective and rooted in scientific method], one that strives to interpret [uh-oh, theory before observation] the entire universe, with all its observers, all modes of observation, and all objects observed as [here comes the animist part] nothing other than consciousness and it’s manifestations! … We feel a holistic science that does not separate observer from that which is observed would lead to the unraveling of the mysteries of the universe [that part is opinion] which at presently seem beyond reach [more opinion], leading to an understanding of a conscious universe [more animism!] in which all are differentiated activities of a single field [quantum woo] that is an undivided wholeness [more q-woo] and in some sense bridges external reality with inner being ["being" is more woo].”

Ouch, teh crazy, it burns. The worst part of this is, it stinks up the room so badly that every other room in the hall ends up getting evacuated, whether or not they have anything to do with the actual stench or have merely had it waft in their general direction.

He really should stick to religion. He could start his own church. That would be an improvement.

a new science rooted in consciousness[...] a holistic science that does not separate observer from that which is observed

Does this New Science go as far as make testable predictions? Or would that be too reductionist?

Lucky you! You already have millions of dollars and another measly mil would just slow you down, eh? If i could just ask one favor though: Please take your destruction of Deepak's challenge to him anyway, claim the mil and then give it to me. Go get the million. You are able to answer his question so go get it. I need it. Please go now to Deepak and tell him your solution to his challenge and he wil be forced to give you a milllion bucks. Then bring the money to me. THANKS!

Nice strawman, Josh. Too bad for you that no one said "Oh, yeah, Chopra's challenge, sure, that's so easy to meet!" In fact, the article says the opposite, that Chopra's challenge is meaningless because it is IMPOSSIBLE to meet.

PROTIP: You cannot mock your enemies for making a foolish statement when in fact YOURS is the foolish mind from which the foolish statement originated.

Wow someone must have really scared Chopra--the bitterness is palpable, especially at the end.

I was on the fence as to whether Chopra believed in his own nonsense or not, but this clip fully convinces me that he is a 100% a conscience charlatan.

It's the bitterness in his voice that gives it away, the ire and spite you hear is that of someone whose financial well-being is being threatened. Amazing.

It's sad to see that he has lost now on both fronts. He always failed intelectually as his woo has always been easily challenged and fails even the most trivial of testing. However at least he was cheerful in public being the embodiment of his philosophy of love through the universal conciousness in mind and body. Now he is a cranky and extremely defensive woo artist. This is where things get very dark, scary and sometimes even dangerous. Yikes!

Skies of bloooo... skies of bloooo....

Dear Dr. Chopra, I accept your challenge. My explanation for how and why conscious experience arises in the brain is summarized in the following 6-minute video that I created, and I have a full researched paper to back it up. https://vimeo.com/98785998

At the forthcoming TAM (The Amazing Meeting) I will formally address Mr. Chopra's rant... Stay tuned.

TAM: http://www.amazingmeeting.com/tam2013/schedule/

July 10th - 13th

James Randi.

This is awesome...

Blimey.

Here is Brian Cox's reply to the same challenge.
The twitter exchange is fun.

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/07/deepak-chopra-doesnt-u…

Here is Brian Cox’s reply to the same challenge.
The twitter exchange is fun.

Cox's invocation of eternal inflation seems to be very wide of the mark.

Cox’s invocation of eternal inflation seems to be very wide of the mark.

Why? It's still a viable model, isn't it? I would be very surprised if Cox blundered in this area.

Inflation itself is doing just fine. The "eternal" part is speculative.

(And inflation per se doesn't answer the question at all.)

Stop worrying. Nobody gets out of here alive and you won't know or remember anything as you will be dead

Deepak Chopra continues his woo-ful whining

oracknows — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 06:00:48 +0000

Deepak Chopra continues his woo-ful whining

Last week, everyone's favorite woo-meister, the man whose woo is so strong that I even coined a term for it way back in the early mists of time (at least as far as this blog is concerned), was woo-fully whining about all those allegedly nasty skeptics on Wikipedia. Yes, Deepak Chopra was clutching his pearls and getting all huffy because, according to him, a group of skeptics known as the Guerilla Skeptics was actually applying science and reason to the Wikipedia entry for his good buddy Rupert Sheldrake. The only problem was, he totally missed the target in that the Guerilla Skeptics actually had nothing to do with the Wikipedia edits for Sheldrake's page, and the person who brought this "atrocity" to Chopra's attention had never actually done an edit of Sheldrake's actual Wikipedia page. None of this stopped Chopra from throwing himself headlong into a tirade against "militant skeptics" like Richard Dawkins as the source of all that skeptical nastiness on Wikipedia, even though, as I pointed out, Richard Dawkins has as much to do with Wikipedia as Deepak Chopra has to do with science. Chopra finished his post with a great big, "To be continued."

And today the continuation has appeared.

Yes, there is now a post entitled The Rise and Fall of Militant Skepticism (Part 2) (also published at SF Gate), with the promise of at least one more post. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy, however, in this case the second part is most definitely not the best part. Rather, Chopra's sequel is like most other sequels, chock full of either more and bigger special effects and/or more of what producers thought made the original popular in the first place but not as good as the original. In this case, we get more of Chopra's "quantum consciousness" and attacks on science, but even less intelligence, if that were possible! As with many sequels, Chopra even brought in another screenwriter, so to speak, in the form of someone named Jordan Flesher, who is advertised as having a BA in Psychology. Here's a hint: If Chopra's trying to impress with credentials, this ain't the way to do it. In academia, if it's not an MS or a PhD, no one really cares. In fact, listing a BA looks rather desperate and will generally provoke disdain among scientists, and this scientist is expressing that disdain. Better not to have listed it at all.

But enough beating on a poor, hapless co-author. Well, not quite. My advise to Jordan Flesher would be that, if he ever wants to be taken seriously as a psychologist and get into a good graduate program, writing opinion pieces with Deepak Chopra attacking science is not the way to go. And, make no mistake, that's exactly what Chopra does, because, well, it's what Chopra does. But first, he claims to lecture skeptics about the nature of skepticism and science, which is always good for a laugh, ever since I first took notice of Chopra, lo those many years ago:

As an attitude, skepticism is a natural part of the scientific method. It calls for solid proof and verification. As an agenda, however, the story of skepticism is quite different. The way that strident atheism has clothed itself in science seems convincing to people who are skeptical about God in the first place. But there’s no scientific basis for atheism, since God isn’t subject to experimentation. As the dust has settled, the agenda of militant skepticism has come to light – it’s basically another symptom of the blogosphere’s culture of personal attack, unfounded allegation, and a reckless disregard for the truth.

Once again, Chopra conflates atheism and skepticism, as though the two were the same thing. They aren't. At the very least there are quite a few atheists out there who are not skeptics, such as Bill Maher, who is antivaccine, doubts germ theory, has supported cancer quackery, and seems to think that he can protect himself from the flu just by eating the right diet and living the right lifestyle to the point that he was once mocked by one of his guests for it. It's also particularly annoying how Chopra repeats the same old tropes without realizing that he's contradicting himself. He's actually the one claiming to wrap himself in the mantle of science, and then he goes on to say that "God isn't subject to experimentation." It all depends, of course, on what you mean by God. If you mean some ethereal being who never does anything, then maybe Chopra has a point, but there are a whole lot of testable claims associated with religion, and there's no reason why science shouldn't test them. The problem for Chopra is that when such claims are tested the results usually aren't what he'd like to see.

Thus warmed up, Chopra then drops this howler on us:

The fate of militant skepticism, whatever it may be, will drift apart from the serious business of doing science. After all, no scientific discovery was ever made by negative thinking. There has to be an open-minded curiosity and a willingness to break new ground, while the militant skeptics represent the exact opposite: they are dedicated to the suppression of curiosity and protecting rigid boundaries of “real” science.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

The very essence of scientific discovery might start with open-mindedness, but to nail down the discovery and demonstrate its validity very much requires what Chopra dismisses as "negative thinking." It requires an utterly ruthless attitude that enables scientists to subject their pet hypotheses to rigorous testing and then reject them if they don't hold up. This is why Chopra can never be considered a scientist. He has fallen in love with several airy, New Agey ideas, and he simply can't subject them to rigorous testing and reject them when they fail. It's far easier to dismiss criticism as being due to "militant atheists" and "militant skeptics," which Chopra mistakenly views as the same thing.

It's not surprising, then, that Chopra gets it so wrong about skepticism. Properly applied, skepticism is not solely about being "negative," although that's how Chopra characterizes it. In fact, Chopra is making the same old mistake of confusing (or conflating) skepticism with cynicism. Cynics do indeed mistrust most information they they see, particularly when the new information challenges their belief system. Cynics often do become intolerant of other people's ideas. They often are inflexible. As has been pointed out many times before, attributing traits associated with cynicism to skeptics is a common method of attack by woo-meisters. It's also a trope that Chopra's been repeating for a very long time.

Skepticism, on the other hand, is not inherently negative, as the caricature promoted by Chopra would have you believe. Chopra will never believe this, because, quite frankly, he strikes me as being as cynical as the picture he paints of skeptics, but I and a lot of skeptics would be more than happy to accept the ideas that there is some sort of "universal consciousness" and that we can powerfully influence our health through our thoughts, two key ideas promoted by Chopra, if there were compelling evidence to support the ideas. There's the rub. Whenever Chopra is asked for evidence for his claims, he can't seem to produce anything resembling persuasive scientific evidence. Show us the evidence, and if it passes muster we'll provisionally accept your hypotheses as likely true, subject to further testing. That's how science works. The process, of course, is a lot messier than that, with fits and starts, hypotheses that seem to pass muster and then don't and vice-versa, as well as hypotheses that are clung to longer than they should be based on the evidence. Science is not neat. However, it's better than the appeals just to believe, which is what Chopra's woo-ful whine boils down to.

Well, that and lame arguments like this, in which Chopra posits four "mysteries" or "problems" that "undercut skepticism" and "demolish militant skepticism":

Also from quantum physics, the Uncertainty Principle undercut the notion of solid, tangible atoms and molecules existing in fixed locations. No one is sure about the implications for the human brain, since it is composed of atoms and molecules whose status is tied into the mystery of consciousness.

The emergence of time and space, either through the Big Bang or at this very moment, remains mysterious. The pre-created state of the universe is a deep mystery.

The whole issue of consciousness, long ignored because of science’s aversion to subjectivity, has become a major concern, principally for two reasons. The assumption that the brain is the producer of the mind has never been proved; therefore, it presents the possibility of being wrong. Second, if consciousness is more like a field effect than a unique human trait, the universe itself could be conscious, or at least possess the qualities of proto-consciousness, just as DNA possesses the possibility for Homo sapiens even at the stage when life forms were only single-celled organisms.

These four mysteries or problems, whatever you label them, undercut skepticism – and more or less demolish militant skepticism – because they make science question its belief in such things as materialism, reductionism, and objectivity. That’s too many “isms” for a non-scientist to really care about, and there’s no doubt that the everyday work of science proceeds as usual without regard for issues that many would dismiss as metaphysics. But such an attitude is the same as accepting a dead end. For without asking the deepest questions about what is real and how do we know the truth, the current state of physics and biology will be mired in speculation and doubt.

Regular readers will recognize that the Choprawoo is near black-hole density here. Very dangerous for the untrained. You might inadvertently slip past the event horizon, be swallowed by the black hole of woo that is represented there, and lose your critical thinking skills. I also can't resist mentioning that Chopra is about as arrogant a bastard as there is. He seems to be implying, with his swipe at skeptics here, that only he and his fellow woo-meisters ask the "deepest questions about what is real" and "how we know the truth." Nonsense! In fact, it is skeptics and scientists, not airy fairy New Age woo-meisters like Chopra who ask the real questions of what is real and how we know the truth. Chopra assumes that he knows the truth to a close enough approximation, no further investigation necessary. We do not.

None of his "four problems" are actually problems, at least not in the way the Chopra presents them. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is not, as Chopra would have you believe, an excuse to make stuff up, nor is it an infinite improbability drive that allows anything to happen. Ditto quantum physics, which Chopra has abused with abandon for decades, using it as an excuse for virtually every claim he makes, as in "Because quantum." Although it is true to say that we have not "proven" that consciousness is the product of the brain only in the sense that it is impossible ever to "prove" anything with absolute certainty, the evidence from neuroscience is overwhelming that consciousness, or mind, is the product of the brain is overwhelming, as Steve Novella has pointed out many times. As for the emergence of time and space, yes, that remains mysterious in the way that all phenomena not yet explained by science remain mysterious. Proclaiming it so is rather akin to arguing that water is wet.

Chopra concludes his post with:

In the next post we’ll consider how irrelevant and misguided the skeptical agenda is proving to be by offering specific examples from the work of two popular skeptics, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, whose intention to keep science pure and objective has led them into blind alleys and rigid thinking – the very things science should avoid at all cost.

Oh, goody. Of course, unlike Chopra's caricature of a "militant skeptic," I'm not a big fan of Sam Harris; so this next installment might actually test my skepticism. Somehow, given that it's Deepak Chopra, I doubt it, though.

oracknows Tue, 11/12/2013 - 01:00

Tags

complementary and alternative medicine

Skepticism/Critical Thinking

complementary and alternative medicine

medicine

religion

Science

There's an old quote, and I can't remember who said it, that science requires an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

Yes, I use that quote quite a bit. Chopra's brains have definitely fallen out.

"militant skepticism", "vaccine bullies"--sadly mistaken phrases from irrational people.

And I bet his third installment won't even have the deceny to attempt to semi-redeem itself with epic lightsaber battles.

I actually kind of like "militant skeptic," despite its oxymoron-ness. I think Imma put that on a t-shirt.

Chopra should realize that criticizing scientists for applying skepticism is like criticizing sculptors for removing bits of stone.

Contemporary physics cannot explain the origin of the Big Bang in detail.

This "demolish[es] militant skepticism" .... how, exactly?

Frankly, I'm disappointed in Chopra. I'd always thought his BS had more of a patina of logic than this. He is, after all, the greatest living bullshit artist writing in English.

This is a non-sequiter on the level of "The climate has changed in the past! Therefore, humans cannot be changing the climate!"

Star Wars > The Empire Strikes Back

The emergence of time and space, either through the Big Bang or at this very moment, remains mysterious.

Chopra seems not to have learned any cosmology in the last twenty years (if not more). There was a time not so long ago when the part of this statement that refers to the Big Bang might have been reasonable--there was a joke, back in my student days, to the effect that cosmologists were happy if they got the order of magnitude of the exponent right. But since then, observations have gotten significantly more precise. There is still a brief interval--somewhere between a fraction of a second and a few minutes after the Big Bang, depending who you ask--where we don't really know what went on. But after that, cosmologists do have a strong handle on the physics, and "the emergence of time and space ... at this very moment" has not been mysterious during my lifetime.

You mean that there isn'i Universal Consciousness?

At any rate, at the end of Episode Two, Deepak's logic has been attacked by hordes of sceptics who Strike Back. In the final episode ( for now anyway), he sits forlorn in a juice bar, crying into his carrot/ cucumber smoothie. HOWEVER he hears a voice coming from the Shadows- " I'm Rupert Sheldrake and I've come to resonate along with you. Together we can vibrate at the correct frequency and thus, tame their unruly dissonance and eternally Return ....." ETC.

They don't make trilogies like they used to. No light sabres.

hahaha, best blog ever:

www.ageofautism.wordpress.com

Will the third part have e-woo-ks? And is Deepak a woo-kie?

The way that strident atheism has clothed itself in science seems convincing to people who are skeptical about God in the first place. But there’s no scientific basis for atheism, since God isn’t subject to experimentation.

Chopra needs to pick a horse and ride it. You can't use science to support the existence of God and then complain that your hypothesis is outside of science because "God isn't subject to experimentation." Choose.

I think there are two main problems with Chopra's version of God, the "field of consciousness that is set up for maximum diversity."

The first is that it's coherent enough to be wrong.
That's the second one, too.

So both the scientists AND the theologians have something here to bother them.

Chopra-speak is what religious claims look like when they TRY to be clear and consistent. The poor guy can't just wave his hands around and talk endless blather about Mystery. He wants his blather to withstand scientific scrutiny -- as long as it's a friendly, accepting, open-minded and benevolent scientific scrutiny, a scientific investigation which strongly resembles a Search for God and has never heard of confirmation bias as flaw.

Chopra will never believe this, because, quite frankly, he strikes me as being as cynical as the picture he paints of skeptics, but I and a lot of skeptics would be more than happy to accept the ideas that there is some sort of “universal consciousness” and that we can powerfully influence our health through our thoughts, two key ideas promoted by Chopra, if there were compelling evidence to support the ideas.

Chopra wouldn't believe it because as a man of faith he can't. That's not the way the story goes.

A lot of atheists would be happy to accept "universal consciousness" version of God as well -- under the same terms. But the faith narrative always has to frame the believers as willing to accept evidence which is sufficient enough for true seekers -- and which could never be enough for the others.

This is why I find the New Age and 'liberal' religions more disturbing and insulting on this matter than many of the fundamentalist ones. When they say "You're an atheist because you don't want Hell to be true!" they're wrong about the underlying reasoning but at least they get the last part right. In fact, I worry a bit about the good will and humanity of anyone who WOULD "want Hell to be true."

But "You're an atheist only because you don't WANT a blissful Universal Consciousness and Healing?" Not only is the reasoning wrong but now my good will and humanity is gone. In that sense the attack has gotten nastier. Why wouldn't I LIKE that? Sounds great.

Out of curiosity, has anyone done a well defined, documented, repeatable experiment showing the existence of mind without brain? Brain without mind I've certainly seen.

Mad Magazine used to (and may still) have a feature called "What they say, and what they really mean".

In Chopra's case, "reductionism" means "valuing evidence" and "militant skeptics" means "people capable of critical thinking who laugh at my woo".

"In academia, if it’s not an MS or a PhD, no one really cares."

Do they even care about Masters' degrees? :)

DB@14 -- I'm reminded of Duck's Breath Mystery Theater's old radio spots by "Dr. Science", who was introduced with:

"He's smarter than you are!
He has a Master's degree --- in Science!"

Deepak Chopra sez: "After all, no scientific discovery was ever made by negative thinking."

I've always thought of science as NEUTRAL awaiting analysis of credible data.

“The climate has changed in the past! Therefore, humans cannot be changing the climate!”

Got that one at lunch at work a couple of weeks ago. Apparently I'm a weirdo for evaluating arguments based on whether they make sense rather than whether I like their conclusions.

@palindrom: There's also the opposite tack, which Ann Landers took back in the day. I own a collection of her columns, and one of the chapters has the title (IIRC): "No B.S., No M.A., No Ph.D., but I Got the J.O.B.!"

@DB: They care about your B.A. or M.S. if and only if you are in, or applying to, a graduate degree program. Otherwise, you are correct that your M.S. means little more than a B.A. In some fields, it means even less, because master's degrees are viewed as consolation prizes for people who couldn't make it through a Ph.D. program.

palindrom - [plug type=shameless]Doctor Science will be appearing at MidSouthCon in Memphis, TN in March. Check out www.midsouthcon.org for details.[/plug]

And he does know more than you do ...

We have learned that 'deepak' means either 'brilliant light' and/ or 'little lamb' in Hindi. SRSY.

The idea that no scientific discovery was ever made through negative thinking is nonsense. Obviously a lot of new thinking came about from being critical of old thinking. I can remember wondering about some data that flatly contradicted the prevailing assumption, and deciding that just maybe, RNA breakdown is not always a simple first order decay process.

Chopra uses the words "negative thinking" as a deepity (a word, phrase, or statement capable of two interpretations -- one true but trivial, one extraordinary but false -- which are then equivocated between in order to grant credibility to the latter.)

No scientific discovery was ever made by giving up too soon or sticking in a comfortable rut. That's the true but (so to speak) trivial.

When it comes to scientific discoveries, anything is possible! If you believe, you will find it! Critical thinking comes from critical people who are afraid to dream! The Spiritual view is true!

Extraordinary but -- false to a very high level of certainty (for it is trivially true that anything is theoretically possible, empirically.)

Great Dog, I despise that smug shit. I used to have to suck up to him when I worked at Whole Life Expos back in the 90s where he was just as warm, humble and charming as you might imagine. I totally bought his dreck for years. After the 10 years that it took me to come out of Wooville (1996-2006), he's the only one of the many new agers I met, about whom I can find nothing kind to say. Okay, Van Praagh is the other one . . . oh, Williamson two. Nevermind.

Too. Can we get an edit function up in here?

Good ol' Deep-crap...

What Chopra is trying to do is link critics of alternative medicine to Dawkins and Harris because even many atheists find them extreme, just like liberals often call conservatives Communists and conservatives often call liberals fascists.
@Sastra- it's easy to understand why people want there to be a hell for baby-rapers and serial killers. It becomes a more difficult concept when they have to worry their neighbors might go there.

Whoops- that first sentence should be the other way around.

I'm curious, Orac... What exactly do you find objectionable about Sam Harris? I always found him to be far more eloquent and less grating than Dawkins, though he tends to get a little flaky when it comes to the topics of reincarnation, mysticism and consciousness. Is this something you plan on getting into in detail in your next post?

Denice,

At any rate, at the end of Episode Two, Deepak’s logic has been attacked by hordes of sceptics who Strike Back.

"This is not the BS you are looking for..."

“Because quantum." Is not the explanation for all his woo-sometimes it's "Because energy."

I think the subtext for both "Because quantum" and Because energy" ultimately comes down to "Because wouldn' t that be the coolest thing?"

“Because quantum.” Is not the explanation for all his woo-sometimes it’s “Because energy.”

Wakalixes makes it go!

@ Krebiozen:

Ha!
I wanted to work the notorious "Cantina Scene" in as distraught Deepak sits down at the bar, orders up, crying into his Aldeberanean single malt despite the bouncy housemusic, telling the insectoid barkeep his tale of woe when Rupert S. emerges from the shadows ..

but wait, these people despise alcohol! Therefore, juicebar.

“Because quantum.” Is not the explanation for all his woo-sometimes it’s “Because energy.”

No "Because chaos theory" or "Because negentropy"? Imagine my disappointment.

'It all depends, of course, on what you mean by God. If you mean some ethereal being who never does anything, then maybe Chopra has a point...'
According to George Carlin the REAL God is busy throwing gas balls around the firmament, and getting pissed off that we celebrate on his day off.

Neil J @ 30:

It may have something to do with Harris being a genocidal racist. Just guessing, of course.

I remember hearing a joke while in grad school that went like this:

A guy goes to apply for a job driving a cab. The cab company owner asks him what his qualifications are. The guy answers "I have a master's degree.". The owner says "Sorry, but all my cab drivers have phd's.".

It was a pretty depressing joke at the time.

@Chris Hickie #39
We had similar one in law school:
What does the law gruaduate from year 1996 says to law graduate from 2006? Two burgers and fires, please.

Also, since Deepra's "four mysteries" eliminate the need for reductionism, materialism and objectivity in science, you think he'll be willing to take part in my planned research of how quantum mind oveconsicousness energy is able to defy gravity? I still need people to the control group jumping out of planes without the chute.

Denice,

but wait, these people despise alcohol! Therefore, juicebar.

No doubt; substitute some dreary, tinkly New Age music too. For some reason that reminds me of Eddie Izzard's take on the Death Star canteen.

In my final days living in Cambridge I spent a lot of time in a pub which attracted various bikers and other countercultural types. Because of the exotic hair, piercings, tattoos and attire it was often referred to, affectionately, as 'The Star Wars Bar'.

Methinks thou doth protest too much...

I am a co-author of the original essay. How do I personally contact the author of this blog? Do you have Twitter? I will be commenting more soon. Just discovered this blog recently.

Thanks, Krebiozen, now I have the Cantina music from Star Wars stuck in my head. :-P

Buh-bah-buh-bah-buh-bah-buh-bupadaba, bah, bah-da....

@Jordan:

Perhaps you would like my good bud Steve's commentary too:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/chopra-skepticism-fail-par…

In the meantime, the comments are open.

In the meantime, the comments are open.

I hope he comes back. I've never met an "Emerging Psychotherapist/Guru" before!

It seems that he's had a bit too much of the Chopra Kool-Aid though.

Mr. Flesher, do enlighten us and show us the errors of our ways.

Have any of you ever studied the work of Donna Haraway and how she specifically addresses the ties between modernist epistemologies of science and society? Because this is key:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway

Moreover, the original blogger stated: "But enough beating on a poor, hapless co-author. Well, not quite. My advise to Jordan Flesher would be that, if he ever wants to be taken seriously as a psychologist and get into a good graduate program, writing opinion pieces with Deepak Chopra attacking science is not the way to go. And, make no mistake, that’s exactly what Chopra does, because, well, it’s what Chopra does. But first, he claims to lecture skeptics about the nature of skepticism and science, which is always good for a laugh, ever since I first took notice of Chopra, lo those many years ago."

I will have you know that I am already enrolled within a graduate program. I am soon to complete a master's degree in psychology and have begun applying to a doctoral program.

Moreover, the whole notion of academic authority, credentials, epistemologies and their social-making has already been addressed and deconstructed by the French postmodernists. Namely, Michael Foucault.

Also, it important for you to study the work of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber

As well as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

As well as: the second and third Wittgenstein as he is known in academia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-game

All the these academics are crucial for anyone to have studied to hold an adequate argument in this era. If you have no background with these theorists it is due to lack of global and integrative education and I cannot help you there.

All the these academics are crucial for anyone to have studied to hold an adequate argument in this era. If you have no background with these theorists it is due to lack of global and integrative education and I cannot help you there.

Mr. Flesher, I highly recommend that you acquaint yourself with the epistemological category known as "bad Fazzm," as Chopra is essentially a monument to it.

Jordan Flesher - You do realize that what you did up there was, in essence, to say "I think you're too ignorant for me to even discuss this with you." This, frankly, is not a particularly effective technique to discuss the issues. In addition to the possibility that some people might very well have read and understood the works of the people you mentioned (possibly better than you), it also opens you up to someone pulling the same gambit on you "Haraway, you say? How quaint. Of course, if you'd read so-and-so you'd know that what Haraway's work is not only gibberish, it's completely disproven."

What you have done is try to shut down the conversation with an academic put-down. I'm sure that's effective in some circles.

By the way, I do disagree with Orac on one point - I think there is plenty of nonsense in even the best academic settings and one will not necessarily harm one's academic chances by taking outre positions.

Good luck with your studies.

Ah, what I like to call the "around the corner gambit."

"Of course, I have a solid refutation to your argument! I have irrefutable proof that I'm right and you're wrong! Therefore you should immediately concede that I have the right of things!

"What do you mean, you actually want to see this proof, and you don't intend to concede without getting a chance to examine it? Why, how arrogant and silly can you be!? I've already assured you that the proof is iron-clad, and it's right around the corner! It happens to be contained somewhere in the complete works of this philosopher, or perhaps it's this other one that I'll mention, or maybe it's this third - anyways, the point is that until you have searched through all these haystacks and comprehensively proved that the needle I claim to know about isn't there, you should be accepting my claim that it is and that it entirely refutes everything you have to say."

Mr. Flesher, you're dealing here with hard scientists who are much too busy finding out real things about the world to worry about what some po-mo Frenchy thinks about how their work is socially constructed. Alan Sokal nailed it.

Mr. Flesher:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Courtier's_Reply

@ Mr. Flesher #48:

"Moreover, the whole notion of academic authority, credentials, epistemologies and their social-making has already been addressed and deconstructed by the French postmodernists. Namely, Michael Foucault."

And yet you seek a master's and possibly a doctorate. Interesting.

Mr. Flesher, when I asked you to tell us the error of our ways, I wanted you to tell us in your own words... not a series of wiki pages. Especially one to a guy who does not understand holograms are a perfectly explainable photographic technique! (I remember in the early 1980s when someone tried to tell me about holograms being mystical, I had to tell her to go the Electrical Engr. building to see where there was a display explaining how hologram photography worked).

It seems that we actually understand science, and you seem to lack in that education. While you are pursuing your graduate studies, pick up some basic science courses in things like physics, chemistry and biology. Seeing how you have a psychology undergraduate degree, you might have missed those courses.

(looking at the differences in BA and BS of psychology at local university I see that both require only one quarter of calculus and some biology classes, but no physics or chemistry... which is odd since they have a biopsychology course that requires knowledge of chemistry and electrical function... according to my youngest who took it)

If you wish to comment on science, you should probably actually learn some. You might find it more interesting than trying to pretend to know what it is. By the way, I have a BS in engineering with some graduate work, mostly in applied mathematics (and I see nothing mystical in imaginary numbers, the square root of negative numbers are very useful).

Moreover, the whole notion of academic authority, credentials, epistemologies and their social-making has already been addressed and deconstructed by the French postmodernists. ..All the these academics are crucial for anyone to have studied to hold an adequate argument in this era. If you have no background with these theorists it is due to lack of global and integrative education and I cannot help you there.

Nice 180 - I think I got whiplash.

@ Chris:

There is great variability across the western world in requirements- also graduate divisions into clinical/experimental/counselling/ educational/ etc- BUT there are usually MUCH more statistics/ physio/ testing required @ the graduate level.

We see how anti-vaxxers may have a grad deree in SW or counselling or similar and still be totally lost about research ( you know about whom I speak).

Denice: "BUT there are usually MUCH more statistics/ physio/ testing required @ the graduate level."

Which is fine if one restricts their writings to counseling and psychology, but not as noted in this article defining science, skepticism, and how scientists think. Your list is lacking in physics, chemistry and lots of mathematics (diffy-q and probability, required for the "quantum" stuff).

Of course that is the problem with Chopra and friends, who pontificate on subjects that they know very little about. As you can tell I was amused that Mr. Flesher told us to read Wilber's wiki page, that even though he had an advanced biochemistry degree had no idea about holography. That's when I could not go on since it was too hilarious.

Mr Flesher, I'm afraid that by offering arguments from philosophy, epistomology, etc., to defend Chopraks calims regarding the origin of the mind and "auantum xonsciousness" in this forum you've committed the classical error most commonly referred to as "bringing a knife to a gunfight".

But by all means get back to us when you have actual scientific evidence supporting Chopra's nmany claims.

"the whole notion of academic authority, credentials, [...] has already been addressed and deconstructed by the French postmodernists. Namely, Michael Foucault.”

I like the appeal to academic authority there at the end.

Is it possible that Jordan Flesher is trying to parody a certain style of obscurantist bafflegab? It requires some dedicated ignorance of History of Philosophy to (a) misspell Foucault's first name, and (b) call him a 'postmodernist', a title he rejected.

@ Chris:

I assume that most people who get through university should at least have an intro to chemisitry, physics, bio and reasonable skills in mathematics- either acquiring them prior to and/ or in university courses.

OBVIOUSLY not everyone gets there-
most physio and related need grounding in life sciences and chem/physics.
Or else there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

BUT then we have PhDs/MDs who talk about homeopathy.

Jordan Flesher,

All the these academics are crucial for anyone to have studied to hold an adequate argument in this era. If you have no background with these theorists it is due to lack of global and integrative education and I cannot help you there.

I am very familiar with all those academics, having studied Social Anthropology at SOAS in the late 80s. I read more of them than I care to remember, I understood them, I even agreed with many of their points to a degree.

However, having also a background in natural science, I know that when the rubber hits the road, the scientific method has enormous value that "other ways of knowing" simply cannot match. I'm pretty sure some things are real and some things are not, independently of how we think of them.

Anyway, despite all this education, I still firmly believe that Deepak is full of it, to the very brim. Does that help?

As well as: the second and third Wittgenstein as he is known in academia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-game

Wittgenstein's work is interesting and rewarding, especially if you think of him as a poet writing in the style of mathematical argument. It also helps to think of him as the philosopher De Selby from Flann O'Brien's "Third Policeman". He was trying to step outside the framework of language-based consciousness and use that framework to examine itself, a difficult endeavour for which I give him props.

Sometimes, though, he would venture outside his preferred metier and extend his a priori speculations to practical reality, where he tended to become embarrassingly wrong. The errors in his "Remarks on Colour" make it a source of great delight among perceptual scientists.

Ken Wilbur, on the other hand, is (as they say) not even wrong.

Denise Walter: "I assume that most people who get through university should at least have an intro to chemisitry, physics"

My youngest did not take physics in high school, and is not required to take any further basic science. The physics and chemistry in college are much different than high school. I checked the course requirements for psychology at the large state university down the road: no college physics or chemistry needed.

"reasonable skills in mathematics- either acquiring them prior to and/ or in university courses."

Unfortunately those are not sufficient to discuss "quantum theory." That requires quite a bit more, like differential equations, Fourier transforms, probability, etc. In short: lots more than the wee bit of calculus required for a psych degree, which just covers differentiation, no integrals and no Taylor's series.

Looking at the wiki pages left to us by Mr. Flesher, I notice quite a bit of "a little knowledge is dangerous" bits. This is why the Sokal Hoax was so successful, and quite wonderful.

I remember when some of the "philosophical" arguments were making the rounds as a college student. I was highly amused that some feminists were claiming there was a "special science" for women, and that the physics, chemistry and math classes were male oriented. I had to laugh, since as far as I knew my body was still subject to the three basic laws of forces noted by Newton, and that basic homogeneous mechanical equation was mass times acceleration plus damping coefficient times velocity and spring coefficient times distance equals zero.

This was just part of the push back I got in the late 1970s for daring to major in engineering. It was bad enough having professors telling me that women weren't smart enough But it was worse from so-called feminists telling me I was a traitor for learning "male science" when they did not even know the difference between mass and weight.

I think some of those women may now be in the anti-vax crowd. Some of them can't tell the difference between an atom and a molecule.

HDB,

Sometimes, though, he would venture outside his preferred metier and extend his a priori speculations to practical reality, where he tended to become embarrassingly wrong.

The Zen masters used to correct this kind of solipsistic error very simply, with a sharp blow from their keisaku. "What hurts?"

Chris:

I had to take tons of science and mathematics just to get accepted at the various institutions where I studied/ acquired degrees.

Oh well, I guess that explains why I like to wear trousers and why trolls can't figure out if you're "a boy or a girl" **

** as David Bowie notes.

Chris,

I was highly amused that some feminists were claiming there was a “special science” for women, and that the physics, chemistry and math classes were male oriented.

Sandra Harding even referred to Principia Mathematica as a rape manual. In my school 'ethnocentricity' and 'eurocentricity' were the cardinal sins.

The real pleasure of science for me is that it truly transcends value-laden cultural symbolic systems. We finally have a way of looking at the universe without our belief systems getting in the way. Mistaking the scientific method for one of those belief systems seems to me a very serious mistake.

Chris - I think the values for the male and female damping coefficients may be different, but that's just a guess.

Denice, I am just pointing out that Mr. Flesher and the people that he listed did not have the requisite education to pontificate on certain things. And I having living in my house an offspring who is majoring in the humanities (and I am really frustrated they want to do double major in psychology with their linguistics because they don't want to take calculus!).

I am very amused by why some trolls are fixated on gender. The same college student has legally changed to a neuter name (the nickname remains the same since I have always found the neuter nickname to be an advantage). I believe "Greg" had some issues, and we all remember "Little Augie."

hdb: "Sometimes, though, he would venture outside his preferred metier and extend his a priori speculations to practical reality, where he tended to become embarrassingly wrong. The errors in his “Remarks on Colour” make it a source of great delight among perceptual scientists."

The meaning of language, and how it is perceived is a subject in my house due to above college student. One thing is the gender assignments to objects and use of pronouns (which is not consistent, like German pronouns for women). Plus there are specific neurological affects of language that get interesting. There are effects of color, shapes, etc and since one child has a neurological speech/language disorder the workings of the brain. The readings would be:
A brief tour of human consciousness : from imposter poodles to purple numbers by V.S. Ramachandran

Through the Language Glass Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages By Guy Deutscher

And for fun: Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions by
Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, Sandra Blakeslee

Predictably Irrational The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

;-)

M O'B: "Chris – I think the values for the male and female damping coefficients may be different, but that’s just a guess"

It is dependent on their natural frequencies.

The Zen masters used to correct this kind of solipsistic error very simply, with a sharp blow from their keisaku. “What hurts?”

Doctor: So, where is the pain?
Bertrand Russell: In my brain.

* Possibly apocryphal exchange.

Krebiozen, oh good grief. That is terrible. But pretty close to what I had to deal with in the non-engineering section of the university.

"We finally have a way of looking at the universe without our belief systems getting in the way."

And we also find it more interesting and wonderful than what those belief systems can dream up.

@ Chris:
@ Krebiozen:

There's a reason I slyly brought up Mr Bowie- other than the obvious ( Orac)-
we were all studying in the late seventies and have already slogged through the viscous mire which you've both accurately outlined. As my famously posh history of science/ psychology prof once noted- " If you know the history, you don't have to go through THAT again"-

AND seriously, the trolls sound as if the 1970s never happened - they are bogged down in mid-century, middle-class, stereotypical thinking about gender et al just as Deepak and Co are hopelessly re-hashing the MindBodySpirit Crap of the 1970s. Talk about *idees fixes* and sharply circumscribed areas of interest/ repetitive activity**
Oh wait,that's the other thread
-btw- these de-congestants well really well..

** I think I'm joking.
HOWEVER I am suffering from cold-like symptoms and am already signed up to go on a LONG day trip by train tomorrow which I can't get out of- which means getting up very early, getting dressed really well, driving to the train,sitting on the train for 3+ hours, taking a metro- ALRIGHT seeing spectacular things and eating fabulous food but then, getting the metro, sitting on the train for 3 hours, driving etc. Talk about slogging.

de-congestants WORK really well.
I'll say.

"Through the Language Glass Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages" By Guy Deutscher

Recommended.

One of Wilber's key ideas is to study and categorize items in terms of their nature as a holon, a term deriving from the writings of Arthur Koestler.

Heh. As I've mentioned to HDB, I'm reading The Age of Longing, which I picked up out of the (original) Powell's discount box since I needed something new and, coincidentally, I long have had The Roots of Coincidence. This of course is Koestler the novelist, not "plate o' shrimp" Koestler.* I'd compare the two if I had felt in any way driven to unpack the latter.

Anyway, I see that Mr. Flesher (who, in a remarkable display of deconstruction, is citing his latest credential before it even exists) has brought forth unto the Perceived World the foreword to The Delusion of Being Human, by "The Signposter" (sign: not a good sign). Behold:

The book allowed me to see that each and every single professor which I encountered had in some way gotten stuck, somewhere within a particular knowledge-story (thought-system) belonging to and constructed by the cultural-social enterprise. I could see, through the aid of the book, that even sociology professors who allegedly belong to a discipline concerned with questioning the ‘social-machine’ and not merely being a ‘slave to society’ had become, along with every other types of professors, slaves to their own knowledge (beliefs, conclusions, and reality-assumptions). Thus, from reading the book, the esteemed power belonging to authorities of any kind within the cultural-social enterprise to influence and contaminate me became gradually less and less of a possibility. One of the most important contributions of the book that I found, and what I predict other individuals will find as well in reading the book, is that it actually and specifically goes into great detail in order to be absolutely clear about various ‘principles’, so to speak, taught by various enlightened beings throughout the ages, especially those renowned contemporary teachers who have already died. In other words, often times a spiritual teacher will say “we are all one” or “there is no ego self”, but they never really explain how they arrived at such a realization, what steps they had to take, and what had to be seen-through and let go of before they could truly apprehend that ‘all is one’, ‘there is no doer’, ‘there is Only God’, and so on; these phrases are often used as mere slogans. The book The Delusion of Being Human provides those specific steps and the necessary apprehensions which must occur before one can come to know what enlightenment is (awakening to one’s True Nature). As the Signposter has mentioned to me many times “if someone cannot say it clearly, then it usually means they do not really know it”.

In the face of this rambling testament to Really Not Getting It (there's more where that came from), I'm reduced to observing that anyone who thinks that there is some sort of litany of prerequisities to Enlightenment is so deeply attached to grotesquerie as to practically be a lost cause.

Narad,
I took a semiotic course as part of my degree, and I have rarely encountered such confusing and incomprehensible stuff (complement cascades in immunology gave it a run for its money, but that actually represents something physically real).

I went into semiotics with a perfectly lucid and practical way of thinking about of things existing 'out there', and of representing those things as a model in my brain which I project 'out there', and that I can talk about to other people using language. Semiotics seemed to me to be determined to greatly and unnecessarily complicate things by insisting that a sign is a real thing that is a combination of something that happens inside my brain and something else that happens outside my brain, which didn't and doesn't seem like a very useful concept to me. Had these people not heard of Occam's Razor?

Despite my struggles with the subject, my tutor wanted me to do a doctorate on Charles Sanders Peirce and his theory of semiotics [shudder] - luckily funding was frozen because too many other PhD students hadn't finished their theses, otherwise who knows where I would have ended up. I did spend a long time trying to get my head around all this before I finally gave up in disgust, though my inability to grasp it didn't seem to make any difference to my grades. It reminds me a little of my experiences jamming with experimental jazz musicians: if I join in with enough confidence, no one seems to notice I really don't know what I'm doing.

Finally accepting that the reason that so much of the post-modernist stuff I encountered seemed like meaningless BS was that it really is meaningless BS was quite enlightening to me - or as they might put it, I experienced epistemic closure.

Do i hear an Eco?
I was writing about psychology of artistic styles and the prof insisted that I read semiotics by Eco. Also i had to translate an article on psycholinguistics by IIRC, Michaud, to satisfy a foreign language requirement.. I swear they forced me.
And you cannot wash these ideas out of your
awareness as easily as you can remove unwanted dirt from your hair: there is no *shampooing pour la postmoderne*
How I wish that there were.

Fortunately I have always sought out practical concerns first and foremost and never got beguiled away from them by the easy path which is studying concepts that you create, not problems that exist outside of your own head .Also I decided to work with real world problems involving actual people.Fancy that.

Narad was kind enough to include that.. uh....intro... and it sounds suspiciously like the garbage I survey at PRN.
Reading just what is excerpted here ( I did however read it ALL at the link), there is no solidity- just vamping and mistiness. No actions or events are described. Lord knows what they're talking about...it sounds like it was created to impress us with its loftiness.

Seriously, with 3 drinks in me I could do much better and it would probably relate to what people experience interpersonally rather than in their own thought wankery.

No actions or events are described.

It's truly a poor entry in the field.

Straightforward expositions of Fazzm belief systems are rare. Here is an example, an early and unusual quote from America’s leading Fazzmaniac, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, 1836), in which he actually lays all his cards on the table instead of playing them close to his chest, as became his standard practice later:

Nature is the symbol of spirit …. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation … man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom arise and shine. This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are all its; we are its property and men …. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries embodies it in his language, as the FATHER …. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit, the visible creation in the terminus of the circumference of the invisible world.

I was going to take up the footnote that I failed to instantiate above, but now that the mention of semiotics has turned the plate o' shrimp into the Clam Plate Orgy, I don't know that I have the energy.

The structure of that italixplosion is correct aside from the first two lines, FWIW.

The "gender" assignments of different Indo-European languages that Chris mentioned in #70 and the mystification they provoke is a pet peeve of mine. The Latin grammarians have a lot to answer for.

The earliest forms of the IE languages that we see (Vedic Sanskrit, Hittite, Greek, etc.) were probably in the last stages of decay of a full-blown classifying system like the Bantu languages. (They vary between 3 and 20+ genders—by comparative work we can see that some of the 3-gender systems are incipient and some are just fizzling out. In between you have something like Swahili, with 20 genders—or more, depending on who you listen to.)

It was strictly an accident of history that in the final stage of decay, the word for "man" wound up in one gender and the word for "woman" wound up in another. What about that third gender? Well...that must be "neuter". Yeah, that's the ticket!

"Gender" just means "kind", but now it's become so associated with sex that when you tell someone Swahili has 20 genders they stare at you like you're crazy—you have to use some clumsy term like "category" or "agreement class". (Why is 20 in principle worse than 3?) In the Romance languages, "masculine" and "neuter" have fallen together, but in the modern Scandinavian languages (IOW, not Icelandic), it's "masculine" and "feminine" that have fallen together, giving two genders: "common" and "neuter". That's all the proof needed that gender has nothing to do with sex.

These studies that purport to show psychological differences in how words are perceived depending on their grammatical gender are IMO pure hokum—or if they're not, they're an artifact of grammarians telling people for centuries that gender = sex. Somebody should do studies on speakers of unwritten languages, or at least ones that haven't been the subject of centuries of misguided grammar punditry and see if they suffer from the same misconceptions. My hypothesis is "No", but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

One of Wilber’s key ideas is to study and categorize items in terms of their nature as a holon, a term deriving from the writings of Arthur Koestler.

I vaguely recall one of Koestler's later essays in which he regretted ever coining the term 'holon' because so many new-age nimrods and intellectual purse-snatchers were making free with the concept and using it without the rigour which he thought it deserved.

so many new-age nimrods and intellectual purse-snatchers were making free with the concept and using it without the rigour which he thought it deserved.

Not the only new-age misappropriation of a valuable concept. Case in point: Kuhn's 'paradigm shift'

I vaguely recall one of Koestler’s later essays in which he regretted ever coining the term ‘holon’ because so many new-age nimrods and intellectual purse-snatchers were making free with the concept and using it without the rigour which he thought it deserved.

I'm not familiar enough to imagine what he intended, but Wilber's going straight for the container-contained relationship strikes me as one-downsmanship, as it were, in comparison with the ideation underlying Owsley's diet.

Years ago when I was young and still open to new ideas and new tools for thought, I tried reading one of Wilber's books, but very soon bogged down in bafflegab and wordwooze and blatherskite. I gathered that captial-C Consciousness occupied a similar position in his worldview as Phlogiston and Calor occupied in proto-scientific ones. Except Consciousness seemed to be an all-or-nothing property of matter, like superconductivity or the gaseous state. It did not fit well with my own experience that evolution has bestowed a dim, flickering, partial form of awareness upon human beings, one that covers only a tiny fraction of our sensorium and our cognitive processing, so I gave up. Perhaps other people get more out of him.

Speaking of Wittgenstein, I dreamed once that someone had turned his Tractacus into an opera. Not (as one might expect) in the style of Philip Glass; in the dream it was more in the idiom of Richard Strauss. So I woke up with the final aria "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" still ringing in my ears.

Probably it would have been better in the original Klingon, but isn't this always true?

I also remain regretful that Wittgenstein and Sam Beckett never got together to collaborate on a play.

Probably it would have been better in the original Klingon, but isn't this always true?

I remain regretful that Wittgenstein and Sam Beckett never got together to collaborate on a play.

HDB,

I remain regretful that Wittgenstein and Sam Beckett never got together to collaborate on a play.

Sadly Wittgenstein had a notorious drink problem, and with all that quantum leaping Beckett simply didn't have the time to acquire the necessary fluency in Klingon...

I've read the reactions to Jordan Flesher and hope someone here will consider my observations about those exchanges. Like many of you, I'm also in the belly of the academic medicine beast; but unlike many of you I'm observing these kinds of conflicts from the margins.

May I suggest...This is a kid. He probably had no idea that he stumbled into a den of working scientists with his adolescently arrogant admonitions to read his favored disciples, and I'm pretty sure that he has no clue about the logical fallacies cited, the references to the fallacy of authority, and all the other things cited. You are wasting your time. YOu are shooting fish in a barrel, and there are better uses for your time and energy.

It can be satisfying to shatter a kid who doesn't know any better and blow him to Mars with superior erudition, but why do that? It reduces the mature experts to the level of their misguided interlocutors to engage them with their own limited view of the world. Why would any of you be so supercilious and aggressive with this obviously immature kid? I don't get it.

I'm not sure what any working scientist or physician gets out of engaging someone who cannot understand that he is in over his head. To me such people deserve dignified guidance and a strong admonition to go out and learn more before they walk into a complex debate for which they are entirely unprepared.

Have to say... the hostile arrogance here I've read here is a serious waste of energy that could be more productively directed towards genuinely threatening influences. People who can can hurt people in real ways should be the target, not some young kid who has no clue what is talking about.

Sorry for multiple typos. Bad keyboard.

@ Sara #89 -- If Mr. Flesher continues on his current path, Life will be far harsher than the mild reproaching the regulars here have offered. 'Tis a far better thing for his illusions to be shattered in a blog comment section than on a job search.

Given that he hasn't yet bothered to return to attempt a conversation, it's interesting that you offer to clutch pearls in his stead.

Sorry, Sara. But I still think if one wishes to comment on science, how it is done and about how scientists think that it would better if he learned some. And not just read the opinions of those who don't seem to understand how it works.

If one would like to ponder philosophy of science (a real discipline) to actually learn it, and avoid the philosophy of pseudoscience. This is where reading Massimo Pigliucci is much more useful than Mr. Flesher's list.

I assume all but me here are familiar with the Wisdom of Chopra generator, but Pupienus over on Sadly, No just brought it to my attention.

"Your consciousness is inside the doorway to possibilities."

@ The Very Reverend....

Of course we are. Two results-

" The web of life transforms quantum sexual energy" et
" Your consciousness grows through progressive expansion of human observation".

I'd guess that that has things about covered.

@Sara -

such people deserve dignified guidance and a strong admonition to go out and learn more before they walk into a complex debate for which they are entirely unprepared.

I went back and re-read my response to Mr. Flesher, and believe you summarized my major point quite nicely.

and I have to add that I don't think that youthful advocates armed with a graduate degree are entirely *harmless* because
they can instruct, counsel, write and otherwise mislead distraught and lost youngsters.

Overcoming the effects of Choprafied advice might take a good decade.

Thanks to all for feedback about my remarks. Some of you were quite quick to assume that I would defend someone like this, so I suggest that maybe it's time to step back and realize that you have put too many dogs in fights like this with ignorant people and need to take a break.

The rather overexcited tone throughout this thread makes me a little antsy about how much misplaced energy might be going into this kind of non-discussion. This is a kid. Please just ignore him and let someone else--or life--teach him that he is an ignorant twerp. I would hope that everyone has better things to do.

I am not defending this boy. I am urging everyone to put their energy where it really counts. Life will slap him down soon enough.

For Denise--This boy has an undergraduate degree in psychology. He is as much of an intellectual threat as my cat.

Please do not squander your energies on straw man arguments and other machinations with 22-year-olds who still think they are the smartest thing in the room. It's a complete waste of time and talent and true competence to fight real fights.

We need you for the real, important fights against the sophists, quacks, and outright crooks who can really hurt people and make lots of money doing it with no remorse or legal accountability.

Seriously.

People who can can hurt people in real ways should be the target, not some young kid who has no clue what is talking about.

"Some kid" who is purportedly in a doctoral psychology program and purports to be in "mental health care"? No, sorry. This "kid" fully intends to lay this line of horsesh*t mystification on anybody he can get his hands on and certainly looks to be fixin' to set up shop. (And if you don't think that "can hurt people in real ways," maybe you didn't look too closely.)

So, I think it's perfectly fine that Jordan Flesher, a/k/a "Troy of Is," have this little monument to his character and people skills tacked up in case any of his future clients get to wondering he really is just throwing out a blizzard of gibberish that he doesn't know a damned thing about.

Anyway, it's not like people flocked to YouTube to say mean things about his 108-minute video with "The Signposter" or something.

Yikes. Apologies for misspelling your name, Denice. Where I live it's usually spelled Denise, and I'm tired and careless right now.

I completely agree that the average well-rewarded undergraduate anywhere may consider himself/herself matched against anyone to argue cherished dogma and can do real harm. That is a legitimate concern, especially if you throw combative arrogance into the mix.

It's somewhat parallel to the frightening phenomenon that makes this blog necessary: a little knowledge can be exceptionally dangerous and infinitely distorted for consumption by malleable and vulnerable people who lack the means to evaluate and question it.

By definition, victims of misinformation don't know what they don't know.

For Narad--Don't understand your own blizzard in the above post. I had the impression that the boy in question had no academic credentials beyond an undergraduate degree and did not see that he is seeking further credentials. If so, that may be truly dangerous. I believe your response is somewhat misdirected. If he is indeed intent on pursuing this course, then I completely agree with your outrage.

I am a retired clinical psychologist. I've also investigated those who abuse their credentials as mental health workers. If what you report is correct about this person, that truly worries me. Nothing distresses me more than the thought that these kinds of people will be set loose on the public in the future with conventional credentials that give them carte blanche to say and do almost anything, honestly.

I'm just trying to participate in the discussion here. Please don't associate me with this kid who is clearly overstepping his very, very limited knowledge. I frankly want it to remain that way from what I've read here.

Sara,

From the boy's latest post:

I will have you know that I am already enrolled within a graduate program. I am soon to complete a master’s degree in psychology and have begun applying to a doctoral program.

He is indeed in a position to counsel people.

Alain

For Narad–Don’t understand your own blizzard in the above post.

I do that when I'm writing quickly, sorry. The fact of the matter is that "Troy of Is" thought that he could pop by, get away with nothing but intimidation, and, I dunno, either wait for the entreaties for dispensations of widsom or simply declare victory and skedaddle.

What he apparently didn't bargain on was the diversity of his target audience. (I, for one, would be more than happy to hang his supernaturalism out to dry without monist materialism, which he and Chopra are in great measure whining about in this entry in the Annals of Globular Blobularism.)

If "life" is to be the agent of the "ignorant twerp" lesson, I see no compelling reason why it oughtn't to operate in the comments to a post about an article that he cowrote.

Wow. And all I thought was that this was a kid totally mystified by the hologram on his debit/credit card.

Wait. Does he even have debit/credit card? Wouldn't that mean interaction outside his world view?

Sara,
I have the strong impression you have not read the blog post that provoked the comments you are uncomfortable with. I suggest that you do so, and hopefully you will understand why some of us have felt perfectly justified in responding to Mr Flesher the way we have.

@ Sara:

Unfortunately woo-topia has many poseurs who *counsel* or provide *therapy* with and without benefit of reasonably SB educations or traditionally acquired degrees.

This guy has been enabled further as he associates with Chopra ( who was IIRC, an endocrinologist in his past life) .i'm sure he's out there ( in both senses of the phrase) already misleading people for good money.

One of our most esteemed and creative commenters, Pareidolius, has had truck with Chopra on a closer basis wilst working at Whole Life Expos and is not impressed.

Their spiritual message might be particularly appealing to vulnerable people who would be better served with more reality-based counselling rather than the airy fairy notions promulgated by these creatures.

As a side note:
1 I for one truly enjoy Narad's blizzards and possibly his other storms as well.
2 my name is a variant which is supposedly to look "not too French" but still reflect the family myth that we indeed have Norman ancestors( which I doubt).And yes I have a second last name (omitted here) which is NOT D'Urberville. Please.

Jordan and Chopra don't understand why science requires (at least) methodological naturalism. They think science is just some bigger search for truth regardless of process, which has never been the case.

Everything else in this debate is a side dish....

Puzzled by Denice's response. I am not here to challenge or attack anyone. I am here to learn and perhaps give my eccentric perspective from time to time. I really have no agenda beyond that.

For Krebiozen--my screen display is cranky and non-standard, and I may indeed have read a truncated version of this person's original post. Thanks for pointing that out.

Chopra scares me. Oz scares me even more because he is the latest anointee to the Oprah bully pulpit and like Chopra once was a Real Physician. Everyone to whom she's handed her mantle of gushing endorsement has abused it and has created a duststorm of lucrative woo that is spun off into a separate empire. It's beyond me why she has gotten away with this for so long and has no oversight for misinforming the public whatsoever.

Oprah is a menace. There--I said it. Dr. Phil was just the beginning. I guess after your first billion or so that no one dares to tell you that you're pushing crappola whose potential or actual harm will take others years to undo. If ever....

@ Sara:

I'm agreeing with you.
Instant Translation;
Alt med is rife with self-styled psychologists, some of whom have real degrees. Chopra gives a boost to youngsters like Mr Jordan. They takeunfair advantage of people. One of our commenters, Pareidolius, has the goods on Chopra.

Side notes- are mostly a joke. Narad is most decidedly not.

I guess the only mantra that keeps me going when these people manage to fool everyone almost all of the time is just Follow. The. Money. Then you hope that enforcement will catch up with them. I'm not seeing much meaningful action, though. The quack in Texas who still has complete freedom to show what an accomplished ripoff artist he is after--what, decades?!-- says almost everything I would ever (not) want to know about Texas. Apologies to those who live there.

But...I live in a community where a discredited (fired) medical examiner was recently discovered to have a storage unit full of salvaged human body parts.

Sara: I'd just like to point out that my computer monitor is currently held together with duct-tape, so I'm not sure 'screen bit the dust' is an excuse.

@Sarah

I live in a community where a discredited (fired) medical examiner was recently discovered to have a storage unit full of salvaged human body parts.

WTF - Where is that? I work at a self-storage centre where we recently stopped collecting security deposits - in the light of this revelation perhaps we should re-instate them.

WTF – Where is that?

Kinda sounds like Pensacola.

I live in a community where a discredited (fired) medical examiner was recently discovered to have a storage unit full of salvaged human body parts.

Eccentric geniuses have a very hard time these days - it may be dressed up as "ethics" and "health and safety", but really it's still peasants with torches. Think of all the scientific breakthroughs that might have come from this sort of creative amateur experimentation. [ ;-) ]

But…I live in a community where a discredited (fired) medical examiner was recently discovered to have a storage unit full of salvaged human body parts

That would make for a kick-ass episode of Storage Wars.

Narad is correct. This was in Pensacola. As I understand it, the case is ongoing because he may have stored pilfered parts elsewhere. This was only discovered because payment lapsed and someone bought the unit at auction.

The kicker for me is that I have a long-term storage unit in a facility with the same company. Several years ago they had a fire caused by improperly stored flammables. Fortunately it was self-contained.

A soapbox moment here, if I may...In many places in the US, the medical examiner and coroner positions can be staffed by people who have no legitimate credentials in forensic medicine and can be political appointments. This is horrifying. I wish the entire medical profession would unite on this issue. The people who pass judgment on cause of death should be medically qualified, and there should be an option for a trained examiner to do cursory autopsies whenever cause of death is questionable.

Here autopsies are only done under strictly defined conditions defined mostly by law enforcement considerations. Families who want a postmortem exam must pay out of pocket. This is cruel when cause of death is ambiguous. Surely there's an intermediate option so that some kind of perfunctory procedure is available to anyone who believes it's necessary. I've dealt with this several times on a personal level.

/soapbox

For Militant Agnostic (#112)--I almost lost a huge collection of family heirlooms to a nearby fire in my storage facility. These places should absolutely have security deposits and should ensure that there's some kind of insurance, whether the paltry policy they offer or equally paltry homeowners coverage (usually 10%).

I apologize for not anticipating that my throwaway comment about the human organ thief might hijack the thread for a bit; but I'm grateful to see that people here are alarmed at what this (unqualified, unethical piece of scum) medical examiner was able to get away with. Truly food for thought.

Back to other unethical issues of concern.....Such as slick Chopra and his disciples. It makes me a little crazy that he and others who have conventional credentials are now free to do pretty much whatever they can get away with.

How did we let this happen? How is an MD now a get-out-of-jail-and malpractice-suits-free card in case you decide that you don't want to play by the scientific and ethical rules?

How did we let this happen? How is an MD now a get-out-of-jail-and malpractice-suits-free card in case you decide that you don’t want to play by the scientific and ethical rules?

AFAIK, Chopra doesn't care for patients, and basically just writes books, gives speeches and does the talk show circuit. He can do pretty much anything he wants, short of fraud. Since he's smarter than the likes of Kevin Trudeau, he'll avoid leaving himself open to charges. Being a bullshite artiste is not against the law.

Referring to Post-Modernist babble and relying on wiki sources to buttress one's intellectual shortcomings? Someone please take a very soft pillow emblazoned with the name 'Alan Sokal' and hit the little brat on the head, repeatedly and without mercy.

Universe Book Club: Incognito

cevans — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:05:28 +0000

Universe Book Club: Incognito

The history of science can be read as a series of brusque reality checks. Once, we thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but modern astronomy relegated our real estate, incrementally, from the center of everything to a hum-drum corner of an unimportant galaxy in a handful of generations. The theory of Evolution turned us from mini-gods into just a consequence of squicky biological randomness. The decipherment of the structure of DNA and the human genome turned the spark of life into something that can be written down, stored, and analyzed by computers. Again and again, we have found our sense of centrality challenged. But at least we still had our most sacred space: the mind.

Alas, it couldn't last forever. In his genuinely beautiful book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (which just came out on paperback) neuroscientist David Eagleman proposes a parallel trajectory for neuroscience, booting the mind from its pedestal to remind us, yet again, of the folly of human self-importance.

Eagleman presents the idea, based on the most current science, that the phenomenon of consciousness is one of the brain's lesser functions. The conscious mind calls the whole machinery "I," but we only become aware of thoughts, behaviors, and actions significantly after the bulk of our brains have already done the heavy lifting. Incognito abounds with examples of brain functions that happen without our knowledge, from the simple kinetics of attraction to strange phenomena like "blindsight," in which some blind people can correctly guess what they're looking at (beyond what random chance would predict) because a low-level operator part of their brain is still chugging along undeterred. Most of what we do, from tying our shoelaces to producing speech to playing video games, is done by hidden subroutines without much conscious awareness.

Consciousness, Eagleman suggests, is just a system for meting out the lower programs–a kind of superintendent for the automated systems whirring below the hood. It's only when we need to learn something new, or our cognitive routine is interrupted, that the superintendent lumbers out from its office to give matters a look-over. In terms of total neural function, it's a pretty small-fries gig.

This view of mind shatters the ego, much like a heliocentric Earth shattered Renaissance cosmology. To some, it might seem almost sinister. Like a squirrel eviscerating a pile of nuts, Incognito methodically cracks every natural preconception its readers might hold about their selves, until it feels like there's nothing left but empty shells. What is spiritual fervor? Perhaps just a temporal lobe seizure. What is sexual desire? Just a complex subconscious perception of smell and symmetry. What is aggression, emotion, sadness, a temperament? Glitches in the wet lab. We are the sum total of our chemicals–neurotransmitters, hormones, viruses, and genes–at any given moment.

Catalyzed by these chemicals, countless hidden programs drive our actions, and our brain (the left hemisphere, actually) makes justifications later; free will is a story we tell ourselves, often in retrospect. The entire subjective world is tied to biological machinery, with little room for a ghost in the machine. At present, neuroscientists have not found any spot in the brain that is not driven by other parts of the network. That is to say, there is no independent, or "free," part of the brain–a detail that slays the most sacred cows of the human experience. "If there's something like a soul," Eagleman writes, "it is at minimum tangled irreversibly with the microscopic details."

I'm left with this sense of a hulking, somnolent beast that churns far below the waterline of my me. Or, too, a mess of rival processes, endlessly redundant, working simultaneously to address the myriad problems of existence, without much concern for any meta-narrative I might pour on top of them. But here I am writing this review now, seemingly of my own volition, so what's happening?

Eagleman isn't just an explainer; he's a real writer with palpable awe for human mysteries (his solitary fiction work, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, is a book of great sentimental value to me). It's this poetic sensibility, as well as Eagleman's ability to contextualize what he calls the "dethronement" of consciousness, that makes Incognito transcendent rather than nihilistic. After all, biological reductionism is as ooky and threatening to the closely-held, ineffable stuff of humanness as quantum mechanics is to our sense of physical reality. But for Eagleman, the brain is a new cosmos. Just as living on the edge of outer space gives us a front-row seat to the drama of the void, so too does being the bearer of all this indifferent biological machinery. The seat of consciousness may be no better than a folding chair, but what a show.

cevans Fri, 11/02/2012 - 07:05

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Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

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This is a great review of an excellent book. I especially enjoyed how Eagleman integrated current events, such as Mel Gibson's DUI, to his subsequent explanations. At the time many people weighed in on whether Gibson's comments were racist or it was the alcohol or his
addiction speaking and is there a difference. Eagleman dives into this enigma.

I really enjoyed this review. I am getting both books thanks to holiday amazon money! Considering the connectivity of the brain, i wonder what path a thought takes through your brain reviewing a book like this. Also i respect your willpower to not address the author's last name, i hope his hair stays abundant throughout his life.

well I'm going to read bc its on your blog!

Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour

edyong — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:30:15 +0000

Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour

Like it or not, the golden arches of McDonalds are one of the most easily recognised icons of the modern world. The culture they represent is one of instant gratification and saved time, of ready-made food that can be bought cheaply and eaten immediately. Many studies have looked at the effects of these foods on our waistlines, but their symbols and brands are such a pervasive part of our lives that you'd expect them to influence the way we think too.

And so they do - Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing to do with eating. They showed that subliminal exposure to fast food symbols, such as McDonalds' golden arches, can actually increase people's reading speed. Just thinking about these foods can boost our preferences for time-saving goods and even nudge us towards financial decisions that value immediate gains over future returns. Fast food, it seems, is very appropriately named.

Zhong and DeVoe asked 57 students to stare at the centre of a computer screen while ignoring a stream of objects flashing past in the corners. For some of the students, these flashes included the logos of McDonald's, KFC, Subway, Taco Bell, Burger King and Wendy's, all appearing for just 12 milliseconds. We can't consciously recognise images that appear this quickly and, indeed, none of the students said that they saw anything other than blocks of colour.

The students were then asked to read out a 320-word description of Toronto and those who had subconsciously seen the fast food logos were faster. Even though they had no time limit, they whizzed through the text in just 70 seconds. The other students, who were shown blocks of colours in place of the logos, took a more leisurely 84 seconds.

Zhong and DeVoe also found that thoughts of fast food could sway students towards more efficient, time-saving products. They asked 91 students to complete a marketing survey by saying how much they wanted each of five product pairs. One option in each pair was more time-efficient (as rated by an independent panel of 54 people), such as 2-in-1 shampoo rather than regular shampoo or a four-slice toaster versus a one-slice one.

If the students had previously thought about the last time they ate at a fast food joint, they were more likely to prefer the time-saving products that students who had thought about their last visit to the grocery store. Zhong and DeVoe say that this supports their idea that thinking about fast-food makes people impatient. To me, this is the weakest part of their study, for products like 2-in-1 shampoo are as much about saving money (perhaps more so) as they are about saving time. Fast food is not only served quickly but priced cheaply, and it may be this aspect that altered the students' preference.

However, the duo addressed this issue in their third experiment. They randomly asked 58 students to judge one of four different logos on their aesthetic qualities, including those of McDonald's, KFC and two cheap diners. Later, they were told that they could either have $3 immediately or a larger sum in a week. They had to say how much it would take to make them delay their windfall.

As predicted, those who considered the fast food logos were more impatient, and demanded significantly more money to forego their smaller immediate payment in favour of a larger future one. It seems that they put a greater price on instant gratification over larger future returns

Of course, these results can't tell us if fast food actually contributes to a culture of impatience and hurry, or if it's just a symptom of it. Nor do they say anything about whether this effect is good or bad. That would all depend on context. As Zhong and DeVoe note, a brisk walking speed is a good thing if you're trying to get to a meeting but it would be a sign of impatience if you're aiming for a leisurely stroll in the park.

Their study does, however, suggest that fast food and the need to save time are inextricably linked in our minds so that even familiar brands can make us behave more hastily. They could even affect our economic decisions, harming our finances in the long run. As Zhong and DeVoe say, even our leisure activites are "experienced through the coloured glasses of impatience" and "it is possible that a fast food culture that extols saving time not only changes the way people eat, but also fundamentally alters the way they experience events".

Reference: Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610366090 If this link isn't working, read why here

Photo: by Rene Sinn

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edyong Mon, 03/22/2010 - 03:30

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We can't consciously recognise images that appear this quickly and, indeed, none of the students said that they saw anything other than blocks of colour.

If they couldn't "consciously" recognize the symbols -- how the hell did it change their behavior? How else does one perceive symbols other than "consciously"?

Fast food is priced cheaply? How so? Measured by the amount of money spent per person per meal, fast food is surely the most expensive type of food you would find in a typical person's week.

I got impatient while reading this so ate a cheeseburger instead.

Frog - your brain does a huge amount of processing without you being consciously aware of it and it can strongly affect our behaviour, including important stuff like our voting choices and our political attitudes. See here and here and here.

Always said it was no coincidence that the logo for Waterstone's (all v respectable LOOKING, but "3-for-2" speedy-bookselling behemoth really) is the golden arches upside down :)

I skimmed this post ;) but nice job as usual, Ed!

It's fascinating and frightening how easily human thought is manipulated without any awareness.

So the brain unconsciously spotted the logos, right? Or maybe the brain realised that it was only processing blocks of one particular colour but rather blocks each comprising of many colours. From then, the brain works more effectively and becomes more rapid when given other things to do.

Am I making any sense? Just a thought. How do we know that the brain actually distinguished the logos and not just blocks of colours?

This might have been even more revealing if they had quizzed people on their specific eating habits. Do the trends hold true for people who never eat fast food versus the rare but accepting fast-food consumer, versus people who eat it 1-2x a week, versus those who consume more than 3x a week?

@Ed: I was being a bit snarky -- but thanks for the cites.

It seems ol' Freud wasn't so wrong after all -- that conscious processing is to a large extent post-hoc rationalization, except in a very limited number of cases of planning with essentially unlimited time to ratiocinate.

The (well-known) implications, are, of course, staggering.

Some of this has to do with the effects of color. The particular shades of red and yellow, and their use together, were researched to magnify both desire for food and and impatience. The desired result being people order more but then quickly leave. Higher profits from larger orders and higher rate of turnover. The red/yellow theme is a popular color scheme for fast food joint.

The seats, and pretty much everything else, have been designed to be comfortable to sit in for a few minutes, presumably just long enough to inhale the meal, but to discourage loitering.

The manipulation of color, symbol, timing and presentation to induce approach, spending, and quick turnover has been made into its own field of study. These places are run by huge corporations that are willing to spend money to optimize the system because small benefits accrue rapidly across a large a system and continue to over time. Every detail has been researched and will continue to be researched.

The goal is programmed behavior where the average American walks in without any conscious choice, tosses their wallet to the guy behind the counter, thanks them for allowing him to experience the atmosphere, and walks out ten second later completely satisfied.

I wonder how much this translated into real-world effects - for instance, how much of our taste for disingenuous, sound-bite politics is due to this effect (and vice-versa?)

We still only have a correlation not a causal relationship. We'd need to compare fastfood logos with other symbols. Just because the subject is not consciously aware of the presence of logos, the brain might be realizing that some of the flashing images do carry meaning. The stress of not having time to parse the symbols could be the cause of the increased brain activity later. The brain may have been "put on notice" to go faster because it didn't have time to fully parse the symbols. That could be easily checked by having a group that see logos for brands associated with slowness (beer?) or not associated with speed at all. But the correlation between faster brain activity and fastfood logos is really interesting.

This study seems very weak in general because there are so many variables. Of course many sociological studies have this problem.

At least in my personal realm of influence, though, I do notice that fast food places make me feel impatient. How they waft the smell of french fries in the vicinity, and I KNOW there is delicious tasting food a few minutes away. Food that is designed to shut off the "I'm full" warning, makes me want even if I'm not hungry. So there is this anticipation for pleasure, and it makes me impatient.

I suppose its a reasonable hypothesis that the logo itself, is some Pavlovian fashion, could trigger impatience... but its gonna take a lot more than this to establish a convincing association imo.

I'm with Yvonne. The results seem to demonstrate nothing at all about fast food, or reactions to it, or to its logos, in particular. They should have had other familiar food logos not associated with fast prep and low quality, instead of blank colored blocks. Maybe what came through was haste, or maybe just associations with salt, sugar, and fat. Did participants think they would get out of the experiment sooner if they finished sooner?

It's easiest to design experiments that provide no new information.

13, 14, 15: Huh? The testing of subliminal images didn't start and end with this. They have been shown to affect behaviour in numerous experiments and they are commonly used to detect the interaction between conscious and unconscious processing.

This result is somewhat different to a lot of the previous work in that it's demonstrating a transitive effect into other domains, not just food-seeking. (If the McDonald's logo just induced preferences for hamburgers the experiment wouldn't be demonstrating anything new.)

Fast = fast as embodied metaphor.

Seems to me that their control is a bit dodgy. It could be the effect of subconsciously recognising any brand logo, rather than fast food. Or just to do with the difference between blocks of colour and logos (i.e. patterns of colour). Better controls would be non-fast food brands and logos with no brand behind them (i.e. still a logo, but not a recognisable one).

I'd be interested to read the stats (when the embargo is over) as well. Doesn't seem to be a huge sample or a massive change in means.

All that aside, its still interesting.

@ Tim CD Lucas Hear hear.

Jim Birch: Fine, there's lots of work on effects of subliminal images. Probably some of it is good. The designers of this study do not appear to have learned anything from the other work, or thought much about it. They got results that vary vs. the controls, but the variance doesn't tell us anything specific.

There is a great deal of published "science" like that. It's one of the reasons scientists are so dismissive of new results they haven't studied carefully. By far the most likely explanation for any interesting result is that somebody did something wrong.

A detail: the $3 immediately or the greater sum in a week. I myself, would choose the immediate sum in case I didn't trust the moneyprovider. Then to my conviction, the choise in fact would be: $3 immediately, or nothing.
How can you know if this experiment wasn't testing [dis]trustment more than or instead of [im]patience?

The paper is freely avail for download on the authors' webistes

Ed, found a typo: its 'Fat food'.

(McDouble, extra pickle & onion, coffee, to go)

A pyromaniac in a field of straw man or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe? Mike Adams attacks skepticism

oracknows — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:00:05 +0000

A pyromaniac in a field of straw man or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe? Mike Adams attacks skepticism

Mike Adams is confused.

I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and responding to Mike Adams' idiocy actually looks somewhat pleasurable for a diversion.

I know, I know. I'm a glutton for punishment, but Adams wrote something that was so spectacularly idiotic even for him, that I fear it may rend the fabric of the space-time continuum. You'll see why in a minute. At best, in this post, Adams can be best described as a pyromaniac in a field of straw man. Alternatively, one could envision his post as a black hole made up of such a huge mass of straw men that it collapsed down upon itself. Or maybe it was simply the black hole of woo that is Mike Adams drawing all the straw in the universe into itself, adding to its size and increasing its event horizon, the better for it to suck the intelligence out of the universe.

Yes, Adams' latest is just that bad, so bad that I had to mix metaphors.

As you may recall, over the weekend, there was a hilarious blowup regarding the Shorty Awards, basically awards for Twittering. Mike Adams was in the lead for the Health Category, but then it was pointed out that a large percentage of his votes were coming from brand new Twitter accounts with only one Tweet. Clearly, they were accounts created for one purpose: To vote for Mike Adams. Such voting tactics are clearly against the rules for the Shorty Awards; and the powers that be behind those awards decided to boot Adams from the competition. Personally, I'm not sure that that wasn't overreacting, as it's not clear that these accounts were created at Adams' behest. It probably would have been better simply to invalidate all the illegal votes. Be that as it may, Adams went full mental jacket upon learning of this, claiming huge and dark conspiracies on the part of big pharma, vaccine manufacturers, and the government to "silence" him, all the while pouting that the awards "weren't important" but belying his dismissal of the Shorty Awards' importance by simultaneously threatening to sue its organizers. Truly, it was comedy gold!

But Adams wasn't satisfied with causing supporters of science-based medicine a huge chuckle. Oh, no. Adams is about nothing if not massive woo overkill. So, in response to his humiliation in the Shorty Awards, he decided to channel Deepak Chopra's misunderstanding of the nature of skepticism and skeptics and turning it up to 11 and beyond. Indeed, "pyromaniac in a field of straw men" doesn't even begin to describe the idiocy of Mike Adams' response to skeptics, entitled What 'skeptics' really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe. It's also the purest distillation of the principle of crank magnetism that I've seen in a very long time--maybe ever. Truly, calling it even a black hole of stupidity is inadequate; maybe it's an alternate parallel universe made up of nothing but stupid. I don't know. Feel free to weigh in...after my deconstruction.

Mike begins with a woo-ful whine:

In the world of medicine, "skeptics" claim to be the sole protectors of intellectual truth. Everyone who disagrees with them is just a quack, they insist. Briefly stated, "skeptics" are in favor of vaccines, mammograms, pharmaceuticals and chemotherapy. They are opponents of nutritional supplements, herbal medicine, chiropractic care, massage therapy, energy medicine, homeopathy, prayer and therapeutic touch.

Strawman #1 (of more than I care to count): That skeptics claim to be the "sole protectors" of intellectual truth. I'd love to see Adams show a statement anywhere from a skeptic claiming that skeptics are the only protectors of intellectual truth. All we claim is that science is the best way to determine what does and does not work, and we do not accept claims without evidence to support them. In other words, we are the polar opposites of Mike Adams, which is why he doesn't understand us. Adams is correct, though, in that most skeptics are indeed in favor of vaccines, mammograms, pharmaceuticals and chemotherapy. We are in favor of such things because we support science-based medicine, and science tells us that these things do work and delineates the situations when they work and do not work. It is also true that most of us do not support supplements, herbal medicine, chiropractic (other than for aspects of it that resemble physical therapy), energy medicine, homeopathy, intercessory prayer, and therapeutic touch. (Note that Adams would be hard-pressed to find a skeptic who has a problem with massage therapy, except when it is infused with woo, which, unfortunately, a lot of massage therapy is.) The reason is, of course, because science does not support these modalities.

Adams also seems very unhappy with the observation that many skeptics are agnostics or atheists, ranting:

But there's much more that you need to know about "skeptics." As you'll see below, they themselves admit they have no consciousness and that there is no such thing as a soul, a spirit or a higher power. There is no life after death. In fact, there's not much life in life when you're a skeptic.

I thought it would be interesting to find out exactly what "skeptics" actually believe, so I did a little research and pulled this information from various "skeptic" websites. What I found will make you crack up laughing so hard that your abs will be sore for a week. Take a look...

Well, I suppose we skeptics are just returning the favor. Many are the articles on NaturalNews.com that left me laughing so hard at Adams' ignorance, paranoia, and conspiracy theories that I should sue Adams for funds to pay for some NSAIDs to treat my aching chest wall and abdominal muscles. Maybe they'd throw in some chiropractic adjustments as well, as I fear that Adams' hilarious woo induced subluxations of each and every one of my thoracic vertebrae. It would be very interesting to know which skeptical websites and blogs Adams actually visited. If you have a skeptical website or blog, you should look for some accesses from Ecuador, which, if I recall correctly, is where Mike Adams currently resides. Maybe you were graced with a visit from the Woo-meister-in-Chief himself! Sadly, I couldn't find any such visits in my logs, but I only use the free version of Sitemeter; so only the last 100 visits are logged.

The sheer number of straw men to which Adams takes a flamethower (I know, I know, I can't make up my mind which metaphor I want to use) is so huge that it would be a colossal undertaking to respond to them all. Therefore, I'm going to pick and choose--dare I say, cherrypick--the ones that amused or enraged me the most. Others may be disappointed that I left their favorite ones out. Fear not! That's what the comments are for. Feel free to respond in the comments to any or all of this collection of misrepresentations and woo.

Let's get started. Adams divides his "commentary" into sections, starting out with "What Skeptics Really Believe." The very first one made me laugh out loud:

Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they've never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and "good for your health."

Is there a more outrageous misrepresentation of the views of practitioners of science-based medicine that you can imagine? If it were true that skeptics believe that "all vaccines" are safe and effective, then why is there so much debate over which vaccines should be in the childhood immunization schedule? Why do we have a VAERS database and VSD to look out for adverse reactions to vaccines? In actuality, Adams completely misunderstands that what is being argued is not that "all" vaccines are safe and effective; rather we argue that the current pediatric vaccination schedule is safe in that the benefits of being vaccinated far outweigh the tiny risks that come from vaccination. The same is true for flu vaccination. As for Gardasil, there is quite a bit of controversy, but it's not so much over whether the vaccine is safe. It is. Rather, it's more about whether it should be part of the routine pediatric vaccination schedule. As for the utter idiocy of Adams' "no limit" nonsense, he's mischaracterizing an example that Paul Offit made that the human body is capable of responding to the antigens from thousands of vaccines at a time; he was not advocating giving hundreds of vaccines at a time.

Which brings us to this gem:

Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

I'd really love to see Adams provide evidence that "skeptics" believe that the body has "no ability to defend itself." The truly hilarious thing about this bit is that Adams is too clueless to realize that the very principle upon which vaccines work depends upon the body's ability to defend itself from invading microorganisms. They don't work (or don't work as well) in patients who are immunosuppressed, whose immune systems don't work, for whatever reason. Truly, the cluelessness of Mike Adams knows no bounds.

Skeptics believe that all healing happens from the outside, from doctors and technical interventions. They do not believe that patients have any ability to heal themselves. Thus, they do not ascribe any responsibility for health to patients. Rather, they believe that doctors and technicians are responsible for your health. Anyone who dismisses doctors and takes charge of their own health is therefore acting "irresponsibly," they claim.

No, they do not. Note how Adams conflates "taking charge of one's own health" with using the forms of quackery that he likes. Nor do they believe that "all healing happens from the outside." Geez, Adams doesn't know many surgeons, does he? Our very profession depends upon the body's ability to heal. We routinely make big incisions in the body and count on the body's ability to heal the temporary injury resulting from our ministrations. As for "not ascribing any responsibility to patients," that's utter nonsense. The sad thing is that Adams probably really does believe this.

I like this one too:

Skeptics believe that Mother Nature is incapable of synthesizing medicines. Only drug companies can synthesize medicines, they claim. (So why do they copy molecules from nature, then?)

Nonsense again. Many science-based medicines are derived from natural products, either extracted from plants or other organisms or extracted and chemically modified. It's amazing to consider: Taxol (derived from the bark of the Pacific Yew), digoxin (foxglove plant); Vinca alkaloids (derived from Catharanthus roseus, a.k.a. periwinkle plant); and camptothecin, irinotecan, topotecan (derived from Camptotheca acuminata, a.k.a. Happy tree). There are many other examples, as well. Indeed, whole divisions of pharmaceutical companies are devoted to screening natural compounds for pharmacologica activity, and the NIH has a huge investment in biodiversity initiatives and similarly identifying natural products that might have value in human disease. In other words, Mike Adams is so wrong that he's not even wrong.

As usual, as he is with this:

Skeptics believe that you can take unlimited pharmaceuticals, be injected with an unlimited number of vaccines, expose yourself to unlimited medical imaging radiation, consume an unlimited quantity of chemicals in processed foods and expose yourself to an unlimited quantity of environmental chemical toxins with absolutely no health effects whatsoever!

Huh? I challenge Mike Adams right here, right now, to provide a link or links to a skeptical website or blog that says anything of the sort! Certainly, this isn't such a blog. Indeed, just recently, I wrote about the dangers of too much radiation from medical imaging. I've expressed skepticism about various science-based medical modalities for which I consider the evidence to be lacking, such as vertebroplasty. Skepticism means skepticism, not just towards "alternative" medicine but to all medical claims. Those that can stand up to scientific scrutiny become medicine; those that can't end up on Mike Adams' website to reside with other gems of woo like this:

Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

I love the primitive vitalism that permeates Mike Adams' beliefs. After all, unless we eat our vegetables right off of the vine or rip the beating hearts out of our enemies and eat them before they stop beating, our food is "dead."

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead!

Meat is dead. Vegetables and fruit, unless they were just harvested, are dead, and certainly both meat and vegetables are dead by the time we've chewed them and send them into the acid baths that reside in our stomachs. Truly, Adams' statement is hilarious, just not in the way he thinks it is, just as his belief that skeptics are not "skeptical" about everything:

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the corruption and dishonesty in the pharmaceutical industry. They believe whatever the drug companies say, without asking a single intelligent question.

Skeptics aren't skeptical about medical journals. They believe whatever they read in those journals, even when much of it turns out to be complete science fraud.

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the profit motive of the pharmaceutical industry. They believe that drug companies are motivated by goodwill, not by profits.

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the motivations and loyalties of the FDA. They will swallow, inject or use any product that's FDA approved, without a single reasonable thought about the actual safety of those products.

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the safety of synthetic chemicals used in the food supply. They just swallow whatever poisons the food companies dump into the foods.

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the enormous dangers of ionizing radiation from mammograms and CT scans. They have somehow convinced themselves that "early detection saves live" when, in reality, "early radiation causes cancer."

Hmmm. I'm puzzled. Right here, at least, I've expressed skepticism about nearly of these things, including pharmaceutical company seeding trials, pharmaceutical company chicanery with respect to medical journals, and misconduct from medical journals themselves. Also, I've written extensively about mammography and the problems with mammographic screening, including overdiagnosis, the risk of breast cancer due to radiation, how screening mammography doesn't reduce deaths from breast cancer as much as many think, and how mammographic screening guidelines have changed. Does Mike Adams not pay attention to such things? Again, skepticism does not differentiate between "conventional" and "alternative" medicine. As the old joke goes: What do you call alternative medicine that has been scientifically shown to work?

Medicine.

Personally, I see this as a massive case of projection on Mike Adams' part and would rephrase a couple of them:

Mike Adams is not skeptical about the corruption and dishonesty in the supplement industry. He believes whatever supplement manufacturers claim, without asking a single intelligent question.
Mike Adams isn't skeptical about the profit motive of the the supplement industry, much of which is being bought up by pharmaceutical companies. He believes that supplement companies are motivated by goodwill, not by profits.

Translating others is left as an exercise for the reader, although if you really want to see just how uncritical Adams is, check this out:

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the demolition-style collapse of the World Trade Center 7 building on September 11, 2001 -- a building that was never hit by airplanes. This beautifully-orchestrated collapse of a hardened structure could only have been accomplished with precision explosives. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSc7NPn8Ok) Astonishingly, "skeptics" have little understanding of the laws of physics. Concrete-and-steel buildings don't magically collapse in a perfect vertical demolition just because of a fire on one floor...

Truly, this is crank magnetism at its finest! Who'd have thought it? Mike Adams is a 9/11 Truther! If you really don't need much more than this to know that Adams has zero credibility when it comes to critical thinking! After all, he still buys into one of the myths of the 9/11 "Truth" movement, namely that WTC 7 couldn't possibly have collapsed from the damage due to the collapse of the other buildings, a point that's been debunked time and time again, in particular in detail by Popular Mechanics. Specifically, not only was WTC 7 was more heavily damaged than initially thought but its design was unusual in that its floors held more load than most buildings. It turns out that removing the structural support of even one column could lead to collapse. Combine the fires that rages out of control with the structural damage from falling debris, and it's not surprising that WTC 7 collapsed several hours later. It's hard to believe that anyone believes the WTC 7 myth anymore, but Mike Adams does.

But, hey, that's just me. What do I know? According to Adams, I'm this:

Skeptics don't believe in a higher power of any kind: No God, no spirit, no angels, no guides, no creative force in the universe... nada. They think the universe is a cold, empty, lonely, stupid place full of soulless, mindless, zombie biological bodies who have no free will and no consciousness.

Gee, no wonder these skeptics are so misguided. They have the most pessimistic view possible. No wonder they seek to destroy themselves with chemicals -- they don't even think they're alive to begin with! Skeptics are bent on self destruction. And they believe that when you die, the lights just go out and you cease to exist. Nothing happens after that. You're just a mindless biological robot whose life has no meaning, no purpose, no higher self.

The only thing not alive in Mike Adams' little rant are his brain cells. I gave up counting the straw men after the "cold, empty, lonely, stupid place" bit.

Skeptics don't think they're alive? Of course they do! Moreover, Adams is conflating skepticism with a nihilistic form of atheism that even the most vocal and--dare I say?--militant atheists I know don't advocate. In fact, I can't recall any of them claiming any such thing or stating the universe is a "stupid place" full of zombie biological bodies with no free will and no consciousness! Do you know a person who thinks that way? Maybe such people exist (although I sincerely doubt it), but they aren't the people who are prominent in the skeptical movement. As for "no consciousness," I think that describes Adams as well. The argument is not over whether consciousness exists; the argument is dualism (the concept that consciousness derives from something other than the brain) versus the idea that consciousness derives from a biological source; i.e., the brain itself. Recent research in neuroscience definitely points towards the latter explanation of consciousness rather than the former, no matter how little Adams likes it.

But the piÃ¨ce de rÃ©sistance is yet to come in the conclusion, where Adams tries to dehumanize skeptics:

Realizing this, it makes it so much easier to debate with skeptics on any topic. Whatever they say, you just answer, "WHO is saying that? Are YOU, a conscious, free-thinking person with a mind and soul saying that, or are those words simply being automatically and robotically uttered from the mouth of a bag of bones and skin that has no mind and no soul?"

If they answer you honestly, they will have to admit that they believe they are nothing more than a robotic bag of bones and skin that is mindlessly uttering whatever nonsense happens to escape their mechanical lips. At that point, you've already won the debate because YOU have a soul, and THEY don't. You're arguing with a mindless robot.

Seriously. Think about this deeply. If you believe what the skeptics want you to believe (because they are always right, of course), then you must accept the fact that THEY have no consciousness. They are not really "alive." They are just robotic biological machines. They are drones, in other words. And drones are not equal to a being of energy with a consciousness and a soul, inhabiting a human body with purpose and awareness.

Never argue with drones. You only waste your time and annoy the drone.

Skeptics... zombies... drones... different words for the same thing. Soulless, mindless, lacking consciousness and free will, having no awareness of the value of life... these are the skeptics arguing for vaccines, mammograms and chemotherapy today. They are agents of death who can only find solace in an industry of death -- the industry of modern medicine.

And there, my friends, you have the black hole of burning stupid incinerating universes of straw men! (I know, I know, I'm mixing metaphors again. Just go with me on this; I'm on a roll.)

Seriously. Does dehumanization get any more blatant than this? Note how Adams turns the skeptic into the "other," an inhuman soulless automaton. Not believing in God or the existence of a soul does not demand that a belief that human beings are automatons, nor does believing in a biological basis of behavior, rather than a dualistic mechanism, to the point of doubting the existence of truly free will necessarily imply that humans are mindless and have no awareness of the meaning of life. None of this means that skeptics are "seeking death" because their lives have no meaning. The sheer number and volume of straw men here threaten to fill the known universe.

It's hard to know if Mike Adams truly believes the sheer volume of nonsense that he is laying down. Whatever the true case, there is no doubt that he is a master of making stuff up as he sees fit. At one point, he says that he is "not going to list those websites here because they don't deserve the search engine rankings, but you can find them yourself through Google, if you wish." So obviously intellectually lazy is this approach that even his acolytes criticized him for it, saying, "This article would have been 100% more effective and informative if after each notation, there would have been examples, names, etc. to give the statement more crediblity, convincing, more impressive."

No it wouldn't, because I'm quite sure that any examples that Adams might pick would actually not support his characterization of them. That's because, like Deepak Chopra's parody of skepticism as unrelenting negative cynicism, Mike Adams' parody is not based on reality. It is based on his projection of his credulity and paranoid distrust of science onto skeptics in order to portray them as mindless, credulous automatons who believe anything that fits within their world view and reject in a knee-jerk fashion anything that does not.

Funny, but Mike Adams' concept of a skeptic sounds a lot like Mike Adams himself. Or maybe it's not so funny. Scratch that. There's no "maybe" about it. Mike Adams' promotion of pure quackery is not funny at all, no matter how hilarious his rants against skeptics may be. He promotes quackery that can result in people foregoing effective care.

People can die when that happens.

ADDENDUM: Mike Adams continues the stupidity. It's late; I'm too tired to take it all on:

http://www.naturalnews.com/028019_skeptics_thinking.html

If there is one inexhaustible resource, it is Mike Adams' ignorance.

oracknows Sun, 01/24/2010 - 18:00

Categories

Brain and Behavior

I can see the glow on the horizon.

Has Mike Adams ever been to Burning Man?

Mike Adams has jumped the shark.

I preferred to look at the article as one big strawman as they blended so noxiously into each other it was difficult to see where one finished and another began.

As I write this, this just in on the Roid Ranger's facebook page:

NaturalNews.com: "The article I posted yesterday that exposed the true beliefs of "skeptics" made some major waves across the 'net. Entitled, What "skeptics" really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe (http://www.naturalnews.com/028012_s...), the article turned the tables on the skeptics and detailed their bizarre beliefs for the whole world to see."

As you noted above, Orac, guffaw at the comedy gold. He has jumped the shark forever.

I particularly liked PZ's description of live vs dead foods ... how thanks to chewing, it's ALL dead by the time it swims in the acid bath in the stomach.

Why WHY are there no enforceable laws against the likes of Mike Adams (and Mercola, and a hundred others)?

Why didn't Adams link to ANY of the skeptic sources he claims to have searched?

Because he knows that in no time a line up of skeptics would have him in an English libel court, taking advantage of the mechanisms that are being used against Simon Singh right now.

"cold, empty, lonely, stupid place"

I think that could become the default description for the skull cavities of Adams, inter alia.....

How do you know the risks of vaccination in young children are tiny? Adverse events to drugs are voluntarily self-reported by physicians. Only a small percentage of the true totals are reported to the CDC. For example, An acquaintance of mine's sister-in-law's very young child died within 48 hours of vaccination. The child's pediatriacian threatened the mother with a report of child abuse to the police if she dared report the death to VAERS. Since you're so busy with your grant application, maybe in your down time you can debate me. I'm waiting.

I'm so happy. Adams couldn't have footbulleted harder.

When I started pushing for votes for @DrRachie, I never in my wildest dreams expected that such glorious hissy fits would be on the horizon.

The woo-monger's tears of defeat and rage are like liquid gold to me.

"The child's pediatriacian threatened the mother with a report of child abuse to the police if she dared report the death to VAERS."

Serious accusations. I suppose you have some proof of this?

@ mary podlesak
Reactions are well documented. Please provide documentation for what you claim. I do not want anecdotal evidence. Please provide evidence that this child died because of a vaccination.

Mary Podlesak:

How do you know the risks of vaccination in young children are tiny?

With the several decades of real scientific research in the real medical literature.

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. Due to the large number of people who get vaccinated per day, a small number will die shortly after the vaccine. A great majority will be for reasons completely unrelated to the vaccine (like being in a car accident, or having an unknown large cancerous tumor growing in their chest).

And now he's responded to the response to his straw legion, with a LOL-worthy display of his ignorance of basic chemistry. Apparently water is too magical because:

Water is made up of two gases, each of which is a combustible fuel on its own. Do I think water is magical? You bet I do!

What an idiot.

Mary, do you have any evidence other than the dubious story of "an acquaintance of mine's sister-in-law's very young child died within 48 hours of vaccination?"

Mary, if you want to report your story to the proper authorities you can go here https://vaers.hhs.gov/esub/step1 and fill out the for,.

The mother and her sister-in-law would have the proof. I don't have that myself. The sister-in-law relating her nephew's death was not a person given to exaggeration. The mother would have to do what I did when the police overstepped the bounds of the law, sign an affidavit attesting to the events as they occured.

The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data.

Police are not exactly those who can give a diagnosis. You heard a story, and made an unsubstantiated conclusion.

Does any of this have anything to do with Mike Adams and his website, NaturalNews? The answer is a simple "no."

In short, Ms. Podlesak, you really have nothing to add to the conversation.

You're just a mindless biological robot whose life has no meaning, no purpose, no higher self.

Yes, thinking critically about things is often conflated with acting mindlessly. Project much?

Chris, as I have said before, there is no such category as "anecdotal data" to anyone other than physicians who seek to denigrate the value of observational data for personal gain. To biostatisticians there is only data. Prove irrefutably that physiological reactions without manifestly circumstantial causes should not at least preliminarily be attributed to vaccination. Automatically dismissing such a relationship is not science but prejudication.

I could wile away the hours
Conferrin' with the flowers
Consultin' with the rain
And my head I'd be scratchin'
While my thoughts were busy hatchin'
If I only had a brain

People listen to this guy for medical advice? "...the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway)."

Um...how do you even begin to respond to that?

Man, is Adams afraid that science is right, or what? He's like a little kid throwing a tantrum with his ears plugged, his eyes shut tight, screaming "La La La La La I'm never gonna die, I'm never gonna die, I'm never gonna die!" The fear of mortality is strong in this one . . .

@16

Chris, as I have said before, there is no such category as "anecdotal data" to anyone other than physicians who seek to denigrate the value of observational data for personal gain.

In other words . . . "Data? We don't need no steenkin' Data!"

Come on Chris, let's face it, we'll never be able to understand her Earth Wisdomâ¢ because we're just cold, sciency robots and she has a Soulâ¢ . . . that, and anecdotes about her sister's best freind's neice-in-law's reiki practitioner's kid.

Ridicule is not argument. Biostatisticians do not recognize anecdotal data, just data. Don't believe me? Look it up genius. As I said before, you guys are nothing but the Borg, the Borg in a Potemkin Village, A fakery set up to promote drugs. Real men debate in public but you don't have real balls, just virtual balls. Why are you so afraid of one old, ugly broad like me?

To be fair, he only claimed that WTC 7 was not hit by an airplaneânot WTC 1 or 2. The Truther BS doesn't enter in until his claim that WTC 7 had to have been destroyed with the help of precision explosives.

Quick point: WTC 7 was not hit by a plane. This was the 30+ story building that had a few tiny fires inside and had received minor damage from the collapse of the twin towers. The most widely held interpretation is that the external damage, coupled from the heat of the fire, caused the collapse. I think there's good reason to be skeptical personally (not to the level of black helicopter conspiracy but just to the level of it being really weird). At the very least we're talking serious design flaws and a hefty lawsuit.

This doesn't, of course, mean that this crack pot is any less of a loon.

It looks to me like mary podlesak actually made a true statement! Biostatisticians do not, in fact, seem to recognize anecdotal data as valid. Because, you know, it's a legitimate field of science. I mean, come on, Mary, statisticians by definition work only with large numbers - you know, the opposite of anecdotes.

Sure, Mary, even if biostatisticians accept ALL possible data, they have a way of weighting their data for reliability. I mean, you can't just add "Some story I heard on the Internet" to "What that bloke in the pub said" and get something to base public health policy on.

Mary, while there is no reason to assume off-handedly that your story is not true, it does not, in and of itself, prove that all doctors are to be distrusted, or that the overall benefit of vaccines does not outweigh the risk. It is possible that the child you refer to had an allergic, or otherwise adverse, reaction to the vaccine recieved. Your doctor or public health authority will tell you that a small number of people may have an adverse reaction to any given vaccine. But the true indication of risk lies in the numbers, ie statistics. The number of people who do not have any adverse reaction to a given vaccine and benefit from the protection it helps the body to create is far, FAR greater than the number of people who have an adverse reaction. And the number of actual deaths (usually due to allergic reactions) is even smaller than the small number of adverse reactions. Even for people who have non-life threatening reactions (such as temporary swelling, fever, or discomfort of the injection site) the benefits still usually outweigh the risk of not being vaccinated, especially against life-threatening pandemics or epidemics. Doctors don't claim that no one EVER dies as a reaction to vaccines, or that there is no risk of adverse reaction. It's just that such occurances are VERY rare. When they do occur they are talked about, much more so than the many, many instances where vaccines do their job without any problems. So your story only proves that one child had an adverse reaction, and one doctor was an ass about it. That's if the story happened exactly as you tell it, because what you've given is third-party information. It happened to a relative of an aquaintance, not to YOU personally, so while I don't disbelieve you, it is not exactly verifiable information.

Would I be incorrect in assuming that, given the right crowd, Adams' tactics would possibly "win" a debate?

This whole thing has been quite entertaining, I'm eager to watch it play out throughout the week.

By the way, the Shorty's are just in the nomination phase. Nominations end on January 29th, after which the top 6 nominees get voted on again. After that, Dr Rachie will need our support to ensure quackaloon Mercola doesn't get the posh free trip to New York.

Correction.. top 5. 6 if there's a tie for 5th. And the invite probably doesn't come with hotel & air.. anyway. :)

Biostatisticians don't work with anecdotal evidence. It's NOT DATA and they work with DATA. Here's an equivalent to your story:
When my dad was 9 years old his 5 year old sister was killed in front of him, she was hit by a school bus when the driver was distracted. Right before they had gone outside they'd been listening to the song Last Kiss. Many years later he was listening to the cover version of Last Kiss done by Pearl Jam when he received a phone call that my brother had been injured being hit by a car.

I could conclude the song caused both accidents but that's nonsense, it was a coincidence and without more data there's no reason to think there was a connection. Same goes with your anecdote, except mine isn't potential grounds for a libel lawsuit.

Ooops, forgot to add. If you don't knwo the song it involves a car accident that kills the narrator's girlfriend.

Mare, Also, this one story does not prove that most vaccine-related deaths are not reported to the CDC. And I have a question for you: If this doctor threatened the mother with a child-abuse charge if she reported the incident, on what was he going to base that charge? A report of an adverse reaction to a vaccine should not have been a threat to the doctor's reputation or practice. It was an ADVERSE REACTION, having to do with the child's reaction to a vaccine, not the doctors methods or practice (for all the detail you have given us). So if his practice was not in danger he must have had some other reason to threaten a charge of child-abuse. Maybe he had reason to believe that the death was actually the result of abuse or negligence rather than an adverse reaction to vaccine? Alternately, if his practice WAS in danger then the death must have been related to something questionable that the doctor did or did not do rather than a reaction to the vaccine. So the fact that the threat was made in the first place indicates that either the doctor was an ass (as many people are, and doctors are people too) or the mother was an ass. If neither are true then there would have been no reason for the threat.

Speaking of strawmen... (sorry, but it fits, in this one case)

Orac says:

Note how he actually seems to believe in the "no plane" idea of how the World Trade Center towers were destroyed.

No, he doesn't seem to believe that at all. He was speaking about WTC 7, which did collapse and which wasn't hit by any aircraft. You quoted this.

Mike Adams said:

Skeptics aren't skeptical about the demolition-style collapse of the World Trade Center 7 building on September 11, 2001 -- a building that was never hit by airplanes. This beautifully-orchestrated collapse of a hardened structure could only have been accomplished with precision explosives.

There's a heap of burning stupid there, of course. The collapse of WTC 7 came about as result of massive damage from falling debris weakening the structure, and by the fires in the building that were started from that debris as well. There was indeed no aircraft impact on WTC 7.

Hence it is a strawman to say that Adams is proposing a no plane idea with respect to other impact, or that he is denying the impact of planes on the two main towers, WTC 1 and WTC 2, which collapsed first.

You need to fix this with an addendum and acknowledgement in your article. Please.

Mike Adams continues the stupidity.

It seems that he doesn't understand the difference between "condemnation" and "derision".

Has Adams ever seen a building being demolished with explosives? A building demolition is more or less an implosion, with the building falling in on itself and leaving other buildings only meters away untouched and unscathed. It does not cause the outward cloud of dust and debris that we witnessed in the video Adams linked to. And the explosives are set off from the bottom up, not randomly throughout the building. Even if the WTC7 building WAS brought down with explosives (which appears highly unlikely), it could hardly be called a true demolition job, or precise, or beautifully-orchestrated.

You criticize Mike Adams for attacking straw men, but you seem to use Mike Adams as your own straw man.

I would be interested in your opinions of the many qualified doctors and scientists who sometimes question the conventional wisdom.

People like Stephan Guyenet of wholehealthsource.blogspot.com, Doctor Art Ayers of coolinginflammation.blogspot.com, and Doctor T of nephropal.blogspot.com

Just asking ... not trying to argue, because I'm not sure Mike is credible enough to deserve all the attention from you.

The 50 Best Health Blogs

So now it seems that Mike Adams, seeing some of Mercola's followers appear to have been alienated by his low grade personal insults on Dr Rachie, has yet another horse in the race.

We want to help natural health advocates win this category. You can help by casting TWO votes right now (yes, you can legitimately vote for more than one candidate in the same category, according to Shorty Awards rules).
Vote for Dr. Joseph Mercola...
And vote for Kevin Gianni here...
You know Kevin Gianni. He's got a huge Twitter following, and he's all about health freedom. He's standing up for health freedom by joining the race. With your support, we could potentially help Dr. Mercola take first place, and Kevin Gianni could take second or third.

Automatically dismissing such a relationship is not science but prejudication.

Then why would automatically asserting such a relationship not be prejudice as well?

I just realised the above quote I posted follows the

Free registration is required to read the rest of this article...

And of course, behind the curtain there's this..

You can probably tell by now that these jackals are front-men for Big Pharma. I've seen this behavior enough to know exactly who is behind this: The drug companies and their P.R. hit men. They see natural health advocates as a threat to their business, and they will do anything to try to get you censored, banned, disqualified or otherwise shut down on the 'net. The one thing they absolutely cannot stand is for health freedom advocates to have a voice and tell people the truth about why they don't need pharmaceuticals, mammograms, vaccines and chemotherapy.

No doubt the best selling items merchandised by Mike Adams and Co. are those top of the range, 100% naturally formulated tin foil hats!

RE: WTC 7/No plane error

I changed the text to fix that faux pas; that's what I get for writing this when I had a lot of distractions going on, but that was the only time I had available over the weekend to do this piece. I fear that the concentrated burning stupid of Adams' article may have damaged my neurons. I can't think of another explanation for making a mistake like that. Oh, well...

Adams is still a 9/11 Truther.

Much better. And yes, he's a "truther". Weird.

The child's pediatriacian threatened the mother with a report of child abuse to the police if she dared report the death to VAERS.

VAERS is not exactly the first thing anyone, particularly the physician, would be concerned about in case of a child's death directly related to very recent medical treatment. Thus the story of a doctor who may have been involved in the death of a young child being concerned to the point of blackmail about VAERS reporting, as opposed to far more likely objects of anxiety such as a criminal investigation by the authorities, or a civil lawsuit from the child's family, makes it quite evident that this story is either completely fabricated or bowdlerized to the point of unrecognizability. I.e., it's made up, mostly or completely.

Brains... I went to Mike Adams' site, and I'm starving... no brainsssss...

Skeptics... zombies... drones... different words for the same thing. Soulless, mindless, lacking consciousness and free will, having no awareness of the value of life...

Zombies have feelings too! Oh, Mike Adams, is there no end to your oppression of the soul-deficient?!

What I don't understand is this: If Mike Adams is such a moron -- and it certainly appears that he is -- why repeat his nonsense, even if just to tear it apart? I mean, seriously -- how can you take him seriously? The guy is clearly an idiot.

One thing I have to admit tho, he is a good rapper. See his music videos on youtube (if you can get past the inanity of the lyrics that is).

"I won't bother linking them here because they don't deserve the views" to borrow from Adams himself.

Maybe he had reason to believe that the death was actually the result of abuse or negligence rather than an adverse reaction to vaccine?

If he suspected child abuse then he had a legal obligation to report it, regardless of what the mother threatened or did not threaten to do to him. However, given that this is a friend-of-a-friend story, I strongly suspect fact drift.

Water is made up of two gases, each of which is a combustible fuel on its own. Do I think water is magical? You bet I do!

Oh, man. There's so much wrong with those sentences, I'm going to have to unpick them manually.

Ok, first off: oxygen is not a fuel. By definition, a fuel is something which reacts exothermically with an oxidant SUCH AS OXYGEN.

Secondly: water is made from hydrogen and oxygen? Amazing! A compound is made from two different elements, which have somewhat different properties to the compound itself!

Thirdly: Table salt is made from an explosive metal and a hideously corrosive gas, yet is tasty and basically harmless[1]. Does that make it magical too? Maybe heshould try mixing it with water and selling it as a magical health supplement!

[1] Compared to, say, strontium fluoride, or hydrogen cyanide, or billions of other generally nasty compounds.

Jim Purdy: "You criticize Mike Adams for attacking straw men, but you seem to use Mike Adams as your own straw man."

Not at all.

Adams brings the crazy more consistently and entertainingly than some of his altie confederates, but a lot of his ideas are echoed and reinforced by seemingly more respectable allies (like Mary Podlesak, AgeofAutism warriorette, whose misconceptions about vaccines have been reproduced on Adams' NaturalNews website).

Mikey, in his petulant foot-stamping rage over being denied an Internet award, is an entertaining spectacle - but he's far from alone in spreading virulent nonsense about health issues.

Beyond the Health RangerLoon and his allies, if you check out the many articles here, lots deal with questions about "conventional" medical wisdom from actual thoughtful sources, and how the status quo stands up to changing evidence.

What I don't understand is this: If Mike Adams is such a moron -- and it certainly appears that he is -- why repeat his nonsense, even if just to tear it apart? I mean, seriously -- how can you take him seriously?

Does this post look like I'm taking him seriously? I'm not, at least not as far as what he writes and advocates. After all, this long post is nothing more than ridiculing his exceedingly ridicule-worthy rant. However, Adams does have a lot of readers, more than most reputable "conventional" medical sites. Consequently, for that reason alone we have little choice but to take him "seriously" enough to slap him down from time to time. The guy's website promotes more pseudsocience and quackery than nearly any other that I'm aware of.

I suspect some "food" might not be "dead". Food borne parasites can be very unpleasant.

@shawmutt, #17

People listen to this guy for medical advice? "...the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway)."

Um...how do you even begin to respond to that?

To that particular point, the response is that it's correct. Water is hydrogen oxide no matter its source, and for any practical purpose two samples of water having the same chemical composition are identical.

Incidentally, the water in your toilet, assuming a "normal" house plumbing, has precisely the same source and composition as the one you boil your vegetables in. Some even drink tap water. Tap water--the same stuff that go in the toiled! (Not to mention the astronauts on the ISS, who drink the water even after it goes out the toilet!)

Ridicule is not argument. Biostatisticians do not recognize anecdotal data, just data. Don't believe me? Look it up genius. As I said before, you guys are nothing but the Borg, the Borg in a Potemkin Village, A fakery set up to promote drugs. Real men debate in public but you don't have real balls, just virtual balls. Why are you so afraid of one old, ugly broad like me?

Science is not settled in public debates and your anecdotal story proves nothing other than you can type on a computer.

Just ask my girlfriend from Niagra Falls.

Mike Adams writes:

Skeptics believe that you can take unlimited pharmaceuticals... with absolutely no health effects whatsoever!

Anyone who has a chronic disease knows, a doctor will take months to find the right medication for said disease. Why? Because they are always looking for adverse reactions and/or interactions. Even if the patient gets impatient and wants the doctor to just 'fix it' already.

Not so with 'natural medicine', they will use multiple 'remedies' with hardly a thought of adverse effects. How many supplements have a patient information insert (I am, of course, not speaking of homeopathy, since that has no more adverse effects than water)?

They want more studies to prove the efficacy and safety of pharmaceuticals and vaccines when they have absolutely no documentation for their own crap.

When I searched naturalnews.com for "adverse reactions" this is what I found. Mostly mention of the danger of 'evil' medical interventions.

Of course, you do get this on every supplement: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. [This supplement] is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

These 'alt med' people are hypocritical swindlers of the highest 'quality'.

Sorry, messed up my blockquote. First sentence is a quote, the rest is mine.

Ups. The paragraph "Um...how do you even begin to respond to that?" should have been inside the blockquote.

I felt I should make that little observation, from a chemist's point of view, given that some people still think there's some essential difference among things coming from different immediate sources... Like tap vs. spring water, natural vs. synthetic vitamin C etc. What differs in water coming from different sources is the overall composition, not water itself. In a sense, all and every molecule of water we drink has been recycled (via the water cycle in nature).

Orac:

If the methods Adams advocates are good enough to use on Haitians, how can you object to them? www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.4e601264cbdad356a9d677659aa5919c.5…

BC Grad Student at #22 writes:

The most widely held interpretation [re the collapse of WTC 7] is that the external damage, coupled from the heat of the fire, caused the collapse. I think there's good reason to be skeptical personally....

Err, no. I've been involved in fire litigation, and the way fire can weaken both metal and concrete structural members would surprise you. As soon as I saw the TV pictures of WTC #1 and #2 in the very early stages of the fires in those buildings, I voiced concern to my co-workers about the potential that both buildings might collapse.

I am not at all skeptical that fire coupled with external damage could have brought down WTC 7. If you are skeptical, of course skepticism is not a bad initial attitude, but you owe it to yourself to do some scientific and engineering research on the subject rather than applying "common sense" to an uncommon situation. (There has been analysis done on fireproofing of structural members in WTC 1 and WTC 2, and a quite good NOVA episode presenting some of it. I don't know whether the same fireproofing regime was used in WTC 7.)

It's all good fun ripping on Adams and I enjoyed every word of it, but in the interest of doing the most good for the average consumer, wouldn't it be better to spend some time taking down all these MD's (Weill, Hyman, Oz, Chopra, Northrup, those mentioned in comment #34, et al)? I know you spend time on this, I only mean to encourage it as there is so much of it out there that needs to be combatted.

By the way, Is Gary Null Mike Adams' twin?

I'm a meat robot, and I'm proud of it. So there.

Orac, you don't just mix metaphors, you have entire figurative episodes of "Will It Blend?". If you had some fancy paper umbrellas and a few maraschino cherries, your writing could be its own cocktail party.

It is also true that most of us do not support supplements, herbal medicine, chiropractic (other than for aspects of it that resemble physical therapy), energy medicine, homeopathy, intercessory prayer, and therapeutic touch.

It depends on what you mean by energy medicine. I am about in favour of treating hypothermia by supplying heat energy, and hyperthermia by removing heat energy, as of anything else.

What I am continually amazed by is that woo-merchants can advertise something as a newly discovered form of energy, and get people lining up to buy it, despite the common knowledge that Marie Curie was killed by a new form of energy.

Jim Purdy wrote:

You criticize Mike Adams for attacking straw men, but you seem to use Mike Adams as your own straw man.

Are you suggesting that Mike Adams didn't write the quotations attributed to him (unlikely as they appear on his website), or merely that he isn't real?

How do you know the risks of vaccination in young children are tiny?

Well, for starters, we've been vaccinating kids by the millions for several decades now; and, relative to the numbr of kids vaccinated, the number of kids who have adverse reactions to said vaccines is...tiny.

And if you're going to base your whole case on anecdotes, here's two of my own:

1) I got quite a few shots when I was a child, and never had an adverse reaction to a single one of them.

2) I got a swine-flu jab last year, along with thousands of other people. No signs (or news) of a bad reaction anywhere.

So, mary...do my anecdotes beat yours? At least mine are PLURAL.

In fact, I can't recall any of them claiming any such thing or stating the universe is a "stupid place" full of zombie biological bodies with no free will and no consciousness! Do you know a person who thinks that way?

Of course not, but it has been my experience that some people whose perception of meaning and value are so inextricably tied to supernatural explanations do think this way about a hypothetical (in their minds) universe with nothing supernatural in it.

I don't think the word "free will" is particularly well-defined, so I suppose once could say I think there is no free will. And as you pointed out, the "no consciousness" thing is a misunderstanding of an anti-dualist position, and I do suspect that the way we perceive consciousness is very much illusory. But I'm totally okay with that, and I find meaning and value in my life regardless.

For someone married to this idea of a "soul" or "free will", however, they may feel that a universe without these ill-defined concepts would be a "stupid place" full of zombies. So in a sense, Mike Adams is sort of correct -- his perception of the universe I believe in is more or less accurately characterized by his foolish rant. (Except of course that "bent on self-destruction" nonsense. Yeesh)

Aww, the part 2 of the story requires free registration to continue.

And all I'd learned is that Mike Adams and Feynman apparently believe in magic. My level 12 wizard has something to say about this!

So what do you guys think? Should I sign up and subject the skeptics society email address to a plethora of natural news articles incoming?

Is it worth the pain for the gain in hilarity?

From Mike Adams' follow-up article:

I do think water is magical!
...
Think about it: Water expands when it freezes (almost everything else shrinks).

Wow. So... he thinks it's magic that's doing that?

Clearly, Mike Adams is not even qualified to receive a degree from the University of Google. None of those links mentions "magic"...

I have an ad hominem attack on Mike Adams I'd like to throw in the mix:

"If he were given a few more brains, he would still just be a half wit."

I know, I know...not the proper way to argue the skeptic's position, but I just wanted to use that joke today...

I can't recall any of them claiming any such thing or stating the universe is a "stupid place" full of zombie biological bodies with no free will and no consciousness! Do you know a person who thinks that way?

Not personally, but isn't that a trait of some psychopaths? That is, their lack of empathy is so severe, they don't recognize that other people are people?

Any serious discussion of WTC 7 has to include a fact that the conspiracy theorists like to gloss over: that was the mayor's "bunker," a.k.a. emergency command center, and for reasons best known to himself, he decided to store huge quantities of diesel fuel there. Above-ground "bunker", with a large supply of flammable materials (there's Giuliani for you). No, there was no jet fuel there: that's like arguing that a pile of wood can't burn because nobody added gasoline.

From another technical angle: if he wants to point at things without boosting their googlejuice, there's rel="nofollow". (Another blog I read encourages posters to use it when pointing to crap, spammers, etc.) So much for that excuse,

Given Adams's "they never talk about medical fraud" line, I wonder whether he has said anything about the fact that the studies saying "narcotics are no better than NSAIDs" turned out to be faked. On the one hand, it's a story of medical fraud and could be pitched as "pharma protecting its patented stuff," but on the other, he'd have to admit that nothing else is as good for some kinds of serious pain as narcotics. I can't quite see these folks advocating fentanyl patches for chronic pain patients, or heroin for people with cancer, and they're probably skeptical of the tylenol-and-codeine given out by dentists. (This goes with a whole culture of telling chronic pain patients to grin and bear it, which doctors are also vulnerable to, because they live in the same culture as the rest of us, and because they are often (reasonably) worried about being scammed by people looking for recreational drugs and/or investigated by the government. So there's a real desire to believe that nobody actually needs narcotics.)

Yes, that's a digression. Sorry.

So what do you guys think? Should I sign up and subject the skeptics society email address to a plethora of natural news articles incoming?

Is it worth the pain for the gain in hilarity?

I'm on the NaturalNews.com mailing list for the sheer amusement of it. It also from time to time provides me blogging material.

So, mary...do my anecdotes beat yours? At least mine are PLURAL.

I wanna play too, RagingBee.

Back in the day, my dad was in the Air Force, and was assigned to the Philippines. We went with him, so in addition to all the shots that were common to someone born in the mid-50s, we received the full course needed to go there, too.

Later, when I joined the AF, I was in a tactical mobile unit - we had to be ready to go anywhere at any time, so we were kept current on all shots. I've never counted, but I wouldn't be surprised if I've had 75 or more.

One shot that we only received when we needed it was GG... ever see a plane load of guys trying to sit on one cheek, because the other one was full of GG. The new formula is nothing compared to the old formula (yes, I've had them both, a few times).

When I got out of the Air Force, back in the mid-80s, I didn't keep my flu shots up to date every year - until I got the flu. I'd never realized how bad the flu can be... it hurts. I still travel a bit (not as much) and am current on everything but cholera at the moment.

One place we went was Senegal - a place so dirty that it was forbidden for us official visitors to go to the beach. Raw sewage was dumped right into the ocean.

In all my travels to Africa and Asia, I never was sick from anything we were vaccinated for - and we were in places that had these diseases circulating.

Yah, it's just an anecdote... but there aren't many people who have had more vaccines than I have, and if they caused problems, I should know, right Mary?

Mary Podlesak - 2 points for a successful troll. You're story is typical bullshit however "freind of a freinds uncles sisters neice blah blah blah...'

No matter how ugly or old you are I'd be more than happy to debate you on it in public.

@ Anthro: I don't think Mikey is Null's twin because of the age(and hair color**) difference,*however*, I *do* think that the former may have studied the latter's sales techniques and ranting style, and mimesis is the epitome of flattery....*par example*, if you look at their web sites(Gary Null.com;HealthRanger,NaturalNews), you see that both have their fingers in a lot of (presumably organic, vegan)pies- Null sells supplements,water filters,books,videos,"documentaries",courses,lectures,has a health food store,his Fla. "retreat"; Adams-(see "current projects" especially) sells supplements,ads,books, videos,vacations and land in Ecuador,software(Arial),media engine,etc. Both have "charities"( and often proclaim all the "good work they do); they quote each other frequently ( I listen to the Null-meister's noon radio show a few days a week as I do my "investment" chores for the past 10 years).Both are trying desperately to get mainstream media and social network attention; both do quasi- political and economic "education"(abysmally)- Null fancies himself to be a psychologist(!!!!); both are "spiritual","sustainable/
green", "non-commercial"(sic),and whatever is fashionable that week in "mass media"(which they despise)...Both are obsessed with their bodies( quote height, weight, blood values, etc.).....I found sales figures on Null but not Adams....yet. **(on that hair color, I saw Null live once and WOW.. it's scary!)

Yay Dr Rachie! She rules!

mary podlesak @ 16:

Chris, as I have said before, there is no such category as "anecdotal data" to anyone other than physicians who seek to denigrate the value of observational data for personal gain. To biostatisticians there is only data. Prove irrefutably that physiological reactions without manifestly circumstantial causes should not at least preliminarily be attributed to vaccination. Automatically dismissing such a relationship is not science but prejudication.

You are quite right that automatic dismissal is not science. The same is true of automatic acceptance. You have assumed, without evidence, that the vaccine was to blame for the death. Absent any information about how the poor child died, I don't see any reason to attribute it to the vaccine. All you've said is that the child died. Children do sometimes die, so we don't know whether this had anything to do with the vaccine. (It might have. As Orac pointed out right in the original post, no one here is claiming vaccines are perfect. We are claiming that for certain widely-recommended ones, the benefits outweigh the risks. It's a gamble, like everything in life. Like forgoing vaccination. There is no time when you are not taking a risk. It's more a question of which risks and when.)

There is no way to prove that any reaction should be preliminarily attributed to anything; if we're talking preliminary attributions, we're talking about a situation where proof is not available. And no reaction lacks causes -- if the cause is unknown, it just means nobody's found it yet. That doesn't justify giving up and picking an arbitrary suspect to find guilty. How do you pick the suspect in that case? If you don't know what caused a death, how do you decide which cause to pin it on? Vaccines? Flouridated water? The food from a new restaurant that the victim had never tried before? An undetected infection? Undetected cancer? Homicide? Accidental poisoning? Blood clot or stroke? If you really have no evidence at all, then it is utterly unreasonable to blame vaccines, when there are so many other possibilities, many of which are more likely.

So why assume vaccines caused this child's death? Really, if you are so concerned about science, why do you assume vaccines were the cause? You must have a reason, either something to do with the nature of the child's death, or a personal prejudice against vaccines. If it is the former, would you care to share it with us? Otherwise, we may be forced to conclude the latter is more likely, and you aren't really so concerned about science over "prejudication".

Jim Purdy @ 34:

You criticize Mike Adams for attacking straw men, but you seem to use Mike Adams as your own straw man.
...
Just asking ... not trying to argue, because I'm not sure Mike is credible enough to deserve all the attention from you.

Wander through old posts; Orac does address more reputable (and coherent) peddlers of woo as well. You may find the results very entertaining. I think he goes after Adams partly for the comedic value and also because it's easy and right now he's been very busy with grant applications. (In addition to being a doctor, Orac is an actual scientist.) You can usually tell when he's got a lot of paperwork in front of him, because he starts re-running classic Orac posts. (Which I greatly enjoy, BTW, and hope he will continue to do!)

Yo universe is so stupid, it ordered the sushi well done!

"I hope it's fairly obvious to you by now that skeptics are the most misinformed people on the planet. (emphasis in original)

They are the easiest people to fool. They're the easiest to hypnotize, too, because they lack independent thinking skillsâ¦"

Man, it's like he thinks we came to the opposite conclusion he did specifically by way of using the same thought processes he did.

Johnny @ 68 - GG? Translation please? (As you can imagine, the google search for that pulls up a lot of clearly irrelevant but amusing results. I'm at work so I don't want to dig much further!)

Natalie @75 -

I'll take a guess that Johnny @68 is referring to gamma globulin.

According to Mike Adams' reasoning, 'Data' from Star Trek would lose every argument automatically. That doesn't sound right.

The Trufer conspiracy about Building 7 was completely debunked. It was caused by massive chunks falling debris and ignition of heating oil spraying in the basement.

Poor Mike Adams. His pathetic rant shows his fury at a world that dismisses woo and ultimately dismisses him.

@77

The same for Mr. Spock. Yeah, I'm not buying it either.

Are there any root differences between Mike Adams' way of thinking, reasoning, explaining how things work and any other leader of a religious cult? He's not about 'health'....he's about being the leader of a following. There is no process to his "health ranger-ing", he cherry picks from work performed by scientists and repacks it into something he can sell (figuratively and literally).

Science is a process. Medicine is an application of science. He's selling a philosophy.

As for him claiming to help people...I'd say I'm skeptical, but then that delegates to me to those on that awful list he provided, and that is clearly bad, bad, bad!

When Adams talks about water being "magic," he's trying to slide between the more technical meaning of 'magic' -- the sympathetic impression of an intention into an object (as in homeopathy) -- and the more familiar meaning of 'magic' -- evoking a sense of wonder and awe (as in having a "magical evening.") This sloppy conflation of two superficially similar but completely different ideas is just another method they use to justify their belief that people who don't believe in magical woo must not have any positive emotional reactions.

Why do we continue to argue with people who should be wearing tin-foil hats? They are more than a burning pile of stupid, many of them are in fact insane! How else would you describe people for whom reality has no meaning?

You should join their facebook-group. Adams is getting a bit of a backlash from fans.

Nice one, Orac.
sometimes the proper reaction is to point and laugh.
Adams bears a famous name, too bad he doesn't bear the famous brain to go with.
couple of notes:
No. 7 World trade was not, as described by Adams, a "hardened structure." Far from it. it was a beam and girder glass box, not hardened at all, and built so that roughly 2/3 of the building's weight was distributed across two pillars or columns. Failure in one of those columns meant that the building had to fall in. Had to .. was going to whether we wanted it to or not.

Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

I expect this is a variation on "organic" food. Or perhaps he advocates swallowing small animals whole. You'd think vegetarians and animal-rights activists would have a problem with that.

I have considered the possibilities of inorganic food: made from all chemicals and minerals?

Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

I expect this is a variation on "organic" food. Or perhaps he advocates swallowing small animals whole. You'd think vegetarians and animal-rights activists would have a problem with that.

I have considered the possibilities of inorganic food: made from all chemicals and minerals?

Personally, I've never eaten any food that wasn't more than 99% composed of chemicals, nor drunk any water that wasn't chock-full of them.

It looks like Health Ranger is referring to my blog post, unless there's another that references magical water. That really makes me smile that he read the whole thing.

I love Dr Rachie! Listen, if the best you can do is talk about someone's weight, then you clearly have nothing of use to say. This is amazing, watching these wackjobbies completely implode on this. I love it!

To speak of Rachie in the manner of Hot Chicks with Douchebags (a paradigm which would certainly hold in our case), I would gladly translate Finnegan's Wake into Swahili just for the chance to be beaten up by someone who sat behind Rachie when they were in primary school.

In the discussion of medicines derived from natural substances, you neglected to point out a couple of major reasons for preferring synthetic versions or at least carefully isolated compounds: A guaranteed of purity and precise control of dosage. You don't get either of these from shoving powdered herbs into capsules. How many herbal supplements has the FDA found that didn't in fact contain what was on the label?

@Natalie and Jud -

Yah, gamma globulin is correct. Sorry for the shorthand, we always referred to it as GG, and it's easy to think that everybody knows what I know, especially on this board. I don't have a background in medicine or the biological sciences, and I come here to try to learn.

To get back a little more on topic, I'm going to disagree with Orac when he says "unless we eat our vegetables right off of the vine...our food is "dead"" and "vegetables are dead by the time we've chewed them and send them into the acid baths that reside in our stomachs".

I have heard (but never seen first hand) of tomatoes sprouting at the sewage treatment plants after the seeds survived all the way thru people *and* the sewers. Many seeds are spread in animal poo after being eaten. I've had potatoes and onions from the mega-mart sprout (and planted them, too). No doubt they were weeks off the vine, and still alive.

I've probably put away a cow or two in my life, and if there is a species on the menu that I haven't had, that's what I'm ordering. All the animals were well dead by the time I ate them (however not always cooked). But live vegetables are yummy.

If you listen close, you can hear them scream when you bite down.

...I was in a tactical mobile unit...

Off-topic humor: When I first read this, I saw "tactical mobile suit" and thought humorously, "Wait, we have Gundams and no one told me?!" Probably didn't help that I was reworking my Armored Core in the game's garage at the time.

Of course, my second thought was some sort of terminology for equipment and uniforms specialized for keeping on the move. And finally, I reread the sentence correctly.

I wonder if I can cash in my Big Pharma Shill Brownie Points for a humongous mecha.

@92 Bronze Dog

Big Pharma would probably be more likely to have Evas, to fight off the "angels" of alternative medicine.

@johnny,

I had the same thoughts on seeds and potatoes, but didn't get back in here to post them. I've grown a few potato plants and had that problem with onions as well.

I think there are also quite a few intestinal parasites, whose life cycle depends on making it all the way through and out and back again.

That's why I'm a bit squirmy about eating raw fish and would probably order the sushi well done anyway. Especially if I saw it being prepared by the guy I saw the other day who was serving up the sushi with his bare hands right to the customer. If I see him again, I think I'll shoot some video and call the health inspector, but I don't get in there very often.

@johnny: that's the point of seeds. A seed is the dormant genetic material of the plant, waiting until it finds a place suitable to grow. If that means the fleshy fruit needs to be consumed to make that happen, so be it. The animal eats the fruit, travels a bit, poops out the seed. That's how the fruiting plant survives.

The fleshy fruit part, however? Once it's removed from the vine, away from water and nutrition, it's good and dead.

Oh, and garlic sprouts if left too long.

To further belabor the water thing - water is burned (oxidized) hydrogen - is Adams so ignorant of chemistry that he doesn't understand that and is astounded that the product of combining to "highly reactive" substances could be stable. This is as bad as when his buddy Mercola referred to aluminium as a "heavy metal+.

Tip - do not hit refresh when you get the "Bad response from server" message - Don't ask me how I know this.

@mary podlesak

to qoute Dr. Harriet Hall on SBM:

In the first place, stories like these are notoriously unreliable. They are laymanâs testimonials that amount to nothing but hearsay. How can we know they were not invented, exaggerated, misunderstood, or otherwise misrepresented? They fall far short of the kind of case reports that are published in medical journals with x-ray, lab and other documentation and the opportunity for peer review.

In other words your example of a friend of a friend is Bullshit and should be treated as such.

Regarding live/dead food....

There was an episode of the Red Green Show where the boys of Possum Lake had come into the possession of a live cow. There were some major hurt feelings involved in the situation, so the cow's new owner (Junior, one of the unseen characters) decided to promptly butcher and eat it. Harold was horrified to learn this, and, while chewing on an apple, said so.

"What, you're going to go out and do the whole Texas Chainsaw Massacre on that poor defenseless milk-maker?"
"Well, at least we're doing the humane thing and killing it first. You're eating that apple *alive*."

:-D

"Real men debate in public but you don't have real balls, just virtual balls. Why are you so afraid of one old, ugly broad like me?"

So you've assumed everyone here is a man, posited a lazy essentialist notion of masculinity and made me chuckle with your talk of 'virtual balls'. : )

Real men debate in public but you don't have real balls, just virtual balls. Why are you so afraid of one old, ugly broad like me?

Of course Orac only has virtual balls. He is a Plexiglas box full of blinking lights after all. Sheesh - what a maroon.

Squirrelelite--Hygiene is important, but bare hands versus gloves can be misleading. I would rather have someone wash their hands thoroughly and make me sushi with clean hands, than put on a pair of latex gloves and leave them on for hours, even through answering the telephone, handling money, or touching someone else's unwashed hands. It's too easy to assume that the gloved hands are clean, and that the ungloved ones aren't. (I'm not saying medical staff shouldn't wear gloves. Part of the reason for those gloves is to protect the medical staff: the phlebotomist with a small, exposed cut on their hand is at risk of contamination if a patient's blood spills. Conversely, a nurse or other medical person who insists "my hands are clean, see, I'm wearing gloves" but walked into the room already gloved may be risking your health, if not their own.)

I got kicked off! I left a perfectly respectful comment on naturalnews.com and had the comment deleted. Not only that, but I was banned from ever commenting again. What is this guy afraid of? My comment contained no swearing, ad hominem arguments, or excessive sarcasm whatsoever. I merely pointed out the disingenuousness of bragging about all the new email subscribers when the site forces one to become an email subscriber to read the entire post. Orac doesn't do that. I also pointed out that his descriptions of "real skeptics" would have a lot more credibility if he sourced them. Orac does do that. This site is embarrassing to even most woomeisters. Pathetic.

@ Zaxter:People who battle HIV/AIDS denialism find that that's exactly what happens to their comments on sites maintained by the denialists.Similar with anti-vaxxer sites. There might be a few ways around this: see if the offender posts videos on YouTube,comments on social media,including Huffington Post(as well as their articles),sometimes "smaller" sites(found through Google) write about them and don't censor(as they want more comments).

@Denice Walter

Huffington Post censors and/or moderates comments. Particularly the pro-disease bloggers.

Are you smarter than a 5th grader? Not Mike Adams. His comments are so ridiculous, childish and uninformed...I find it difficult to see why anyone would actually spend so much time tearing him apart. Sure, I understand that this is a great exercise in evaluating statements and understanding what's wrong with them...but dealing with Mike Adams seems to be like picking on the kid that rode the short bus to school. Actually, with his level of intelligence...I struggle to believe he can tie his own shoes (Velcro, perhaps?)

Particularly the pro-disease bloggers.

Pro-disease?

Pro-disease??,blockquote> The new designation for the antivax.

pro-disease gets kicked around here at times. I like considering comments made by Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend about measles coming back and killing people and our own Sid Offit who was pretty blase about vaccine-preventable disease when it occurred in africa.

crap! blockquote fail

Got it. thanks

His comments are so ridiculous, childish and uninformed...I find it difficult to see why anyone would actually spend so much time tearing him apart.

I can't speak for Orac's reasoning, but IMO it's worthwhile because, despite his foolishness, he's highly influential in a certain segment of society. Attempting to limit that influence is a desirable goal.

If Adams didn't have so many people listening to him, you might have a point.

Real men debate in public but you don't have real balls, just virtual balls. Why are you so afraid of one old, ugly broad like me?

Wait, you mean real men prefer media with numerous opportunities to be disruptive, no easy method of citing sources for all to see, and the biggest hiding place of all: The clock?

These "real men" sound like craven cowards. I'm the sort of person who prefers those who have something to say be held accountable for it. The internet, with the Streisand Effect, leave no room to hide.

@ John V: Don't write off Huff Po 100%(maybe 90%), although there is moderation, they *occasionally* will let a sane comment through, unlike Adams' sites, the anti-vaxxers,HIV/AIDS denialists.

Awww, Mary stopped posting. I was enjoying reading her assertions strung up by their entrails.

She might come back. She seems to come around very late in the evening to early morning. Perhaps after she has put all the kids to bed and has been sipping the cooking sherry.

I don't drink, wait, I take that back, I do drimk but in extreme moderation, I had breast cancer and believe it prudent to do so. Besides, I never was very fond of alcohol.

I don't have much time. In partial response, Professional scientific conferences mimic a mini debate, but they do not have hundreds in the audience. All the elements are there of a debate. The scientific presenter lays out his/her research, citations, explanations, conclusions, proposals. Then other scientists critcize, analyze, provoke, respond. I believe a debate on the autism-vaccine connection should model a good paper presentation at a scientific conference with the caveat that hundreds would be allowed to watch. I would like to see them in school auditoriums or town hall opera houses, etc., that is, large public venues. Maybe you young whipersnappers haven't expierenced the rather strident give and take of an authentic scientific paper presentation.

"I believe a debate on the autism-vaccine connection should model a good paper presentation at a scientific conference with the caveat that hundreds would be allowed to watch. I would like to see them in school auditoriums or town hall opera houses, etc., that is, large public venues."

So a pseudo-scientific plebiscite, with evidence vs ignorance and a baying mob. Yeah, good one.

"Maybe you young whipersnappers haven't expierenced the rather strident give and take of an authentic scientific paper presentation"

Maybe you old fossils haven't experienced the rather strident scientific process. I'm just sayin...

When your handlers at Scienceblogs and Seed magazine get serious about an autism-vaccine debate instead of hurling insults and ad hominum attacks it will be entirely possible to present verifiable evidence in a respectful dignified setting. They need to come up with the money for this. It is entirely possible to put such a debate together and a very good public relations move on their part. This can generate good will for the CDC, NIH, FDA, the medical profession and the pharmacuetical firms. If you can't debate an old ugly mother like me, you can't debate anyone.

What better place than here where your claims can be verified mary?

Go ahead and lay out your evidence now?

"If you can't debate an old ugly mother like me, you can't debate anyone."

You might be confusing "can't" with "have better things to do than" or "won't stoop to the level of".

Scientific conferences are put together for the purpose of presenting organized data evidence and written and verbal arguments in a personal setting where peers can review and criticize. It is not possible to do that solely on the internet. If that were the case there would be no need for scientific conferences as they would all be held online. I see a debate on the autism-vaccine connection as a type of this scientific presentation.

Fine. Make a powerpoint presentation. Put it on microsoft office live (or your preferred file repository) and post a link here for us.

#123
"It is not possible to do that solely on the internet"

Sure it is. You just post references to all the peer-reviewed articles that support your claims. I mean, you do have them, right?
After all, if you don't, what exactly did you want to present at this conference you're proposing? No, you must have bucket-loads of serious research lying around.

Let's make it even easier. How about if you post just one? One single article? That would be a big step for you and then we might have something real to discuss.

Scientific conferences are put together for the purpose of presenting organized data evidence and written and verbal arguments in a personal setting where peers can review and criticize. It is not possible to do that solely on the internet. If that were the case there would be no need for scientific conferences as they would all be held online. I see a debate on the autism-vaccine connection as a type of this scientific presentation.

Peer Review â scientific conference

Sounds like you would like to set up a debate because debates are perfect for grandiose displays of the tugging of heartstrings combined with your version of the Gish Gallop. Public debates do not settle science.

When your handlers at Scienceblogs and Seed magazine get serious about an autism-vaccine debate instead of hurling insults and ad hominum attacks it will be entirely possible to present verifiable evidence in a respectful dignified setting.

Been done. The trouble is, only one side HAS any verifiable evidence, and the other side therefore resorts to screaming, lies, and Gish Gallops.

Scientific conferences are put together for the purpose of presenting organized data evidence and written and verbal arguments in a personal setting where peers can review and criticize.

The only thing I would say different is that it allows "other conference attendees" to review and criticize, which may or may not be peers. However, with that minor modification, I have no problem with this.

Although I should say, I don't know exactly what you mean "in a personal setting." Do you mean, "in person"?

It is not possible to do that solely on the internet.

Why not? Aside from doing it "in person," all those things are possible.

The only advantage of the "in person" part of the conference presentation is that it allows for rapid feedback and exchange. However, that is absolutely possible on the internet.

If that were the case there would be no need for scientific conferences as they would all be held online.

Yes, they can be, IF you can get a sufficiently large group of people with the appropriate level of expertise that can provide insightful comments on each other's work, so that the information can be used to improve the quality of what ultimately gets published.

The nature of the internet makes that difficult. However, there are absolutely places where these types of interactions go on on the internet. You can find "special interests groups" for an awful lot of topics, where people will present their research findings for discussion. OTOH, people still like conferences, but science could progress without them.

Lastly, I think you are under a very bad misconception. Any presentation that can be made at a conference can also be presented in written format (especially electronically, because even then, the fanciest of graphics, like animations and movies can be included). I have given many, many dozens of talks at conferences and all over, and could always, if I wanted to, provide a written contribution if I wanted. The science would still be there. The only thing missing would be my charisma and charm that makes it more entertaining.

Mary, your complaints don't hold up.

When your handlers at Scienceblogs and Seed magazine get serious about an autism-vaccine debate instead of hurling insults and ad hominum attacks it will be entirely possible to present verifiable evidence in a respectful dignified setting.

Mary - the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) is going to be held in Philadelphia in May. Why don't you go and participate? Then you can debate all you want in an apparently sufficiently dignified setting.

Unfortunately, the deadline for submission of papers has passed, but you could submit something for next year.

What I'm saying is that the "debate" venue you keep clamoring for already exists. So if you are REALLY serious about it, you have the opportunity to do something.

I'm sure those men, old scientists won't let her participate. They'd probably make her jump through all sorts of hoops, like showing credentials and presenting evidence. You know, completely unreasonable demands.

Of course, they're just scared of the TRUTHâ¢

My last comment didn't make it to the blog. The reason for a PUBLIC debate is to inform the PUBLIC. I'm not interested in convincing bureaucrats from NIH, CDC and FDA, nor medical bureaucrats, nor pharmacuetical bureaucrats of the merits of my arguments. Even if G-d Himself presented irrefutable data evidence of the autism-vaccine link, these clowns wouldn't acknowledge the truth of my arguments, because acknowledging the truth could interfere with the cash flow from the vaccine business.

SEED, Scienceblogs and their corporate partners surely can afford to fund such debates and if they cannot, then our government should, because as I have said, it's good PR. They gain good will among the public which is directly effected by vaccination. If they can't debate this old ugly broad, they can't debate Albert Einstein.

Here are a few posts where I point out why debating with people like Mary is almost always a waste of time:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/01/just_how_stupid_do_they_think…
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/10/homeopathy_debate_at_the_univ…
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/01/arthur_allendavid_kirby_debat…

The reason for a PUBLIC debate is to inform the PUBLIC. I'm not interested in convincing bureaucrats from NIH, CDC and FDA, nor medical bureaucrats, nor pharmacuetical bureaucrats of the merits of my arguments.

And the reason public debates aren't good for that very reason is because they are not about facts and "truth" but about who can either win over the audience of filibuster sufficiently to obscure their opponent.

If you have the science that supports your position, please bring it forth in the scientific channels and win the real debate based on facts and empiricism.

"of" should be "or"

My last comment didn't make it to the blog. The reason for a PUBLIC debate is to inform the PUBLIC. I'm not interested in convincing bureaucrats from NIH, CDC and FDA, nor medical bureaucrats, nor pharmacuetical bureaucrats of the merits of my arguments.

WHAT???????

Holy smokes, Mary, you can't be serious.

I've said this before, if you really want to inform the PUBLIC, start with convincing the people who have influence. You want to convince the doctors, because they are the ones who will advise their patients. In order to convince them, you need to influence their sources of information, which include primary scientific literature, but also the recommendations they get from the NIH, CDC, and FDA.

Seriously, what is the better way of informing the PUBLIC: a) spend two hours in a dog and pony show in a public "debate" with Orac in front of 100 people, most of whom are already sympathetic to your case, or
b) convince Orac by whatever means and have him argue your case for you to the SBM community?

Good gravy, if you were able to convince the CDC to pronounce vaccines dangerous, that would change the world as we know it. Why in the world would you not want to do that? I thought that is what you wanted?

If you actually had the goods, you should relish the opportunity to go after them.

If you actually had the goods, you should relish the opportunity to go after them.

But then that would take away the chance for some public pearl clutching.

Mary,

Congratulations on *your* shorty award.

http://shortyawards.com/marypodlesak

Do not feed the sock puppet.

Mary, if you can't bring yourself to present what "facts" you have to us ancient, ugly, hideously deformed and satanic skeptics, what more can we say to you?

Dear Borg,
With good case-control studies, good epidemiological studies using vaccinated vs. never vaccinated individuals, neither the CDC, nor NIH, nor FDA nor medical professionals, nor pharamacuetical companies could be convinced of the autism-vaccine connection. It doesn't matter how good the science is, and it could be done very well, to convince all sane human beings that vaccines cause more harm than good. MONEY is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet. Vaccination is the sacrament of the church of our government and the medical profession acts as it's priests dispensing "immunity to disease" to the faithful. The money that flows from this gusher can't be stopped even by good scientific studies. Only a series of honest public debates can do that.

I am by training a statistician, economist and an engineer, not a journalist and a two-bit surgeon like you with pretensions to scientific expertise but in reality a mere polemecist. Your excuses for not debatting are ridiculous. You're afraid you can't match their arguments?? The opposing argument might make you or your arguments look bad?? What the hell is that but professional cowardice? I've heard extremely heated arguments at scientific conferences. The public should be aware of these arguments and allowed to participate in this debate, not be high handedly told what to do with their bodies and those of their children by those with a vested financial interest in vaccination.

If all the above is the case then you should be able to produce the actual science that shows that vaccinations do more harm than good.

It should be easy and you can do that here.

No one is holding you back from doing that.

What the CDC or NIH or scary Big Pharma has to say doesn't have a thing to you with YOU producing the science that supposedly has this undeniable link between vaccines and the damage you claim they do.

You are the one who refuses to put it up.

Go ahead and put it up.

If you won't it's obvious you can't.

Your excuses for not debatting are ridiculous. You're afraid you can't match their arguments?? The opposing argument might make you or your arguments look bad??

Nice strawman, no one is saying that. What we have told you over and over is that people like you intentionally practice a form of public debate that is not about examining data and research honestly, it's about hyperbolic stage antics designed to win over the crowd not to show the validity of real empirical based medicine or science.

Winning a debate proves nothing other than the debaters ability to wow the audience and in many cased to fill the discussion with as much factual nonsense that it can't be addressed in the debate format.

The evidence should stand on it's own without the need to a popularity vote.

Science isn't about popularity its about producing reliable and repeatable results.

The public should be aware of these arguments and allowed to participate in this debate, not be high handedly told what to do with their bodies and those of their children by those with a vested financial interest in vaccination.

So you think Joe Sixpack is just as reliable a source of scientific knowledge and opinion as someone who is educated and trained in the specific science at hand?

Are you really this dense?

Do think we should let Billy Bob the Subway Sandwich technician give his input on matters of Air safety and engineering?

@mary podlesak

Present, here, what you feel are the best studies (pick, say, the top 3-5) supporting your position. You say it's out there, so let's see it.

I find it interesting, though, that you suggest Orac (and others here) is lacking in scientific expertise, while at the same time asking the public (a group largely lacking in scientific expertise) to weigh in on the question. Here's something, I am a member of the public. I have no ties to any pharmaceutical company, no vested financial interests in any vaccine, no potential, at all, for monetary benefit from maintaining the current vaccination policies. So, hit me with your science. Convince me.

Mary,

Don't lie. You have no interest in an HONEST debate. An HONEST debate is limited to facts on both sides. And when limited to facts instead of lies, fraud, and wild speculation, you would have absolutely nothing to say.

It's absurd to compare me to David Kirby or Cassey Cohen or any of these other people who wanted to debate you. I'm not a professional journalist. I don't have that kind of savoir-faire. My arguments would revolve around science. I'm not going to put on some great show. As I've said in another post, I will have to resort to nuclear warfare to get the scientific-government-medical-corporate establishment to pay attention and indeed I will do that.

Here's something, I am a member of the public.

I meant to mention this. How in the world is the PUBLIC being shut of the debate? We are trying to have it right here, in this public forum! Mary just refuses to debate in _this_ public forum, and keeps insisting that we do it by her rules. That's not "shutting out the public," that is trying to manipulate the conditions in her favor.

My arguments would revolve around science.

You mean the science that provides no support whatsoever for your arguments? The science that firmly, as near conclusively as science gets, says you're completely wrong?

No, I suspect your idea of "science" is fraudulent data manufactured at the behest of trial lawyers, and unsupported lies that the Amish don't vaccinate and don't have autistic children, and the like.

what happened to my last post? If you Borg weren't afraid of the PUBLIC you wouldn't be afraid of debate. If your arguments are irrefutable and so superior then whatever I have, whether it's personal "anecdotal evidence" or studies should be of no consequence, your irrefutable studies should trump them. As I said before, I'm not a professional journalist, but I have a serious argument and I expect it to be addressed by our scientific-governmental-medical-pharmacuetical collective. If SEED and Scienceblogs won't do so, then I'll have to resort to nuclear warfare. Have a nice day!

Good grief you are dense. How many times do you need to be told this?

Science is not settled in public debate. What the crowd thinks or not doesn't have anything to do with what you can actually support scientifically.

Your science should be able to stand on it's own without your appeals to the crowd.

The fact you think you need a debate to show your side hints at how weak it must be.

I expect it to be addressed by our scientific-governmental-medical-pharmacuetical collective. If SEED and Scienceblogs won't do so

THEN SHOW YOUR FUCKING WORK RIGHT HERE. It's really very simple. This is SEED. This is Science Blogs. Show it here so that your actual science can be addressed outside of any appeals to emotion or popularity that work in the public debate form.

See this is exactly why debates on these issues are typically bullshit. You want to show the science you claim you have but only if you can do so in a format where the use of phrases like

I'll have to resort to nuclear warfare

have any sway. Namely public debates in front of crowds not as concerned with the science as with the appeals to emotion.

Your little stunt here exposed you Mary.

You are the reason public debates are bullshit on matters that are settled with science.

@Mary (146): if your last post actually contains links to research, then it might be caught in the spam filter and Orac will release it when he has time (he IS a surgeon and researcher and DOES have a life outside this blog, you know). Otherwise, I can't see that any posts are missing.

You don't have a serious argument. You keep repeating you have proof but never show any. You keep asking for unethical studies to be performed.

We are not afraid of debate. We are carrying one on, now, but you keep running away from the debate. We ARE the public.

You claim to be a statistician, but you never give any statistics, research, or data. You keep claiming you want a debate, but you never give any proof. Why should we debate you when you have no evidence for us to debate against? All you want is to do a Gish Gallop, whip up an audience for the Warrier Mothers, and get attention without showing any real proof. YOU HAVE NO PROOF OR YOU WOULD SHOW IT TO US. Now put up or shut up.

I have a serious argument and I expect it to be addressed by our scientific-governmental-medical-pharmacuetical collective

So that's why you want to debate Orac?

I'm missing a step here.

I've already provided information about the IMFAR. Serious autism researchers, those that have the ear of the scientific-governmental-medical-pharmaceutical collective, are going to be there. If you want to make that difference, talk to them. If you have a serious argument, talk to people who can do something about it. Why grandstand against a oncological-surgeon-who-blogs-in-his-freetime?

It is true science is not settled by public debate. I never made the claim that it was! My bitch is that the science produced by good scientific studies will not be accepted by "scientists" if it conflicts with their economic and financial objectives. Money talks in science. Money is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet. The purpose of public debates is to air both sides of the debate to the PUBLIC, both sides of the scientific debate. Both sides air the science, not polemics, insults, ad hominum attacks, obfuscation, etc.

Mary Podlesak:

I am by training a statistician, economist and an engineer, not a journalist and a two-bit surgeon like you with pretensions to scientific expertise but in reality a mere polemecist.

If that is true, you have shown absolutely no evidence that you even remember the basics. There could be many reasons why you demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the basics of statistics. One could be that you are sock puppet of the real Mary Podlesak, another could be that you have suffered from some kind of neural injury from a stroke, head injury or something else.

Until you have shown you understand basics like sampling size, randomization and the reasons why anecdotes are not data: you are a troll to be ignored.

@MikeAdamsSockPuppet(mary):

If your links are being caught up in spam filters, then at least give us the names of three authors and describe their studies. You know, the ones that allegedly prove your case.

Repeating nonsense about vaccination being the sacred church of Rothschild-Lindbergh's baby or the evil tool of the canon of the Freemasons will not cut it.

My bitch is that the science produced by good scientific studies will not be accepted by "scientists" if it conflicts with their economic and financial objectives.

But the doctor who diagnosed your daughter with dystonia and then "cured" her is in it for the goodness of his heart, right?

Then again, I thought you had a "serious argument"? In the end, it is nothing but a PharmaShill gambit?

I'm so disappointed.

Epidemiological studies involving vaccinated vs. never vaccinated are NOT unethical. The only reason they haven't been done is because you're afraid of the results. You put up or shut up.

...and Rothschild is it's (sic) prophet

And here we go...

My bitch is that the science produced by good scientific studies will not be accepted by "scientists" if it conflicts with their economic and financial objectives.

Sigh. While sure there are going to be examples of unscrupulous people that are only concerned about money you're going to have to do a lot better claiming the entire medical profession is involved in a giant conspiracy to suppress this amazing evidence you claim to have (but refuse to show).

Money is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet.

Yes you've repeated that a few times and it doesn't have any more connection to this now than it did then. Here's a hint, when you are trying to not sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, repeating phrases like the above is a not going to help.

The purpose of public debates is to air both sides of the debate to the PUBLIC, both sides of the scientific debate. Both sides air the science, not polemics, insults, ad hominum attacks, obfuscation, etc.

Again this is a stupid argument. Publish a damn book. Start a magazine. Write your paper. There, you've aired it publicly. But that still doesn't absolve you of providing the actual science that shows the direct unquestionable link between vaccines and the damage you claim they do.

Now where is it? Where is your science? A public debate does not have the format that allows for a good airing of the science. A book or a scientifically paper showing repeatable verifiable results does.

NOW WHERE IS IT?

Mary begins a post with "Dear Borg" and expects to be taken seriously as an adult? Even Trekkie fanboys are more mature than that.

Oh, and Mary? I gave you TWO anecdotes that counter yours (#60); both of them indicate that vaccines are safe and effective. Are you going to respond to either of them? Of course not -- you can't even win an argument on your own terms, let alone ours.

You have PLENTY of opportunity to present your side of the debate to "the PUBLIC" right here on this not-exactly-unknown blog (and quite a few others like it); and you refuse to even try to present anything of substance. You're a joke and a fraud, you have nothing to offer, and you're not even smart enough to stop bluffing after we've called your bluff.

Mary--

So, you believe it's ethical to deliberately deny people the best known care, in the interests of research?

The only way a study like that could be ethical is if the researchers had reason to believe that each treatment was as good as the other. People who have seen the lives saved by vaccines aren't going to do that study because it violates basic human decency and the Nuremberg Principles.

Conversely, if you genuinely believe vaccines are harmful, how do you justify a study that involves vaccinating large numbers of children?

Bear in mind that, to be useful, a study has to match the participants on other axes: age, gender, general state of health, socioeconomic status, etc. So you can't just say "okay, these poor kids didn't get vaccinated until they started school and were forced to, because they didn't have regular doctor visits, and these other kids had better health care, including well baby visits, a doctor if they got fevers, and so on, and by the way they're better fed and didn't have to sleep in unheated rooms on some winter nights." That's not a matched study. (It's also unethical in other ways.)

It's not as simple as announcing "That's not unethical," when just about everyone, atheist, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, or Discordian, disagrees with you. At the least you need to provide an argument in favor of your assertion.

I think it was on this blog where I pointed out one possible way to do such a study: look at Christian Scientists. What are the autism rates in that community? What are the rates of serious infectious diseases?

@mary podlesak

Epidemiological studies involving vaccinated vs. never vaccinated are NOT unethical.

Go read the Nuremburg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, the Belmont Report, the ICH and FDA guidelines on human research protection and take a course on human research ethics, then come back and tell us that, again. Now, a retrospective study would be fine, but a prospective, RCT would, most certainly, be unethical.

Mary, you can do what you want, but it is rude of you to expect your views to be given equal value or equal time, just because you have them.

By all means, carry on throwing a strop and carry on this facade pretending that you want both sides (i.e. yours and why you think the other side is wrong) to be equally heard, but dont for one minute kid yourself that there has been anywhere near equal effort put into 'your side'.

You have no right to demand to be taken seriously if you are not willing to put in serious work.

Coem to think of it, that's probably why you want a public debate.

"I am by training a statistician, economist and an engineer, not a journalist and a two-bit surgeon like you with pretensions to scientific expertise but in reality a mere polemecist."

Hey look guys, an engineer making proclamations about a scientific field in which they have no knowledge. This is an exciting new development in the world of biology. And as for "pretensions to scientific expertise" at least several participants on this blog come from the scientific side of things. For example, I'm a microbiologist. I would be a very poor surgeon.

"Epidemiological studies involving vaccinated vs. never vaccinated are NOT unethical. "

Purposefully leaving individuals susceptible to potentially deadly (amongst other bad outcomes) infections is unethical. They haven't been done because no one with a conscious will engage in them. If you do the trial as a double blind study, you're putting people at risk of death or worse without their knowledge. If you don't do the trial as a double blind then you're making it quite open to significant manipulation (by both the pro-vaccine and pro-disease side). If you are purposefully leaving 1 group of people susceptible to vaccine-preventable diseases, you risk the health of all other individuals they come in contact with, vaccinated or not.

Why again do you think its ethical? Like an actual reason not "OMG YUR SCARED HURR HURR". That's not a reason.

Yes, Mary, it is. Period. Full stop. End of story. For reasons why, I point you to these two arguments why:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/08/its_so_cute_when_anti-vaxers_…

http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=154

What I fear are a lot of kids having bad outcomes from not being vaccinated including death, deafness, sterility, and paralysis. That is what scares me. I'm saddened that it does scare you.

Even a retro vac vs. non-vac has not been done. I asked Cochrane Collaboration and they can't find one. All the other shit you've put up is beside the point. Any one of these studies can be gamed if they are done by the vaccine companies or if they have a hand in it. It is terribly easy to bias a study.

Money is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet.

So now Mary reveals herself to be a bigot and a Jewish-conspiracy buff. Seriously, the above sentence could have come straight from Nazi propaganda of the early twentieth century. There's really no point in arguing with her -- she's clueless and unhinged, and won't be presenting any evidence to support her belief any time soon. And since she's already hiding behind a conspiracy theory, it's a pretty safe bet that any evidence refuting her beliefs will simply be written off as proof of the conspiracy.

Oh, and Mary? Bragging about your "expertise" in economics and statistics won't impress me. My mother is an economist (now comfortably retired), and has a good grasp of statistics; and you have proven you have NONE of the understanding she shows in casual dinner-table shop-talk.

"All the other shit you've put up is beside the point."

So what you're saying is you have no explanation for how a vaccinated-unvaccinated study can be ethical? Noted.

Also, your responses here are a good representation of why no one wants to waste their time with a "public debate" with you people.

Others have already noted it, and I've asked for it myself, but let it be said again: when asked to produce the science that supports her view, Mary Podlesak has continually refused to present anything and instead complained about how unfair scientists, the CDC, FDA, etc. are and how they will never be convinced. She has refused to engage the public (e.g., me) in debate or let the public participate in a meaningful fashion.

I, for one, am done with Mary. I encourage others to just ignore her, as well, unless and until she actually produces some science to discuss.

Money is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet, spoken by Heinrich Heine, early 1800's German Jew and poet, as it is very likely I am likewise.

All the other shit you've put up is beside the point.

As I predicted, Mary will simply find one excuse after another to ignore every bit of information she doesn't want to hear.

It is terribly easy to bias a study.

So pick out one or more studies, show us how they're biased, explain who could have "biased" it/them without getting caught (by anyone other than you), and explain how you and you alone managed to catch the bias.

Money is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet, spoken by Heinrich Heine, early 1800's German Jew and poet, as it is very likely I am likewise.

You are likewise an early 1800's German Jew and poet?
Wow, when you said you were an old woman, you weren't kidding!

thank you you caught me, i should be on to my next task. Nuclear Warfare!

#139

With good case-control studies, good epidemiological studies using vaccinated vs. never vaccinated individuals, neither the CDC, nor NIH, nor FDA nor medical professionals, nor pharamacuetical companies could be convinced of the autism-vaccine connection

and yet

#154

Epidemiological studies involving vaccinated vs. never vaccinated are NOT unethical. The only reason they haven't been done is because you're afraid of the results

So, they don't actually exist. Interesting, considering this

#150

My bitch is that the science produced by good scientific studies will not be accepted by "scientists" if it conflicts with their economic and financial objectives.

How do you know, when it's never been done?
Don't you think it's dishonest to talk about the results of studies that have never been done? How do you know whether people would accept the results when the studies have never been performed? And, since you're the one making the claim, isn't it your responsibility to conduct those studies?

#139

You're afraid you can't match their arguments??

Not really. I think the general sentiment (see #126 & 127) is that you won't bring real arguments, but rely on the same methods that creationists do, i.e. lies, exaggerations, distortions and general bullshittery.
It won't convince anyone who knows what they're talking about, but it might convince the public, who will then vote for equally stupid politicians.

This is what we're afraid of; fraud, not truth.

#143

My arguments would revolve around science

Prove it. Here's your chance. Present us with one of your magnificent arguments. You have the floor; use it.

#146

If your arguments are irrefutable and so superior then whatever I have, whether it's personal "anecdotal evidence" or studies should be of no consequence, your irrefutable studies should trump them

Nice attempt to reverse the burden of proof. Looking more and more like a creationist.

As I said before, I'm not a professional journalist, but I have a serious argument and I expect it to be addressed by our scientific-governmental-medical-pharmacuetical collective

Fine, present it, please. Your continual whining about lost posts are starting to sound a bit like a conspiracy theory.

How about this; click on my name, it'll take you to my blog. There, you can post your evidence and I swear on my name that I will
a) not delete it, and
b) attempt, to the best of my ability, to repost it here.

Bring it on.

The purpose of public debates is to air both sides of the debate to the PUBLIC, both sides of the scientific debate. Both sides air the science, not polemics, insults, ad hominum attacks, obfuscation, etc.

And yet, public debate are incredibly well suited for polemics, insults, ad hominem attacks, obfuscation, etc.
What a conundrum.

Money is the god of our age and Rothschild is it's prophet, spoken by Heinrich Heine, early 1800's German Jew and poet, as it is very likely I am likewise.

And you repeating that quote, regardless of who said it and what their cultural background or profession was still makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.

And there is a reason for that, because you are one.

Holy f...ing sh..! http://shortyawards.com/category/health Mercola has pulled way ahead!!!

@Joe

I took a look at a couple of the twitter accounts that recently voted for mercola and saw that they have a very small number of followers and have 1 tweet. I hope that the organizers take a good look at the votes and remove those that violate the rules.

I'm not a twit myself, but maybe there's some way to alert them to this?

Mary Podlesak:

Epidemiological studies involving vaccinated vs. never vaccinated are NOT unethical. The only reason they haven't been done is because you're afraid of the results

You are either lying, have put blinders on to studies that do not have the conclusion that you want them to have, or (the most possible) you move the goalposts further and further away. The football stadium in my community is actually on a peninsula separating two lakes, the way the anti-vax folks have moved goalposts they are figuratively completely under water!

There is a list of studies in the free online paper Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses. There are explanations of the studies, with tables that summarize the results. It is missing these two, which are papers showing that autism still increased when Japan stopped using their own version of hte MMR (and several dozen people subsequently died from measles):
MMR-Vaccine and Regression in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Negative Results Presented from Japan
Authors: Uchiyama T, Kurosawa M, Inaba Y
Source: J Autism Dev Disord, February 2007; 37(2):210-217
and
No effect of MMR withdrawal on the incidence of autism: a total population study.
Honda H, Shimizu Y, Rutter M.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2005 Jun;46(6):572-9.

Cut and pastes of the tables, I did not bother to fix the formatting since they are included in the link above.

Table 1.
Studies that fail to support an association between measlesâmumpsârubella vaccine and autism.
Source Study design Study location
Taylor et al., 1999 [5] Ecological United Kingdom
Farrington et al., 2001 [6] Ecological United Kingdom
Kaye et al., 2001 [7] Ecological United Kingdom
Dales et al., 2001 [8] Ecological United States
Fombonne et al., 2006 [9] Ecological Canada
Fombonne and Chakrabarti, 2001 [10] Ecological United Kingdom
Taylor et al., 2002 [11] Ecological United Kingdom
DeWilde et al., 2001 [12] Caseâcontrol United Kingdom
Makela et al., 2002 [13] Retrospective cohort Finland
Madsen et al., 2002 [14] Retrospective cohort Denmark
DeStefano et al., 2004 [15] Caseâcontrol United States
Peltola et al., 1998 [16] Prospective cohort Finland
Patja et al., 2000 [17] Prospective cohort Finland

and:
Table 2.
Studies that fail to support an association between thimerosal in vaccines and autism.
Source Study design Location
StehrâGreen et al., 2003 [22] Ecological Sweden and Denmark
Madsen et al., 2003 [23] Ecological Denmark
Fombonne et al., 2006 [9] Ecological Canada
Hviid et al., 2003 [24] Retrospective cohort Denmark
Verstraeten et al., 2003 [25] Retrospective cohort United States
Heron and Golding, 2004 [26] Prospective cohort United Kingdom
Andrews et al., 2004 [27] Retrospective cohort United Kingdom

Now, Ms. Podlesak, your evidence is what again? Oh, wait, absolutely nothing but a couple of anecdotes. Do try to work on that please.

Here is the conclusion of the paper I linked to above:

Twenty epidemiologic studies have shown that neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism. These studies have been performed in several countries by many different investigators who have employed a multitude of epidemiologic and statistical methods. The large size of the studied populations has afforded a level of statistical power sufficient to detect even rare associations. These studies, in concert with the biological implausibility that vaccines overwhelm a childâs immune system, have effectively dismissed the notion that vaccines cause autism. Further studies on the cause or causes of autism should focus on moreâpromising leads.

The more frequently I comment, the more trouble i seem to have in getting posted. Ok,
1) Were any of these studies of vaccinated vs. never vaccinated individuals?
2) How many of the recorded measles cases were among those previously vaccinated against measles?
3) What determined whether individuals were dropped from these studies, and became "missing values"
4) Was there oversight of the conduct of these studies, other than pharacuetical, medical or governmental bodies responsible for their production?

What determines biological implausibility? How can that be determined before a study is done? Wouldn't it be more ethical to record ALL adverse events following drug intake, whether of a vaccine or any other and then sort out and attribute causes after multiple studies, and multiple replications?

@Mary: and WHO would you like to PAY for these studies, if you won't accept "...pharaceutical (sic), medical or governmental bodies..."? No researcher works for free, any more than you work for free at your place of employment. All studies involving humans must pass an IRB, which is the oversight (at least in the USA, I am not familiar with other countries). An IRB usually consists of people not involved with the research...scientists, medical people and laypeople. In fact, for an IRB to be made of people involved in the research, their family and friends, is considered invalid (For example, the "IRB" which approved the Geiers "study")

Again, Orac has, in previous posts, addressed the configurations of IRBs, whom they consist of, and what they will and will not approve. Do a little research! (In fact, IIRC, one of his linked posts in the comments above address an IRB makeup).

I have tried to be patient with you. Since I don't know you in real life, I can't tell you in person that you are REALLY being stupid (like I did with a coworker this week, who is uncertain about the vaccines/autism link...but at least he is amenable to doing a little reading into the issue and not accepting only anecdotes).

My understanding is that many of these studies are of partially vaccinated individuals vs. other partially vaccinated individuals. If there are common long term vaccine reactions, they would show up in both groups and could lead to a conclusion of no advderse effect of the vaccine. I understand that in some studies the vaccine without the attenuated virus is given as the control. If the contents of the vaccine without the virus are not neutral biologically and have not been determined to be so, how can the conclusion be made of no effect? Sorry, just some random musings...

Mary Podlesak (showing she has not bothered to even click the link):

) Were any of these studies of vaccinated vs. never vaccinated individuals?

From the paper, emphasis added:

No studies have compared the incidence of autism in vaccinated, unvaccinated, or alternatively vaccinated children (i.e., schedules that spread out vaccines, avoid combination vaccines, or include only select vaccines). These studies would be difficult to perform because of the likely differences among these 3 groups in health care seeking behavior and the ethics of experimentally studying children who have not received vaccines.

Mary Podlesak (who keeps running with those goalposts, I believe she has now left the lake and is now in the foothills of the a mountain range!):

Was there oversight of the conduct of these studies, other than pharacuetical, medical or governmental bodies responsible for their production?

Dare I ask who is left with the relevant expertise? How is Fombonne disqualified? Why is the study from those in the Unit of Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, Department of Community-Based Medical Sciences, University of Bristol" disqualified? What about the ones written by folk at "Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, Box 3040, Duke University Medical Center" or "Hospital for Children and Adolescents, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland"? Explain very carefully.

Oh, and also present your evidence. Did you lose it? It is hiding somewhere because it is too shy to come out and play?

I'm sure I am unfamiliar with the makeup and configurations of IRB's. You can denigrate and condescend to me all you want. I don't give a rat's ass. If you want a fair fight, I'll debate you.

You can configure IRB's as ethically as you and some medical/governmental/corporate bureaucracy chooses. That however, does not automatically eliminate bias in studies. The appearance of ethics and it's actual practice and reality are two different things. The jack boot tactics reenforcing dogmatic conformity in the medical profession are the reason why I did not continue in health care industrial engineering. That group think agenda alone can bias the conduct of medical studies, which should be the incentive for a greater use of statisticians in such groups. Are you wondering why the medical profession is losing credibility? Put more independent statisticians on your IRB's. You need independent responsible adults running these studies.

My sympathies are extended to your coworker.

Mary Podlesak (still running with those goalposts, I believe she is past the foothills and now starting to climb a major slope):

My understanding is that many of these studies are of partially vaccinated individuals vs. other partially vaccinated individuals.

This is what happens when children are not immunized:
Parental Refusal of Pertussis Vaccination Is Associated With an Increased Risk of Pertussis Infection in Children.

Mary continued (and without any of that gosh darn good science she claims she has!):

You can configure IRB's as ethically as you and some medical/governmental/corporate bureaucracy chooses. That however, does not automatically eliminate bias in studies.
Have you heard of the Geiers? Their IRB consisted of (quoting the linked article):
Notice how conveniently every single member of this IRB is either one of the Geiers, an anti-thimerosal activist, a Geier associate, or a lawyer suing on behalf of "vaccine-injured" clients. Anyone want to make a bet about how closely they adhere to the guidelines for human research listed above? It almost doesn't matter anyway because, as Kathleen points out, besides the fact that none of the members of this IRB has any expertise in endocrinology, Mark and David Geier would not be eligible to debate or vote on their own protocols anyway; Anne Geier wouldn't be eligible to vote because of her relationship to Mark and David; and Lisa Sykes wouldn't be eligible to vote if her child is to be a subject in the research protocol being reviewed. And does anyone really think that any of the other members of this particular IRB has research subject protection as his or her overriding concern?

Is that evidence of yours still being shy? Have you tried coaxing it out of its hidey spot with a stevia sweetened gluten-free dairy-free treat?

It is YOU who must come up with the evidence, not me. Look in the mirror genius. Anyone who makes positive claims for a drug has an moral obligation to demonstrate it's safety and effectiveness, NOT THE POPULATION OF RECEIPIENTS! These are healthy individuals receiving these vaccines, even one adverse event is one too many. It's not my obligation to demonstrate this, it is yours!

I've heard the crap about it being unethical to study unvaccinated individuals in a prospective case-control study. That is prejudification again, based on gamed statistics given out by government. Where are your independent statisticians?? without financial ties to big Pharma, government and medicine??? I know my fellow travelers in this field are afraid to lose their day jobs. Financial insecurity makes cowards of us all.

To reiterate, the bureaucratic oversight of IRB's is irrelevant to the subject of bias in research studies. The system was setup by the medical profession and the government in order to control the conduct of research, not to produce honest studies. Whether the study of the Geiers' is unbiased is a separate issue and could be determined by looking at it's conduct from initial assumptions, hpothoses, to data, methodology, analysis and conclusions. The presence of family members alone should not determine it's validity. The problem with so many of these vaccine studies, is that the people who financially benefit, are themselves conducting the studies, or have oversight and control of outcomes or writeup. That is why there was a major article on the subject of research fraud in the New York Times business section recently. Conclusions were arrived at before the commencement of the studies and corporate sponsors were having the papers ghostwritten.

Mary Podlesak:

It is YOU who must come up with the evidence, not me.

Actually, I did. You just choose to ignore it, or put on a bunch of silly conditions. I believe you have reached the summit of the mountain range and are heading towards the Pacific Ocean with those goalposts.

Here is my version of a Gish Gallop again. Now take each and every one and tell us what exactly is wrong with. You will not be complete until you have read each study and told us what all the specific flaws are, something you were asked to do the last time I dumped it here. So until you come up with a real argument, Put up or Shut up!:

Lack of Association between Measles Virus Vaccine and Autism with Enteropathy: A Case-Control Study.
Hornig M et al.
PLoS ONE 2008; 3(9): e3140 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003140
*Subjects: 25 children with autism and GI disturbances and 13 children with GI disturbances alone (controls)

Measles Vaccination and Antibody Response in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Baird G et al.
Arch Dis Child 2008; 93(10):832-7.
Subjects: 98 vaccinated children aged 10-12 years in the UK with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); two control groups of similar age: 52 children with special educational needs but no ASD and 90 children in the typically developing group

MMR-Vaccine and Regression in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Negative Results Presented from Japan.
Uchiyama T et al.
J Autism Dev Disord 2007; 37(2):210-7
*Subjects: 904 children with autism spectrum disorder
(Note: MMR was used in Japan only between 1989 and 1993.)

No Evidence of Persisting Measles Virus in Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells from Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
DâSouza Y et al.
Pediatrics 2006; 118(4):1664-75
*Subjects: 54 children with autism spectrum disorder and 34 developmentally normal children

Immunizations and Autism: A Review of the Literature.
Doja A, Roberts W.
Can J Neurol Sci. 2006; 33(4):341-6
*Literature review

Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Prevalence and Links with Immunizations.
Fombonne E et al.
Pediatrics. 2006;118(1):e139-50
*Subjects: 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 attending 55 schools

Relationship between MMR Vaccine and Autism.
Klein KC, Diehl EB.
Ann Pharmacother. 2004; 38(7-8):1297-300
*Literature review of 10 studies

Immunization Safety Review: Vaccines and Autism. Institute of Medicine.
The National Academies Press: 2004
(w w w . nap.edu/books/030909237X/html) *Literature review

MMR Vaccination and Pervasive Developmental Disorders: A Case-Control Study.
Smeeth L et al.
Lancet 2004; 364(9438):963-9
*Subjects: 1294 cases and 4469 controls

Age at First Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination in Children with Autism and School-Matched Control Subjects: A Population-Based Study in Metropolitan Atlanta.
DeStefano F et al. Pediatrics 2004; 113(2): 259-66
*Subjects: 624 children with autism and 1,824 controls

Prevalence of Autism and Parentally Reported Triggers in a North East London Population.
Lingam R et al.
Arch Dis Child 2003; 88(8):666-70
*Subjects: 567 children with autistic spectrum disorder

Neurologic Disorders after Measles-Mumps-Rubella Vaccination.
Makela A et al.
Pediatrics 2002; 110:957-63
*Subjects: 535,544 children vaccinated between November 1982 and June 1986 in Finland

A Population-Based Study of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Autism.
Madsen KM et al.
N Engl J Med 2002; 347(19):1477-82
*Subjects: All 537,303 children born 1/91â12/98 in Denmark

Relation of Childhood Gastrointestinal Disorders to Autism: Nested Case Control Study Using Data from the UK General Practice Research Database.
Black C et al.
BMJ 2002; 325:419-21
*Subjects: 96 children diagnosed with autism and 449 controls

Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccination and Bowel Problems or Developmental Regression in Children with Autism: Population Study.
Taylor B et al.
BMJ 2002; 324(7334):393-6
*Subjects: 278 children with core autism and 195 with atypical autism

No Evidence for a New Variant of Measles-Mumps-Rubella-Induced Autism.
Fombonne E et al.
Pediatrics 2001;108(4):E58
*Subjects: 262 autistic children (pre- and post-MMR samples)

Measles-Mumps-Rubella and Other Measles-Containing Vaccines Do Not Increase the Risk for Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Case-Control Study from the Vaccine Safety Datalink Project.
Davis RL et al.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2001;155(3):354-9
*Subjects: 155 persons with IBD with up to 5 controls each

Time Trends in Autism and in MMR Immunization Coverage in California.
Dales L et al.
JAMA 2001; 285(9):1183-5
*Subjects: Children born in 1980-94 who were enrolled in California kindergartens (survey samples of 600â1,900 children each year)

Mumps, Measles, and Rubella Vaccine and the Incidence of Autism Recorded by General Practitioners: A Time Trend Analysis.
Kaye JA et al.
BMJ 2001; 322:460-63
*Subjects: 305 children with autism

Further Evidence of the Absence of Measles Virus Genome Sequence in Full Thickness Intestinal Specimens from Patients with Crohnâs Disease.
Afzal MA, et al.
J Med Virol 2000; 62(3):377-82
*Subjects: Specimens from patients with Crohnâs disease

Autism and Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine: No Epidemiological Evidence for a Causal Association.
Taylor B et al.
Lancet 1999;353 (9169):2026-9
*Subjects: 498 children with autism

Absence of Detectable Measles Virus Genome Sequence in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Tissues and Peripheral Blood Lymphocytes.
Afzal MA et al.
J Med Virol 1998; 55(3):243-9
*Subjects: 93 colonoscopic biopsies and 31 peripheral blood lymphocyte preparations

No Evidence for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine-Associated Inflammatory Bowel Disease or Autism in a 14-year Prospective Study.
Peltola H et al.
Lancet 1998; 351:1327-8
*Subjects: 3,000,000 doses of MMR vaccine

Exposure to Measles in Utero and Crohnâs Disease: Danish Register Study.
Nielsen LL et al.
BMJ 1998; 316(7126):196-7
*Subjects: 472 women with measles

Immunocytochemical Evidence of Listeria, Escherichia coli, and Streptococcus Antigens in Crohnâs Disease.
Liu Y et al.
Gastroenterology 1995; 108(5):1396-1404
*Subjects: Intestines and mesenteric lymph node specimens from 21 persons from families with a high frequency of Crohnâs disease

Neuropsychological Performance 10 years after Immunization in Infancy with Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines
Tozzi AE, Bisiacchi P, Tarantino V, De Mei B, D'Elia L, Chiarotti F, Salmaso S.
Pediatrics, February 2009, Vol. 123(2):475-82

Mercury Levels in Newborns and Infants after Receipt of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines
Pichichero ME, Gentile A, Giglio N, et al
Pediatrics, February 2008; 121(2) e208-214

Mercury, Vaccines, And Autism: One Controversy, Three Histories
Baker JP
American Journal of Public Health, February 2008;98(2): 244-253

Continuing Increases in Autism Reported to California's Developmental Services System: Mercury in Retrograde
Schechter R, Grether JK
Arch Gen Psychiatry, January 2008; 65(1):19-24

Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to 10 Years
Thompson WW, Price C, Goodson B, et al; Vaccine Safety Datalink Team
N Engl J Med, Sep 27, 2007; 357(13):1281-1292

Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Prevalence and Links with Immunizations
Fombonne E, Zakarian R, Bennett A, Meng L, McLean-Heywood D
Pediatrics, July 2006, Vol. 118(1):e139-e150

Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System Reporting Source: A Possible Source of Bias in Longitudinal Studies
Goodman MJ, Nordin J
Pediatrics, February 2006, Vol. 117(2):387-390

MMR-Vaccine and Regression in Autism Spectrum Disorders: Negative Results Presented from Japan
Authors: Uchiyama T, Kurosawa M, Inaba Y
Source: J Autism Dev Disord, February 2007; 37(2):210-217

No effect of MMR withdrawal on the incidence of autism: a total population study.
Honda H, Shimizu Y, Rutter M.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2005 Jun;46(6):572-9.

Thimerosal in Vaccines: Balancing the Risk of Adverse Effects with the Risk of Vaccine-Preventable Disease
Bigham M, Copes R
Drug Safety, 2005, Vol. 28(2):89-101

Comparison of Blood and Brain Mercury Levels in Infant Monkeys Exposed to Methylmercury or Vaccines Containing Thimerosal
Burbacher TM, Shen DD, Liberato N, Grant KS, Cernichiari E, Clarkson T
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, April 21, 2005

Thimerosal Exposure in Infants and Developmental Disorders: A Prospective Cohort Study in the United Kingdom Does Not Support a Causal Association
Heron J, Golding J, ALSPAC Study Team
Pediatrics, September 2004, Vol. 114(3):577-583

Thimerosal Exposure in Infants and Developmental Disorders: A Retrospective Cohort Study in the United Kingdom Does Not Support a Causal Association
Andrews N, Miller E, Grant A, Stowe J, Osborne V, Taylor B
Pediatrics, September 2004, Vol. 114(3):584-591

Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines and Autistic Spectrum Disorder: A Critical Review of Published Original Data
Parker SK, Schwartz B, Todd J, Pickering LK
Pediatrics, September 2004, Vol. 114(3):793-804

The Evidence for the Safety of Thimerosal in Newborn and Infant Vaccines
Clements CJ
Vaccine, May 7, 2004, Vol. 22(15-16):1854-1861

Safety of Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines: A Two-Phased Study of Computerized Health Maintenance Organization Databases
Verstraeten T, Davis RL, DeStefano F, et al
Pediatrics, November 2003, Vol. 112(5):1039-1048

The Toxicology of Mercury--Current Exposures and Clinical Manifestations
Clarkson TW, Magos L, Myers GJ
New England Journal of Medicine, October 30, 2003, Vol. 349(18):1731-7

Association Between Thimerosal-Containing Vaccine and Autism
Hviid A, Stellfeld M, Wohlfahrt J, Melbye M
Journal of the American Medical Association, October 1, 2003, Vol. 290(13):1763-6

Thimerosal and the Occurrence of Autism: Negative Ecological Evidence from Danish Population-Based Data
Madsen KM, Lauritsen MB, Pedersen CB, et al
Pediatrics, Sept. 2003, Vol. 112(3 Pt 1):604-606

Autism and Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines. Lack of Consistent Evidence for an Association
Stehr-Green P, Tull P, Stellfeld M, Mortenson PB, Simpson D
American Journal of Preventive Medicine, August 2003, Vol. 25(2):101-6

Impact of the Thimerosal Controversy on Hepatitis B Vaccine Coverage of Infants Born to Women of Unknown Hepatitis B Surface Antigen Status in Michigan
Biroscak BJ, Fiore AE, Fasano N, Fineis P, Collins MP, Stoltman G
Pediatrics, June 2003, Vol. 111(6):e645-9

Vaccine Safety Policy Analysis in Three European Countries: The Case of Thimerosal
Freed GL, Andreae MC, Cowan AE, et al
Health Policy, December 2002, Vol. 62(3):291-307

Mercury Concentrations and Metabolism in Infants Receiving Vaccines Containing Thimerosal: A Descriptive Study
Pichichero ME, Cernichiari E, Lopreiato J, Treanor J
The Lancet, November 30, 2002, Vol. 360:1737-1741

An Assessment of Thimerosal Use in Childhood Vaccines
Ball LK, Ball R, Pratt RD
Pediatrics, May 2001, Vol. 107(5):1147-1154

Economic Evaluation of the 7-Vaccine Routine Childhood Immunization Schedule in the United States, 2001
Zhou F, Santoli J, Messonnier ML, Yusuf HR, Shefer A, Chu SY, Rodewald L, Harpaz R.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005;159:1136-1144.

An economic analysis of the current universal 2-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccination program in the United States.
Zhou F, Reef S, Massoudi M, Papania MJ, Yusuf HR, Bardenheier B, Zimmerman L, McCauley MM.
J Infect Dis. 2004 May 1;189 Suppl 1:S131-45.

Impact of universal Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccination starting at 2 months of age in the United States: an economic analysis.
Zhou F, Bisgard KM, Yusuf HR, Deuson RR, Bath SK, Murphy TV.
Pediatrics. 2002 Oct;110(4):653-61.

Impact of specific medical interventions on reducing the prevalence of mental retardation.
Brosco JP, Mattingly M, Sanders LM.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006;160:302-309.

Encephalopathy after whole-cell pertussis or measles vaccination: lack of evidence for a causal association in a retrospective case-control study.
Ray P, Hayward J, Michelson D, Lewis E, Schwalbe J, Black S, Shinefield H, Marcy M, Huff K, Ward J, Mullooly J, Chen R, Davis R; Vaccine Safety Datalink Group.
Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2006 Sep;25(9):768-73.

Childhood vaccinations, vaccination timing, and risk of type 1 diabetes mellitus.
DeStefano F, Mullooly JP, Okoro CA, Chen RT, Marcy SM, Ward JI, Vadheim CM, Black SB, Shinefield HR, Davis RL, Bohlke K; Vaccine Safety Datalink Team.
Pediatrics. 2001 Dec;108(6):E112.

Mary Podlesak:

Whether the study of the Geiers' is unbiased is a separate issue and could be determined by looking at it's conduct from initial assumptions, hpothoses, to data, methodology, analysis and conclusions.

Well, we now have full evidence that you do not read the references given, and that you just parrot what AoA says. Do you actually think that chemical castration of children is a good thing?

Who is part of the hive mind?

Being sucked into the Borg controlled by Handley does explain why you have totally forgotten all of your statistics education. It is either that, or you should really see a neurologist about that stroke you forgot about.

O hai guise. What's going on in this thread?

Actually, I think, from Mary's last few comments, she has proven that she doesn't give a damn about children. The fact that she can think the Geiers' activities are OK (!!!) makes me ill. She wants a perfect world, when nothing ever goes wrong (one child injured from vaccines is too many).

Well, Mary, are you also going to put for a ban on cars, planes, sidewalks, bathtubs, stoves, dressers, cribs, etc etc etc? They kill/injure many more children every year than vaccines do. Let me know when you find Utopia. I'm staying here in reality.

Mary, opinions are like arseholes. Everyone's got one. Yours just happens to be shitty.

It is YOU who must come up with the evidence, not me.

And here we have Mary fully removing the goalposts and throwing them in the lake while shifting the teetering truckload of shit so that is deposits on this blog's front porch.

All this time Mary you have been claiming to have evidence of the link between vaccines and whatever damage you people are claiming this week.

Where

Your

Evidence?

Mary when you hear hoofbeats do you think of Unicorns first?

Just a quick note on IRBs. They are volunteer jobs. 21 CFR 56.107 outlines who needs to be on the IRB:

(a) Each IRB shall have at least five members, with varying backgrounds to promote complete and adequate review of research activities commonly conducted by the institution. The IRB shall be sufficiently qualified through the experience and expertise of its members, and the diversity of the members, including consideration of race, gender, cultural backgrounds, and sensitivity to such issues as community attitudes, to promote respect for its advice and counsel in safeguarding the rights and welfare of human subjects. In addition to possessing the professional competence necessary to review the specific research activities, the IRB shall be able to ascertain the acceptability of proposed research in terms of institutional commitments and regulations, applicable law, and standards or professional conduct and practice. The IRB shall therefore include persons knowledgeable in these areas. If an IRB regularly reviews research that involves a vulnerable category of subjects, such as children, prisoners, pregnant women, or handicapped or mentally disabled persons, consideration shall be given to the inclusion of one or more individuals who are knowledgeable about and experienced in working with those subjects.

(b) Every nondiscriminatory effort will be made to ensure that no IRB consists entirely of men or entirely of women, including the instituton's consideration of qualified persons of both sexes, so long as no selection is made to the IRB on the basis of gender. No IRB may consist entirely of members of one profession.

(c) Each IRB shall include at least one member whose primary concerns are in the scientific area and at least one member whose primary concerns are in nonscientific areas.

(d) Each IRB shall include at least one member who is not otherwise affiliated with the institution and who is not part of the immediate family of a person who is affiliated with the institution.

(e) No IRB may have a member participate in the IRB's initial or continuing review of any project in which the member has a conflicting interest, except to provide information requested by the IRB.

(f) An IRB may, in its discretion, invite individuals with competence in special areas to assist in the review of complex issues which require expertise beyond or in addition to that available on the IRB. These individuals may not vote with the IRB.

In addition, there are conflict of interest laws banning IRB members from even commenting on any protocol where they have a financial or personal interest. When considering a protocol, they also consider not only the safety of the individuals involved, but the appropriateness of the methods used and a review of the COIs of the investigator(s).

Study protocols must be reviewed before the study commences, as well as annual reviews to continue. The annual reviews include all results up to that point. If there are any safety concerns, the IRB can shut the study down.

Then there are Data Safety Monitoring Boards, but that's another topic altogether.

So, again, before making excuses about IRBs, read the documents I listed previously.

@mary

Do you see yet why no one wants to debate you?

1) You are stupid.
2) You are too stupid to understand what you are saying.
3) You are asking people to prove that they're not part of a conspiracy, essentially.

"Anyone who makes positive claims for a drug has an moral obligation to demonstrate it's safety and effectiveness,"

Ok that's easy. Look at infection numbers for a disease before and after the introduction of its vaccine. Hey look much fewer cases. Ok, effectiveness demonstrated.

Now lets think hard for a minute. You're making the positive claim that vaccines do awful things. And yet you still refuse to show any proof. Instead you blurt out repeated bits of idiocy about conspiracy. You have no proof and I suspect you might be too stupid to even understand what is going on.

This is why no one wants to debate you people.

"These are healthy individuals receiving these vaccines, even one adverse event is one too many."

And this is why you people are called pro-disease. Do you hold anything else up to this standard? Did you know that every day people injure themselves using computers? QUICK turn off you computer and never turn it on again.

@JohnV

I'm wondering if mary is going to put this much effort against automobiles, particularly with the recently damning evidence of gas pedal issues in Toyotas. Toyotas have a potentially dangerous problem, therefore all cars should be eliminated until they have zero risk. Right?

I wonder if today is the day that Mary makes us all eat our hats and shows this amazing evidence she has?

Nah. Rabid evidence-free conspiracy theory ranting is so much easier to produce than actual support for one's claims, after all.

I wonder if today is the day that Mary makes us all eat our hats and shows this amazing evidence she has?

Well, better to eat my hat than hers. That tin foil makes my fillings hurt.

Well, better to eat my hat than hers. That tin foil makes my fillings hurt.

No. Mary doesn't have a tin foil hat. If she did, she wouldn't hear the voices that tell her 'vaccines are evil'.

She's probably having trouble recording the voices - that's why no evidence to back up her claims. She probably figures if we all get in a room with her for a live debate, we'd hear the voices, too, and become believers in her silly fantasy.

So this is Mary "explaining" why she is entitled to ignore the fact that all the studies which have been done looking for a vaccine-autism connection have found none:

"My bitch is that the science produced by good scientific studies will not be accepted by "scientists" if it conflicts with their economic and financial objectives."

And here's Mary just eight hours later, defending the Geiers, whose experimentation on human beings was supposed to be overseen by an impartial IRB but instead was rubber-stamped by an "IRB" of which each and every member stood to benefit financially from giving the Geiers' work a facade of respectability:

"... the bureaucratic oversight of IRB's is irrelevant to the subject of bias in research studies. The system was setup by the medical profession and the government in order to control the conduct of research, not to produce honest studies. Whether the study of the Geiers' is unbiased is a separate issue and could be determined by looking at it's conduct from initial assumptions, hpothoses, to data, methodology, analysis and conclusions. The presence of family members alone should not determine it's validity."

My, my, my... is that a little old double standard peekin' its nose out of the bushes? Why, I do believe it is! It's the exact same issue, scientific truth being subordinated 'economic and financial objectives' -- but where Mary is convicting of this offense any scientist past, present, or future who does not find a vaccine-autism connection, all without a shred of evidence against those scientists, she's going to lengths to ignore the evidence of the Geiers committing that very offense!

Just another reason, as if we needed any more, to disregard Mary.

Antaeus Felspar:

Just another reason, as if we needed any more, to disregard Mary.

She will most likely defend the recently sanctioned Wakefield's invasive lawyer paid tests on a dozen children (including one whose colon was punctured several times!), because in her world he was doing "good science" (even if it was only to feed his ego and bank account).

In the future, please respond to Mary with just these five words: Put up or shut up!

Thank you.

@ Chris (202): Hear, Hear! At this point, that's all I am looking for Mary to do, too. (And wanna bet, it ain't happening?)

@Antaeus Feldspar

Let's not forget that in addition to the unethical makeup of the Geiers' IRB, it was also formed after the study was already under way. Another ethical no-no.

"unless we ... rip the beating hearts out of our enemies and eat them before they stop beating, our food is "dead."

Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorence on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon... you know, cause I tell you, people do that all the time.

Dear lord! I am gone for three days and I miss all this fun.

Just had something additional for Mary:

1) Were any of these studies of vaccinated vs. never vaccinated individuals?

Are you suggesting studying the children who are not being vaccinated because their parents are listening to the anti-vax idiots? Should these children be studied and compared to the children who are properly vaccinated?

Although I am definitly not an expert on the matter my understanding is:

This wouldn't work. Because the two groups studied are not chosen randomly. The parents who tend to not vaccinate are middle class to wealthy caucasion people, these children would be compared to children who are not equally matched in socioeconomic status and access to health care. Or do you not care if the poor and minority groups are not represented (in the non-vaccinated group) in your hypothetical study? Or would you suggest that some of these minority children be denied vaccination because of your inane theories?

"unless we ... rip the beating hearts out of our enemies and eat them before they stop beating, our food is "dead."

Sounds like my divorce...

This wonderful and wondrously long discussion has brilliantly displayed the power and the weakness of the Internet. Mary has come here, defending her (factually indefensible) position. She has been demolished repeatedly, she has ducked every challenge to actually back up her statements, her (two -- people missed the first one) "Rothschild" comments certainly showed the possibility of her bigotry. The whole discussion became much more powerful as Mary vainly -- in both senses -- put forth her case and it was shown just how weak it was.

But there was thing that was lacking, sadly, the same thing that was lacking in the well over 10,000 comments on the Prop H8 Trial tracker site -- where I ran into several familiar faces. Okay, I only read about half of them, but neither there nor here did I read a comment that went something like this:

"Hey, guys, I used to be sorta on the fence about vaccination (or same-sex marriage). I mean I'm not an expert or anything, but I'd heard the arguments that people like Mary put forth, and they sounded kinda reasonable, so I was being cautious, keeping an open mind. But you guys have really convinced me, and I've come over fully to your side."

I never read comments like this. Maybe there are lurkers out there who do get their minds changed -- ideally from anti- to pro- but I'd settle for neutral to pro. If so, will at least one of you tell us so.

Because I am getting scared -- and getting a reputation as a 'dotty old man whose getting paranoid anout paranoids' -- that we are spending so much time 'convincing people who were already convinced' that all our skeptical writing is in reality doing no good at all. We are making each other feel good, we are making very valuable points, but we seem to be staying in a niche of our own, and making no difference in an outside world where the forces of anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, 'Christian nation' arguers, birthers, End Time preachers, 'comuunist-fascist dictator Obama' declarers and others are busy swapping paranoias like I used to swap baseball cards.

(Yes, there are quite a few HuffPost anti-vaxxers -- and I condemn them for their stupidity, but they might be reachable by this sort of discussion -- but take a look at someone like Jane Burgermeister -- or Janet Folger Porter of Faith2Action who has had Burgermeister on her show. Or the WND. These are the real crazies out there, the ones evidence can't touch, the ones who combine all the evidence-free rantings.

(And of course there is the 'rodeo clown' filling his tv slot with much of the same.)

Sadly, they are reaching the uncommitted (I'm tempted to call them the ones who are and need to be committed). It's easy to dismiss them as 'just a handful of nuts' and a couple of years ago they were. But now they are getting stronger, taking over one party, and I'm damned if I know what to do about it.

So will someone out there please calm me down and just tell me, honestly, that all our rationality and solid ecidence-based reasoning, our demonstrations of the absurdity of people like Mary and Mike Adams actually worked? Please!

Prup, once in a long while I will see someone posting who had first been sucked into not vaccinating (often a new parent who has wandered into the sMothering Commune forum), but then they come here and elsewhere and actually change their mind.

Also, I know at least one blogger (Kev at LeftBrainRightBrain) who at first blamed a vaccine for his daughter's autism. But with additional information he changed his mind.

Prup -

I didn't go from anti to pro vax, or even neutral to pro. I know they work. But, with all the ink the antivaxers get, I wanted to *know*.

My background isn't in medicine, I don't work in health care in any way. Y'all break these ideas down and make things clear enough that I'm able to understand. From the links and words posted here, I can now spot a quack, and even say *why* they're a quack.

With what I've learned here, I've even been able to help guide a few fence-sitters I know away from the dark side. It ripples out.

The person who posts as NotMercury recounted that s/he was convinced vaccines caused her older children's autism until his/her youngest (unvaccinated) child was diagnosed, though I guess that's more a victory for simple rationality than for sceptical blogging. James Sweet has said that he was amenable to spacing out immunization to prevent autism or some nebulous other harm, until he researched the issue, whereupon he became strongly pro-vax.

for sceptical blogging

Prup,

I used to be all into the anti-mainstream medicine. I never was anti-vaccine because my mother lost (most) of her hearing when she contracted mumps. But I did have my third-born at home after two c-sections. I was all into 'natural' supplements and alternative medicine (being from Colorado, this was the norm).

When I moved to [redacted] I asked my pediatrician about 'mercury' in vaccines and all the other woo I believed in. He just happened to be a skeptic and gave me all sorts of information that just made sense. So much so that I decided to deliver my fourth child in a hospital (by c-section, no less).

I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a skeptic, because I am just learning, but I admire the author of this blog and so many others that are fighting for rationality.

Prup, Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy posted a link to just such a story only days ago. Hope it will lift your spirits ;)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/28/why-one-paren…

Thanks to all of you for giving these examples. And I know that Orac knows I meant no disrespect to him -- his was literally the first blog I read, and I have never stopped admiring his work. It's just the tide of irrationality I see growing daily. mostly in the political world, and the misunderstanding of the type of thinking that ties a Palin to a Mike Adams, teabaggers to global warming denialists, creationists to the type of health care reform fighters that talk about FEMA concentration camps. All so led by the Glenn Becks, the Farahs and the Folgers. but also by the ministers of a new and very scary type of Christianity that calls itself the New Apostolic Reformation, and that has very little to do with what most of us think of as Christianity -- whether we like it or hate it or simply consider it a mild delusion.

When I see a candidate for Governor -- of Alabama, true, but not some 'backwoods hick,' but a man whose family has been prominent in the state since before statehood. who's been a lawyer for 25 years, who was in charge of the state's two-year college system -- merely state that 'not all the words of the Bible are to be taken literally' (nd he was referring to the great ages of the Patriarchs, not the myths of the opening of Genesis) -- and be forced to recant his words, I get scared. When I see not just one, but all of the candidates for President of a major party approve the teaching of creationism in schools (as happened in 2008, though only a few declared themselves to be creationists), I get visions of Nehemiah Scudder.

And when I see political commenters on 'my' side of the spectrum -- and I spend more time in the political blogosphere -- regretably -- than in the Skeptisphere dismissing these folks as 'too absurd to pay attention to' or see their real -- if delusional -- beliefs as either 'fronts for racism' or the result (from the dinestore Marxists) of corporate manipulation, or refer to the 'obscenely rich puppeteers, I want to drag every one of them over to the Skeptical blogosphere to give them lessons in the type of thinking they are fighting against.

And then I think of the Scopes trial, and how, despite every showing of Inherit the Wind the result was, in fact victory for the creationists, if a mild one. (Other laws against evolution teaching remained in place and, to quote a very solid Wikipedia article -- that is supported by other cites I know "The immediate effects of the trial are evident in the high school biology texts used in the second half of the 1920âs and the early 1930âs. Of the most widely used textbooks, there is only one which lists evolution in the index and in the wake of the trial, under the pressures of fundamentalist groups, the entry is countered with biblical quotations."

And I see, after growing up in a time and place where creationism was laughable, today that polls still show a near majority of America supporting it. My GP (80 years old and no altie) tells me of a friend who is "Professor of Alternate Medicine" at Harvard.

And that's when I wonder if even we know how to fight the tide of irrationality, when I become 'paranoid about paranoids' when I write the type of comment I wrote above. And when I need and am grateful for the responses it received.

Prup,

I can at least tell you this: I used to be on the fence about creationism (though I leaned heavily towards it due to my Christian upbringing). I also used to beleive in UFOs being alien spacecraft, alien abductions, and I was very sympathetic to various paranormal claims. I was convinced of most conspiracy theories involving the JFK assassination and also convinced of all sorts of "ancient astronaut" stories. I also had a tendency to believe certain things about health that sound now eerily similar to the alternative medicine quackery that Orac debunks here regularly (though I was sort of indifferent to that, being an 'invincible' teenager who cared little for my well-being).

I liked to think that I was one of the few rational voices in the world and that so many of the scientists and other people were not quite as imaginative as they should be, blinded by the institutional learning they went through (or something along those lines).

Now, in college I had begun to move away from such beliefs. However, I still liked to believe in paranormal claims, in creationism, etc. But, one day, after watching a show on moon-landing conspiracy theories, I went to google to find out more. I found Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" site. And from a link there, I found Orac's old blogspot blog. For a couple years, I read this blog daily. And I also began reading other skeptical blogs regularly.

Well, this is just anecdotal evidence, so make of it what you will, but for me, the skeptics on the internet have really changed my life for the better. I have become a much more consistent critical thinker since that time, and have been turned away from all sorts of crackpottery, woo, crankdom, and more that I may have been attracted to were it not for the wonderful bloggers/commenters who introduced me to a skepticism as something more than the pejorative hurled by UFO nuts and psychics. So here's at least one person who's changed her mind, and would probably otherwise be a 9/11 truther today.

WE ARE BORG. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

(Sorry, but I just couldn't believe that someone didn't do that one straight away.)

I can't believe (figure of speech) that I've never seen this site before. Keep up the great work!

The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause

neurophilosophy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:50:39 +0000

The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause

A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness.

Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you'll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you'll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.

The researchers first used a variation of these stimuli to test the occurence and duration of the motion-induced blindness effect. In these pre-test trials, seven participants were presented with a static yellow ring on a rotating background, and asked to report when the ring disappeared from and reappeared to conscious awareness, by respectively pressing and releasing a button. This was repeated 200 times for each participant, and the reported durations in all trials - between a few hundred milliseconds and several seconds - were plotted onto a graph. The data from each participant were then divided into four equal sets, and the average of the lowest 25% was calculated, to give a value called PreQ₂₅.

In the test trials, a dot was flashed for 50 milliseconds in the location of the ring after it was perceived to disappear. For each participant, this was timed so that the dot appeared at the exact time delay given by the PreQ₂₅ value in the previous trials. In 75% of the trials, the dot was perceived to appear before the reappearance of the ring. As expected, it hastened the perceived reappearance of the ring, as revealed by second graph plotting motion-induced blindness duration. In the remaining trials, the ring should have been perceived to reappear before the dot was flashed. However, the participants reported seeing the ring before the dot in around 90% of trials. Evidently, the perceived time sequence of events had been reversed - the participants reported seeing the cause (the dot) after the effect (the reappearance of the ring).

How might this be explained? One possibility is that the duration of motion-induced blindness was shorter in the test than in the pre-test trials. But further measurements of the duration, carried out during post-test trials, showed that it had not changed significantly across the trials. Another possible explanation is that the flashed dots were also rendered invisible by the illusion, as it was presented in the same location as the ring, but a second experiment ruled this out. The participants were presented with two rings on opposite sides of the roating background. A dot was flashed in the centre of each, half a second after the onset of the illusion, and they were asked to state the order in which they perceived the dots to appear. This was then repeated on a static background. The reported order was the same in both conditions, showing that the illusion had no effect on the perception of the dots.

Wu and his colleagues therefore conclude that the unconscious representation of the ring is perceived with a shorter time delay than the flashed dot. That is, because the visual system contained a representation of the ring before it was rendered invisible, it could reactivated quickly and fast-tracked into conscious awareness when it was perceived to reappear. The flashed dot, on the other hand, was a completely novel stimulus, so took longer to enter the stream of consciousness.

The researchers then carried out another experiment designed to measure the time difference between processing in the conscious and unconsious streams. They repeated the first experiment, but this time introduced a subtle change in the colour of the ring, which occurred at various times relative to the flashed dot. After each trial, the participants reported whether they perceived the ring or the dot first, and were also asked what colour the ring was when it first reappeared. By plotting colour choice against the time of the colour change, the researchers could calculate exactly when the unconscious representation of the ring entered into conscious awareness.

This revealed that the colour change needed to occur about one tenth of a second before the flashing dot in order for the ring and the dot to be perceived as appearing simultaneously. In other words, after the flashed dot induced perception of the ring, the first ring colour that the participants tended to perceive was the colour that the ring had been about 100 milliseconds before the dot appeared, rather than the colour it was at the time the dot was flashed.

Finally, the researchers investigated whether the time illusion could be induced by a time mismatch between the conscious and unconscious representations of the same object, rather than by differences in the time at which two different objects appear. To do so, they modified the last experiment, and introduced a prominent change in the colour of the ring. Here, the dot was not flashed - instead, the colour change occured while the ring was perceptually suppressed, and triggered the ring's early reappearance. The participants were required to state which the colour the ring was when it first reappeared into their awareness. Remarkably, the colour most often reported was the old one, even though it was the change to the new colour that triggered the reappearance of the ring. So although the new colour was registered unconsciously by the visual system, it was the old colour that was perceived when the ring reappeared.

Related:

Wu, C.-T., et al (2009). The Temporal Interplay between Conscious and Unconscious Perceptual Streams. Curr. Biol. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.017.

neurophilosophy Fri, 11/06/2009 - 06:50

Tags

motion induced blindness

I think this may help you to understand;

Years ago,after leaving the armed services, I was abducted by Grays that are working for "the Federation".
The Federation is "a NATO type organization", of Grays,
Reptilian, Moth men,(all non human types about 42 different beings mostly violent military males ) different recessive beings too, that are discussed in various
contact books, and thousands of internet sites for the smart people to learn and study.
I was taken to the Federation by physical, barely visible in our spectrum.. I used infrared/spectrum lenses goggles,to see them
race of sub space beings. Regressive Beings working with Grays, called the White Brotherhood. After my negative experiances
of many years I learned from the Grays themselves ,(they abducted me for sperm, surgical removal, as they do with womens eggs all around the world),
This is what I know to be true: 1. all extraterrestrials are physical carbon based,
silicon based, or molecular based beings,including the ones who use magnetic field tecnology to cloak themselves, travel or
appear as a humans, i.e. stable plasmon technology. These technologies can be detected with geiger counters,
and magnetic field detectors sold "on line", directional is preferred....find the electrical devices on them,and around them in their nearby craft.
For your homes and cars..some of the Gray and reptilian devices can be disrupted by Mhz frequency devices built at home,
someone could make a small fortune selling better portable particle and wave detection, and disruption devices for our pockets.
High voltage tazer weapons as well, work. As with hand held powerful battery operated magnets,in close proximaty some can interfere
with gray technologies. Magnetic shielding paint can shield a room in your house where no EMF or ELF is detected! Other
races of sub space
beings have technology that I have seen, are defended against with hand lasers, built at home!!
2.Critical, we are not the only humans in the universe or multiverse...there are humans from Lyra, Pleadians,
Andromidan, Cassiopeian, Simion and billions more! 3, Even more important the Gray Federation is using Religion to "Dumb Down",
all of us on earth. 3. All Religions are false, there is no god, only Extraterrestrials and human support groups from other
worlds, the earths which NASA is just now locating are inhabited.

Our military is being attacked by the Grays ,(google on the internet), and
Reptilian Federation all the time, all the time, The shootings at Army bases world wide are mind controlled by the Gray Federation,
as is the sweat lodge incident , 911, and the current state of our economy and health...chem trails,
( 8-120 MHZ broadband mind control technologies piggybacked on T.V. cell phone and cable, important for you to remember).
A strategy used by the Grays and others is to mind control in the name of Religions, a not so well informed
person into doing the killing or attack on our government. Obama needs to know this as he has been manipulated openly by the federated grays,
those of us who understand Gray, Reptilian Military mind control Strategy and Tactics( for example...
Jesus is my mentor and I
am speaking with him now, no!! Jesus is dead It was told to me Jesus did exist , but he is dead it's an ET who learned earth languages.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
It is not Obamas fault,
nor is it Hilliary Clintons fault...it was not President Kennedy fault, but the Gray military Federation did kill him in part
because the Grays and others did not want us in Space.

It's being done mainly because these other types of ET"s, Grays, reptilian Snake beings, insectoid which are more technically advanced
and regressive in the way they think and act are working together against humans, abducting women for there experiments etc.

As we speak somewhere on earth a child is being abducted for food by the reptilians, and or for DNA by the grays I know!!!
There are technologies you can buy to protect yourselves, guns, tazers high volts, mind brain protection velostat caps,velostat 3M
shielding material also works in many labs with high emf use.
at home depot, particle dectors magnetic particle detectors...Critical infrared binoculars,
portable magnetic field room detectors, they have through chem trails and dropping poisons form the ships into our water supply,
use water filters and A/C hepa filters, our government needs to do more to protect its population.!! WE must invent
better ways of protection against these recessive extraterrestrial races, mind defense technologies and home shielding as well
as robots to detect and defend!!!
Have extra food at home for your family, it is no coincidence that in the movies on
abduction and on aliens we are seeing a lot of ET films, on T.V. "V", house, etc...They are signaling massive problems ahead,
maybe another war? The humans from hollywood, like me are trying to through this note, and films to
inform you of the risks we are in! 2012, alien mind control, H1N1 gray federation attacks on humans.

The Gray Federation ruined myself and family like they did with Alex collier, and Billy Meir, Michael Salla and others... I know about the
Photon belt we are entering please look it up on the internet...many friendly human races are trying to help us now
When I was at the Gray army here in Santa FE, N.M.base, I did see many things, I have a PhD, I'M a quick learner and
can now read their sumerian type alphabet and words... I was taken on one type of craft they use, how they fly and what they use in them...the saucer
shaped craft use electrical batteries as propulsion power, in the middle of some saucers there is a large circular ceiling to floor
barrel structure it contains lithium type batteries extremely high voltage charges. The craft are made of layered and compressed metals titanium compounds,
the outer skin is electrified to reduce and eliminate drag and atmospheric resistance. Inside the saucer is a network of Compressed
frequency transmitting fiber optics for controls and for ON BOARD GUIDENCE SYSTEMS, SIMPLE. THEY USE THE EARTHS MAGNETIC AND GRAVATATIONAL FIELDS TO FLY.
THE COPPER CLINDER CIRCLES ON TOP OF THE CRAFT AND BOTTOM SPIN, PICTURE TWO SMALLER CIRCULAR DISKS ON TOP AND BOTTOM
SPINING INDEPENDENTLY OF THE SAUCER. THEY CHARGE UP..THAT DIFFERENTIAL OF CHARGES INTERACTS
WITH A PLANETS OR SPACES MAGNETIC FIELDS FOR LIFT AND MOVEMENT. THE SAUCERS ARE SHIELDED TO PREVENT EXPLOSIONS AND TO PREVENT
MAGNETIC FIELD INTERACTIVITY......(THE OUTER SHELL IS CHARGED UP TO FLY W/O RESEISTANCE, IT STINGS when touched electrical pulse).
...I'M NOT A PHYSICS MAJOR BUT DID STUDY SOME ENGENERING.

They are trying to mind control our socities through Mhz frequency control, we think in about 11-80 Mhz,
and they use computers and oscilloscope combo. type MRI type equipment to read thoughts as we read print or a scientist reads peaks on a
graph, as well as gravitational field tech. to beam in false info.
Shield your brains and spinal cords!!!
All of our military and armed forces should wear velostat (signal protection electrical grounded materials on your head)
caps and monitor the frequency changes around them, the
government of the USA ours, needs to be informed of the grays methods and take steps to help each other, protect our
families people this is real....(people in Britian were not ready, prepared for WWII, Study military history )
...(we have a very weak and complacent military/police/NSA/CIA/) The Grays have even infiltrated some gov't individuals
in these agencies.......................!!! Just because you were in church on sunday and you see people speaking in tongs,
falling to the floor, and saying they are talking to god? there is no god only ET groups, ET governments.

Love
Dan

P.S. This was written under partial duress......they know where I live. Pass the info on.

The Federated reptilian/gray/insectoid societies are using harmful
technology to harm the human mind, causing
memory loss and fatigue...FIGHT BACK, I use the above mentioned technology
and when I go out and they start to harm my body with high intensity back spasm devices
i.e. microwave, particle , mind control. I use my mind and picture each attacker
being attacked by me. They hate loud music, food odors, perfumes, light, and our
minds killing them...! I keep a gun and tazer by my side always now!!!

Listen to this highly educated old man, if you see a craft these are not dolls, these are recessive
violent, harmful, controlling alien males..read the info on the net with a grain of salt,
why haven't they come forward? They wont because of violent abductions, use logic.
Protect your brains!!! stay away from them, Betty and Barney Hill were assaulted,
all of the abduction cases are harmful rape and kidnapping humans, we in the USA have laws
against these crimes yet our government turns in another direction. Because they control some
people in our not one world gov't yet.

Space is alot more crowded than most people know, extremely dangerous NASA knows..Our Rocket
systems and defense systems are frail...

Connect the dots.........biology, secrect governments, mind control, abductions,
alien tecnologies genetic and magnetic, and we wonder where
they come from reverse designs from crashed UFO...s

Wow! The way the mind works is really wild. Thanks for this posting.

Crazy! I find that when the yellow dots disappear, and I notice it, that my eyes seem to re-scan (I can feel it!) and they pop back up. The harder I try to concentrate on the blinking green dot, the longer the yellow disappear for. But it's hard!

The illusion in the video reminds me somewhat of the illusion that Jack Pettigrew associated with hemispheric rivalry, as in this television report (which no longer contains video, only transcript and links). I don't know what the current consensus is about that, but I certainly found it interesting at the time.

Sounds like perceptual frame-snapping.
I have seen wheel spokes appear to reverse rotation when they get aroune 10 rpm - in broad daylight - not stroboscopic.

Fascinating.

(This may be a naive idea of what's going on, or maybe it's just rephrasing what you've said in other terms. If so, then apologies.) But surely the illusion in the first video must involve a story featuring at least two things. a) We know that there are fewer color receptors at the periphery of the eye (which would explain why the illusion is more effective when you're closer to the picture and the picture is enlarged). b) The receptors are color-sensitive, so perhaps the perception of yellow is "crowded out" by the blue background.

(Granted, that wouldn't be enough of a story, because we also need to explain why movement matters. I guess then memory must play a role, perhaps in the way you so clearly explained later in the post.)

Leading up to my question: would the same effect happen if the background matrix were a different color?

"it could reactivated quickly and fast-tracked into conscious awareness when it was perceived to reappear"

What does it mean for something to come "into" consciousness? Doesn't this ascribe some unity to consciousness? On what basis? Why should there be a sharp dividing line between activity in the brain that is related to conscious versus unconscious phenomena?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Drafts_Model

Here's a very interesting 44 min. talk by Prof. Meister from Harvard that he gave at the place where I work a few days back on the subject of visual perception and some amazing stuff that the neurons in the retina do.

Unfortunately the demos are not visible due to the way the talk was recorded.

"In the remaining trials, the ring should have been perceived to reappear before the dot was flashed. However, the participants reported seeing the ring before the dot in around 90% of trials."

Doesn't this mean they saw what was predicted 90% of the time, in contradiction to your conclusion:

"Evidently, the perceived time sequence of events had been reversed - the participants reported seeing the cause (the dot) after the effect (the reappearance of the ring)."

Fascinating as usual.

I've been aware of this for some years now, and this article gave me a name for it. I believe this phenomenon can account for some motor vehicle accidents, where a driver fails to see a significant object along his way due to distraction of other moving objects in his visual field, or due to flashing lights along the road. The giant LED movie screens now being erected along major highways may thus have some unfortunate consequences for the traveling public.

Vegetative and minimally conscious patients can learn

neurophilosophy — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:20:55 +0000

Vegetative and minimally conscious patients can learn

THE vegetative and minimally conscious states are examples of what are referred to as disorders of consciousness. Patients in these conditions are more or less oblivious to goings-on in their surroundings - they exhibit few, if any, signs of conscious awareness, and are usually unable to communicate in any way. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to establish what these patients are experiencing, and the consciousness disorders are among the least understood, and most commonly misdiagnosed, conditions in medicine.

Although technologies such as functional neuorimaging have enabled clinicians to gain some insight into these conditions, proper assessment and diagnosis of patients are still major challenges, and there are big ethical questions regarding how they should be treated. However, researchers from the University of Cambridge have made what could be a significant advance.

In a paper published online in Nature Neuroscience, they report that some minimally conscious and vegetative patients appear to be capable of learning simple associations between two stimuli, and that this ability is strongly correlated with subsequent recovery. The findings point to a reliable method for evaluating and diagnosing patients suffering from consciousness disorders, and also may enable clinicians and relatives to make informed decisions about treatment.

Disorders of consciousness are typically defined by behavioural assessment - patients in the so-called minimally conscious state exhibit intermittent evidence of awareness, while those in the vegetative state exhibit no awareness whatsoever. Most patients are usually unresponsive to external stimuli, but this gives no indication of the state of brain function, or of cognitive processes. It is clear that the behavioural criteria for diagnosis of these disorders are inadequate, and it is estimated that approximately 40% of patients have been misdiagnosed.

It is also now clear that at least some patients are aware of what is going on around them, despite showing no outward signs of awareness. Several neuroimaging studies have shown that auditory regions in the brains of vegetative patients become activated in response to speech. And another study provided evidence of specific brain activation patterns in a vegetative patient when she was asked to imagine playing tennis or moving around her house.

In some cases, the prognosis, or outcome, of such patients, is inaccurate too. It was also long assumed that patients who have existed in such conditions for long periods cannot recover. However, it is now clear that is not always the case. In 2007 researchers used an experimental surgical procedure called deep brain stimulation to improve brain function in a patient who had been in a minimally conscious state for more than six years. Almost immediately, the patient opened his eyes, and responded to voices. In the following months, he became capable of speaking, swallowing and reaising a cup to his mouth. Then there is the remarkable case of Terry Wallis, who went into a vegetative state following an accident in 1984, only to emerge from it 19 years, despite doctors' insistence that he would never recover.

In the new study, Tristan Bekinschtein of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues used classical conditioning to test whether any traces of conscious processing are preserved in minimally conscious and vegetative patients. This procedure is also referred to as Pavlovian conditioning, after the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who first showed, over 100 years, ago that dogs quickly learn to associate the sound of a ringing bell with the presentation of food, so that after a number of pairings of the two stimuli, they begin to salivate in anticipation of being fed when presented with the bell alone.

The researchers used the same procedure with 22 patients, all of whom had been in a minimally conscious or vegetative state, for at least 6 months. In 70 learning trials, the patients were presented with a tone, followed half a second later by a puff of air into the eye, which produces a reflexive blinking response. In 70 subsequent trials, the tone was presented alone. This was also carried out on 16 healthy, conscious controls, and on 12 patients undergoing a standard medical procedure, during which they were rendered unconscious by the anaesthetic propofol.

If an association between the two stimuli has been learned, the tone should elicit a blinking response when presented by itself during the second block of 70 trials. Learning was assessed using event-related potentials (ERPs), by which electrical activity in the brain associated with specific events is measured with electrodes placed on the scalp. An electromyograph was also used to monitor the electrical activity of the eye muscles. Learning in this case would be associated with an increase in activity in specified electrodes during the anticipatory period - the 500 milliseconds after the tone was presented - and peaking at the time at which the puff of air was expected, as well as electrical activity in the eye muscles, which is correlated with the blink response.

These effects were recorded in the healthy conscious control group and in some of the experimental group of vegetative and minimally conscious patients, but not in the unconscious controls who had been under anaesthesia during the task. Significantly, learning effects were observed in both vegetative and minimally conscious patients. From their results, the researchers could predict, with an accuracy of more than 70%, which of the patients had been diagnosed as being in minimally conscious state and which were in a vegetative state. They could also predict, with even greater accuracy, which had suffered a traumatic brain injury, and which had incurred their consciousness disorder as a result of prolonged oxygen deprivation. Furthermore, it was found that learning was accurate predictor of future recovery - the condition of patients who showed signs of learning subsequently improved much more than those patients in whom the effects were not observed, as measured by the Revised Coma Recovery Scale.

These results can be interpreted in two ways. One interpretation is that patients with consciousness disorders still retain conscious processing to some extent. The other is that the classical conditioning demonstrated in the experimental group can occur in the absence of consciousness. The fact that the anaesthetized patients in the second control group did not exhibit associative learning suggests that the first interpretation is the more likely one. Either way, the findings suggest that those in the experimental group who did show signs of learning had properly functioning medial temporal lobe structures, such as the hippocampus and surrounding structures, which are crucial for memory formation and in learning the time interval between two stimuli during classical conditioning.

The findings of this study have important implications for the treatment of patients with disorders of consciousness. First, testing for signs of associative learning could help clinicians to distinguish between the different states, and to assess patients' levels of arousal more reliably. The knowledge that learning effects predict future recovery could also provide a means of accurate prognosis, and help relatives of patients who have been in an a minimally conscious or vegetative state for long periods of time to make informed decisions based on realistic possible outcomes.

Related:

Bekinschtein, T., et al. (2009). Classical conditioning in the vegetative and minimally conscious state. Nat. Neurosci. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2391

neurophilosophy Mon, 09/21/2009 - 07:20

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This is the welcome page for the dietguidance.us Association web site.

Oh dear - the right wingers and right to lifers are going to abuse this and say Teri Schiavo could have recovered.

Poorly understood? Yes.

Among the most commonly diagnosed conditions in medicine? Hardly!

Thank you for this great write-up. What a wonderful discovery, and with such simple methods!

Very interesting stuff from a clinical perspective. However, the claims about consciousness are not justified by the data.

The major problem is that there is good evidence that Pavlovian conditioning doesn't require consciousness. Pavlovian conditioning can be evoked in the body of a spinalized cat(that is, in a preparation where the spinal cord is severed from the brain stem, the body still learns). Less conclusively, invertebrates like snails learn associations via Pavlovian conditioning, and one could argue they are not conscious.

We must applaud that they included any controls, which makes their study better than the one where 'Play tennis' responses were observed.

On the other hand, the results from the anesthesia control are also very hard to interpret. It isn't as if anesthesia abolishes only consciousness: the entire brain is affected by general anesthesia. Even reflexes can be turned off by general anesthesia (indeed, in rats one of the checks that we have them under deeply enough is to pinch their tail to make sure the withdrawal reflex is no longer activated). Clearly, basic reflexes don't require consciousness or even brains (again, we can evoke reflexes just in spinal cord preparations). Hence using anesthesia as a control could be like pulling the plug on a computer to show that computers without a fan can't do computations.

On the third hand, I must admit I don't know what controls would be better. One avenue to explore is that not all general anesthetics are the same. Some seem to turn off consciousness by basically pulling the plug on most of the brain (an imprecise control). Others seem to act on specific nuclei in the brain stem. They used propofol, and my quick PubMed search suggests not much is known about its effects at the biophysical level.

Clearly, the most exciting conclusion is the clinical correlation between learning and recovery of consciousness. As someone noted its simplicity is beautiful. It should be easy to automate with cheap medical supplies. They note in the paper that recovery is also correlated with degree of cortical damage, but that isn't necessarily a cheap or easy thing to ascertain.

I think Terry Shaivo's cortical damage was fairly complete, so even using these results her diagnosis seems accurate.

Reference
Durkovic and Damianopoulos (1986) Forward and backward classical conditioning of the flexion reflex in the spinal cat, Journal of Neuroscience, Vol 6, 2921-2925.

Quite right, Eric. The authors actually mention the fact that invertebrates can be classically conditioned, even though they do not possess anything like human consciousness. I didn't go into any detail about whether conditioned responses require conscious awareness (perhaps I should have), because, as you say, the most interesting aspect of the study is the correlation between conditioning and subsequent recovery.

Thanks for the comment.

This study is cool no doubt if for no other reason than it suggests a degree of cortical processing that predicts recovery. I want to find some more support for the "retains some consciousness" proposal but all i recognize is the possibility that the degree of cortical activity for certain patients in vegetative states extends to the capacity to develop nondeclarative memory. My question: what is new here?

Previous studies have shown there can be a significant degree of cortical process for patients in a vegetative state, e.g. (D. K. Meno et al, 1998), a study examining reactions to familiar faces. It is easy to take this study as an indication that objects can be represented even under such debilitative conditions (Damasio, somewhere).

The formation of a memory is more involved, perhaps, than the recognition of a face. Other studies suggest that memories formed from changes in the perceptual and response systems can be developed from subliminal signals or by amnesic patients with damage to hippocampal formations, an eye blink study by Clark and Squire (1998): memories formed without awareness. In other words, awareness is not necessary for nondeclarative memory formation. It is fair to say that a vegetative state is an extreme form on nonawareness.

I somewhat understand a bit of this. I have a 19yr daughter that fell 27feet into concrete and most oh her injury was all in her brain. The doctors of course give no hope at all they say that she now just needs LTCF. As a mother I want her in home care they wont let me. How is a mother to help her daughter that is in this type of state as you describe. What can i do to help my daughter, cause no one is doing nothing no more for her??
But lots of helpful information for me. some parts a bit confusing. must put in plain English for folks like me. Just a working mother going thru this type of Brain Injury

Emerald: I'm so sorry to hear about your daughter. That must be the most awful for a parent to hear. I'm not qualified to give you any medical advice, but unfortunately I think there's very little that you can do to help her.

The most important thing for you to understand about this study is that the tests accurately predict whether there will be any improvement at all in a patient's condition at some point in the future. So you might want to consider asking the doctors who are taking care of your daughter if they know about this study, and perhaps to have them carry out the tests on her.

Hello
This may not be a direct link to the memory test but I think it still helps connect some of the dots.
I have seen people in many states of consciousness and have been "unconscious" but aware many ,many times myself. People in the room with me saying all manner of things about me ,even telling others not to worry I could not hear them or would not remember anyway. I corrected them and scared quite a few.Any kind of test is believable to me but I am an easy subject to convince.
A few weeks ago my daughter's grand father and my former father in law was in a "vegetative" state in an I.C.U. in hospice after 2 brain surgeries and a stroke after the second surgery left him paralyzed and unresponsive. He was over medicated and suppose to be "vegetative" and not responsive.
I told my daughter that is anyone was going to get him to giggle that it would be a cute grand daughter or a smart Alec former son in law. I whispered a dirty joke in his ear that also included a few words about his daughter and my former wife.
OOPS I set the monitors off and his heart rate went up and what ever the beepers and buzzers were for they worked.
The nurses came and checked and at the same time my daughter was whispering a little lullaby and sweet nothings in his other ear.
We spoke with the the doctor and head nurse and this was the first response from this man in around 5 days.
They laughed and scolded me a little bit.
For what ? My daughter and I stayed there all evening and just the sound of my voice would cause a slight movement on the non-paralyzed side and my daughter singing him little love songs caused his rates to level off.In a "vegetative" man that reacted to nothing else for days.
That was his last night alive and my daughter will always remember grandpa with a smile from her memories.

Rick

My 27 year old daughter is in her third week after suffering a TBI of an unexplained cause. She is a Type I brittle diabetic and now is in a nursing home in Nampa, Idaho. Other than a CT scan and EEG (pretty good EEG according to a neurologist), no one has done a brain study of her, no one has done anything to stimulate the brain, and no one in the 12 days at a regionail hospital did anything to monitor brain pressure.

My daughter was cognizant of me from the first day. She is a valuable person, four classes away from her masters degree, and I firmly believe that someday she will return home.

I understand how frustrating Mrs. Banda feels right now and wish I could talk to her face to face. Medicine has become a political ballgame and the patients suffer in the end. Since my daughter was taken to the hospital that did NOT have a brain injury clinic, she could not be transferred to the facilities connected to the hospital that DOES have a brain injury clinic.

Will vs. Grace - are people honest because they resist temptation or because they don't feel it?

edyong — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:40:24 +0000

Will vs. Grace - are people honest because they resist temptation or because they don't feel it?

In a world where the temptation to lie, deceive and cheat is both strong and profitable, what compels some people to choose the straight and narrow path? According to a new brain-scanning study, honest moral decisions depend more on the absence of temptation in the first place than on people wilfully resisting these lures.

Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton and Harvard University came to this conclusion by using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of people who were given a chance to lie. The volunteers were trying to predict the outcomes of coin-flips for money and they could walk away with more cash by lying about their accuracy.

The task allowed Greene and Paxton to test two competing (and wonderfully named) explanations for honest behaviour. The first -the "Will" hypothesis - suggests that we behave morally by exerting control over the desire to cheat. The second - the "Grace" hypothesis - says that honesty is more a passive process than an active one, fuelled by an absence of temptation rather than the presence of willpower. It follows on from a growing body of psychological studies, which suggest that much of our behaviour is governed by unconscious, automatic processes.

Many studies (and several awful popular science articles) have tried to place brain-scanning technology in the role of fancy lie detectors but in almost all of these cases, people are told to lie rather than doing so spontaneously. Greene and Paxton were much more interested in what happens in a person's brain when they make the choice to lie.

They recruited 35 people and asked them to predict the result of computerised coin-flips while sitting in an fMRI scanner. They were paid in proportion to their accuracy. In some 'No-Opportunity trials', they had to make their predictions beforehand, giving them no room for cheating. In other 'Opportunity trials', they simply had say whether they had guessed correctly after the fact, opening the door to dishonesty.

To cover up the somewhat transparent nature of the experiment, Greene and Paxton fibbed themselves. They told the recruits that they were taking part in a study of psychic ability, where the idea was that people were more clairvoyant if their predictions were private and motivated by money. Under this ruse, the very nature of the "study" meant that people had the opportunity to lie, but were expected not to.

Based on their average results, the duo classified 14 of their would-be psychics as "dishonest", for they achieved improbable levels of accuracy of 69% of more. Everyone else was placed in either an honest or an ambiguous group. Of course, these labels referred to their overall behaviour during the task rather than personality traits - the 'dishonest' people didn't always behave that way and, in fact, that was critical to the first part of the experiment.

Greene and Paxton found that the honest people had the same reaction times whether they won or lost money, and whether they had the opportunity to lie or not. These results support the Grace hypothesis for they suggest that honest people aren't making any extra mental effort when they forgo the opportunity for cheating.

The brain-scanning data matched the pattern suggested by the reaction times. When interpreting the scans, Greene and Paxton focused on areas at the front of the brain that are associated with mental control, such as the anteriror cingulated cortex (ACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VLFPC). These areas are active when, for example, we delay instant gratification to follow through on a plan, and Greene and Paxton refer to them as "the control network".

In the control networks of honest volunteers, there were no significant differences in activity when the do-gooders lost money because they had to (in No-Opportunity trials) and when they lost money because they gave an honest answer (in the Opportunity trials). Even when Greene and Paxton fine-tuned their analysis of the brain scans to the highest possible resolution, they couldn't detect any differences.

Both the reaction-time tests and the brain scans show that for people who mostly behave honestly, these experiments strongly favour the Grace hypothesis - these people don't seem to require any extra effort to resist the opportunity to lie. This isn't due to ignorance, for every one of the 14 honest people said afterwards that they knew they could cheat if they wanted too. They're not oblivious to the option - they just don't need to work to ignore it.

The dishonest group showed different patterns. Their DLPFC was more active when they won money in the Opportunity trials (which they often did by lying) than in the No-Opportunity ones (where they always had to win honestly). This suggests that the choice to be dishonest is associated with brain activity in the DLPFC.

But as a whole, their control network was more active in the few Opportunity trials where they lost money due to an honest response than in No-Opportunity trials when they had no choice in losing money. This matches the results from the reaction time measurements, where they took much longer to respond in Opportunity trials where they could cheat but didn't, than in No-Opportunity trials where their losses were forced. Both sets of results suggest that people who are usually willing to lie exert some extra mental control when they refrain from doing so.

Surely this is compatible with the Will hypothesis? Greene and Paxton argue otherwise - they describe these situations as "limited honesty" and they say that "the Grace hypothesis applies only to honest decisions in individuals who consistently behaved honestly and not to decisions reflecting limited honesty."

I'm not sure I really buy that distinction, but the duo offer up an interesting explanation for the fact that control network activity is associated with both limited honesty and the decision to lie. They suggest that this pattern reflects attempts by the dishonest players to resist temptation. The fact that they fail more often than they succeed explains why the network is active in trials where they end up lying as well as those few where they successfully resist.

To prove their point, Greene and Paxton created a mathematical model that predicted how many wins people would get in the Opportunity trials (a rough indicator of how often they lied) based on activity levels from 9 different control network areas. The predictions from the model matched the real figures with an almost 80% accuracy.

So, people who veer towards dishonesty try to resist it but fail more often than they succeed. People who are mostly honest don't really need to try. This result is fairly counter-intuitive, for we tend to believe that honesty is an act of will overcoming temptation. In a survey done before any of the experiments, Greene and Paxton found that given a choice, ordinary people believe that the Will hypothesis is the right one.

Obviously, the study has its limitations. Greene and Paxton couldn't work out how many of their dishonest volunteers were aware of their deceit, whether the honest lot wilfully pushed aside temptation well before the brain-scanning commenced, what the motivations of either group were, or whether their degree of honesty in the experiment carries over into their normal lives. Nonetheless, it's an intriguing start, and as the duo concludes: "The present findings do suggest, however, that some individuals can, at least temporarily, achieve a state of moral grace."

PS On a final note, one of the stranger results amid the data is the fact that VLPFC of honest players was more active during Opportunity trials where they had to accept money by admitting to choices they had made fairly, than in No-Opportunity trials where their win was a given. Why would people need to exert more mental control to accept a just outcome? Perhaps this activity reflects their "pride or self-doubt upon accepting legitimately won rewards"?

Reference: PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900152106

More on consciousness:

edyong Tue, 07/14/2009 - 03:40

Tags

Nice post! I saw Greene give a talk about this work a few months ago, and you've done a good job of summarizing and analyzing the results.

"PS On a final note, one of the stranger results amid the data is the fact that VLPFC of honest players was more active during Opportunity trials where they had to accept money by admitting to choices they had made fairly, than in No-Opportunity trials where their win was a given. Why would people need to exert more mental control to accept a just outcome? Perhaps this activity reflects their "pride or self-doubt upon accepting legitimately won rewards"? "

Honest people tend to be insecure and have low self-esteem; the truthful people in this test didn't lie because their fear of getting caught, and the social consequences thereof, was greater than their desire for the money involved. Since their fear made the decision for them before the game even started, of course they'd think less about whether or not to lie.

But when the payout comes around, the situation reverses. Where a more confident person would just take the money, someone with less social confidence would have to consider whether or not they could safely claim the money, whether they'd be believed if they did claim it, whether they should give the money up anyway for the sake of getting along, and so on, before taking it. So brain activity in that region is higher, because, again, they're making a decision whether or not to tell the truth. Makes sense to me...

So it isn't that no temptation was offered. IE there was a possible pay-off to everyone. Honest people didn't have to work at resisting the temptation whereas dishonest people had some brain activity. However it is still unclear that the activity had to do with resistance. Maybe they were calculating the chances of getting caught, or imagining their satisfaction at not, or figuring out how much to cheat, or a lot of other possibilities.

Maybe they weren't lying, maybe they really were psychic!

Have to agree with Lilian, and overall say that while the results are cute, I don't put much stock in the interpretation. It's quite feasible that the "honest" group simply made one decision at the beginning to be honest, whether they felt temptation or no. And that the "dishonest" group wasn't thinking about temptation at that point, but rather thinking something more akin to "did I do this too many times in a row? Am I too obvious?", or somesuch.

I've often thought there is a lot to this concept. It's easy to resist something if it doesn't interest you that strongly, and it's certainly no reason to feel 'superior' or more moral. Everyone's mix of temptations is different.

Even for myself, there are certain things that serve as strong temptations for some people which I have no trouble at all resisting (to be honest, because they provide less psychological 'reward'), and to be equally honest there are some things that tempt me severely... passing them up is a real struggle.

Which category defines a person's moral stand?

Perhaps, given the last paragraph people who weren't expecting to win (ie low self esteem) didn't even try to cheat. They didn't need to in order to fulfill their belief that they wouldn't do well.

Why [Mad the Swine, Richard Eis] so sure about honest people having low self-esteem as if that must be the only possible explanation? That isn't tested by Green and Paxton! They do question themselves, but - according Ed's PS - think of PERHAPS pride or self-doubt [seemingly among other possibilities].
I can only talk for myself, why - being honest - mentally reacting when having to accept money. If gaining, I woudn't be sure if there wouldn't got something claimed upon me, something unexpected [not agreed in advance] afterwards. Not a low self-esteem, but some mistrust in other people by having experienced such behavior often enough. So, not self-doubt, but realistic doubt about other people. Accepting, makes me more vulnerable to them. In contrast to when I am the one to pay [and they depend on my obliging and fairness].

Toos: An interesting point about accepting money.

There's also one very interesting group of people who didn't get mentioned in your article -- people on the autistic spectrum have difficulty even learning how to lie! They're significantly delayed in their ability to manage even social lies, with more severe cases being more-or-less unable to do so even as adults. They have similar difficulty in learning to recognize, not only outright falsehoods (including "white lies"), but sarcasm and "prank lies".

And even as adults, folks fairly low on the autistic spectrum tend to have a deep dislike of, and reluctance to engage in, dishonesty. (The higher levels are often still unable to lie, and have great difficulty recognizing lies from others). I have NLD myself (roughly, "half an Aspie"), and willful falsehoods feel to me like a rip in the fabric of the world -- something not just "wrong", but fundamentally threatening. However, I'm pretty good at evasiveness, or just holding my silence. With some effort, I can manage misdirection.

David, I'm surprised by your comment: my husband has Asperger. And indeed he is absolutely not manipulative! Eureka why I appreciate that so much.

Joshua Greene, who studies morality will not share the data from this publication with the scientific community despite it being funded by public sources. I have requested this data numerous times and he has refused to provide it. How can we trust a publication if the author refuses to share his work?

With the scientific community, you say? Well since your comment appears to criticise Greene for lack of transparency, it behooves me to note that, according to your email address, you are Steve Laken, CEO of Cephos Corp. Your website says:

Cephos provides comprehensive lie detection/truth verification services, using state-of-the-art technology that is unbiased and scientifically validated. We have offered expert testimony and have presented fMRI evidence in court.

You also appear to be using Greene's paper as evidence of the validity of your services, on the top of your list of "Scientific Industry Articles Regarding fMRI Lie Detection".

And you can't imagine why he might not want to release his data to you?

For interested readers, here are some links on the use of fMRI in lie detection from New Scientist, Jonah Lehrer and ScienceLine

HAHAHAHA! Steve, what a shameless fuckwit you are!!!!

Reminds me of the Lenski Affair, at least in the level of fuckwititude.

Dude, "Steve." Just buy the paper for $30 and stop complaining like a douchecock.

Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will

edyong — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:05:04 +0000

Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will

When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.

Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. This region helped to produce the intention to move, and predicted what the movement would feel like, all before you twitched a single muscle.

Michel Desmurget and a team of French neuroscientists arrived at this conclusion by stimulating the brains of seven people with electrodes, while they underwent brain surgery under local anaesthetic. When Desmurget stimulated the parietal cortex, the patients felt a strong desire to move their arms, hands, feet or lips, although they never actually did. Stronger currents cast a powerful illusion, convincing the patients that they had actually moved, even though recordings of electrical activity in their muscles said otherwise.

But when Desmurget stimulated a different region - the premotor cortex - he found the opposite effect. The patients moved their hands, arms or mouths without realising it. One of them flexed his left wrist, fingers and elbow and rotated his forearm, but was completely unaware of it. When his surgeons asked if he felt anything, he said no. Higher currents evoked stronger movements, but still the patients remained blissfully unaware that their limbs and lips were budging.

These contrasting responses tell us two important things. Firstly, they tell us that our feelings of free will originate (at least partially) in the parietal cortex. It's the activity of these neurons that creates a sense that we initiate actions of our own accord. Secondly, they show that the sense of moving doesn't depend very much on actually doing so - it depends on calculations that are made in the parietal cortex, long before the action itself begins.

The seven patients in Desmurget's study were brain cancer patients, who were having their tumours removed. All of them gave consent to have their brains stimulated as part of the operations, something that's often done beforehand to check that everything's working and minimise the risk of major complications after the surgery.

Stimulating the brain with electrodes in this way gets around a major problem with studying the idea of "free will" in a laboratory setting. It allows scientists like Desmurget to carefully control their experiments, delivering a very precise input and watching the result. The alternative would be to give volunteers the framework of a task and get them to choose what action to make, when to make it or whether to make it at all. Another neuroscientists, Patrick Haggard, describes these experiments as "unsatisfactory, even paradoxical", the equivalent of instructing people to "have free will now!"

Electrodes help to bypass that problem, and this isn't the first time that scientists have used them to the subjective side of movements. In 1991, Itzhak Fried found that delivering an electric jolt to a person's supplementary motor area (SMA) produced a strong urge to move. But unlike the desires experienced by Desmurget's patients, these urges felt strong and irrepressible, like they went beyond the patients' own will. With enough current to the SMA, Fried could trigger actual movements.

Desmurget, on the other hand, could only ever produce the illusion of movement by focusing on the parietal cortex. And his patients' descriptions of their experiences made it very clear that they were feeling some sort of internal intention to move, rather than feeling compelled by an external force. Without any prompting from the researchers, they all described their feelings with words such as "will", "desire" or "wanting to". One of the patients said, "I felt a desire to lick my lips", after a low burst of current. With more stimulation, he said "I moved my mouth. I talked. What did I say?"

These results are a good fit with those of previous studies. Research on monkeys suggests that the posterior parietal cortex contains a sort of "map of intentions", where different areas are dedicated to planning different groups of movements - looking, grasping, reaching, and so on. And in humans, people with parietal cortex damage aren't aware of their intention to move. They can tell when they start moving, but not when they actually decided to do so.

To Haggard, the SMA and the parietal cortex are two sides of the same coin. All the voluntary actions we do, from kicking a ball to opening a door, eventually pass through the primary motor cortex, the final staging ground where electrical thoughts are converted into muscular deed.

This area receives inputs from two others - the premotor cortex, which governs movements that respond to something in the outside world, and the SMA, which is involved in actions that we make of our own accord. The SMA prepares commands for the actions we undertake. But it also communicates with the parietal cortex, which predicts what it would feel like to carry out those actions and create a sense of ownership over our own movements.

Dualist philosophers like Descartes believed that the mind and consciousness exist outside the physical world, producing our actions by interacting with the physical meat of our brains. The idea has become commonplace, but it's challenged by neuroscientific studies like this one, which show that the conscious intention to move emerges from electrical activity in neurons, tangible objects that are all too real.

Reference: Desmurget, M., Reilly, K., Richard, N., Szathmari, A., Mottolese, C., & Sirigu, A. (2009). Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans Science, 324 (5928), 811-813 DOI: 10.1126/science.1169896Haggard, P. (2009). The Sources of Human Volition Science, 324 (5928), 731-733 DOI: 10.1126/science.1173827

More on consciousness:

edyong Thu, 05/07/2009 - 08:05

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going to try some diy electrical stimulation

The findings you describe here are almost exactly the same as those reported by Wilder Penfield in the 1930s. Penfield pioneered this technique of presurgical evaluation, and evoked both movements and the intention to move by electrically stimulating the cortex. The main difference, to my knowledge, is that Penfield did not evoke the illusion of movement.

There seems to be something crucial missing from this story. If they felt the urge, or formed the intention, to move when their parietal cortex was stimulated, why did they not actually do so? Their brain areas are not disconnected are they?

Apparently, with a stronger current applied to the parietal, they thought they had moved even when they had not. It rather looks as though this is not where intentions to move are formed, but where we register the fact that we have moved, and confabulate a story about having willed it. The trouble with that, however, is that when they actually did move, after premotor cortex was stimulated, they apparently did not register it in their parietal cortex.

The diagram makes a bit more sense, because it seems to show the intention to move coming from the presupplementary motor area, which appears to be signaling to both the primary motor cortex (to produce the actual movement) and the parietal. I am guessing that the diagram means that the parietal's job, in this scenario, is to compare afferent input about the actual movement with the signal from the presupplementary area and to conclude, "Ah yes, that was a movement I intended to make" (or if the appropriate signal from the presupplementary area, to conclude that it was an unintentional movement of some sort).

The trouble with that interpretation, however, is that from the account given it is not apparent that they did any experiments on the presupplementary motor area. Are they relying on other work which implicates that in the formation of intentions?

Anyway, unless there is some key point missing from the account of what is being done here, these results do not make a whole lot of sense. I am not saying the findings are not real, but it is not at all clear what they mean, and it is almost certainly wrong to interpret them as having located the "seat of the will," if there is such a thing.

Would you please post a full citation of the article for those of us who would like to look at it more in depth?

That means Matrix can actually be made one day - no actual motion is required to experience living !

I think it's fascinating when metaphysics meets neuroscience. We see inside the brain too--that doesn't mean what we see isn't real. However the fact that intention and perception and action and awareness of action are distinct--that takes a lot of thinking about.

Yeah! More evidence for determinism.

Nigel, the model you describe in the second paragraph of your comment is essentially what I write about at the end of the post and the one suggested by the diagram. That model is more explicitly laid out in the review by Hagger (which I've cited above) who looks at both the new data from Desmurget and previous work on the presupplementary motor area. Also, on the basis of this model, I was specifically trying *not* to imply that there was a "seat of will" somewhere in the brain. Which is why the headline, and various summarising sentences, describe the electrodes as producing "feelings of free will" rather than broader statements like "free will produced in the parietal cortex".

Also, I caution against reaching too far based on these conclusions. I don't particularly see anything here that counts as "evidence for determinism" or that "no motion is required to experience living".

So does this mean that in a few years we can stimulate our brains in such a way to produce a stroking movement of the hand without being aware of it? Because that would sell well in the porn industry. Ooooo....The Stranger :D

I'm not sure I understand the challenge being made to dualism here - dualism posits a locus of identity that can will the body to move. Thus, a person is a mind which controls a body. This picture paints a relationship between body and mind, such that the body is the actual vessel of movement, and that a person controls all necessary relations between mind and body necessary to make their body move in the intended manner. This predicts that the brain is something which, when told by the mind, has the ability to feed the body commands - physically - to move. So all the connections between regions of the brain and parts of the body is expected if dualism is true.

I don't really know where I stand on philosophy of mind, so it would be great if I could get how this study challenges dualism so I can properly weight it in the debate. Thanks to anyone who explains it to me. :-)

When Desmurget stimulated the parietal cortex, the patients felt a strong desire to move their arms, hands, feet or lips, although they never actually did. Stronger currents cast a powerful illusion, convincing the patients that they had actually moved, even though recordings of electrical activity in their muscles said otherwise.

...

But when Desmurget stimulated a different region - the premotor cortex - he found the opposite effect. The patients moved their hands, arms or mouths without realising it. One of them flexed his left wrist, fingers and elbow and rotated his forearm, but was completely unaware of it. When his surgeons asked if he felt anything, he said no. Higher currents evoked stronger movements, but still the patients remained blissfully unaware that their limbs and lips were budging.

These contrasting responses tell us two important things. Firstly, they tell us that our feelings of free will originate (at least partially) in the parietal cortex.

Here you conflate 'desire' with 'free will' . Desires to use addictive drugs, desires invoked by various mental disorders, and many other desires are often perceived as being in opposition to 'free will' by nearly everyone I know.

When I originally read your title, I chuckled and thought 'feelings of free will artificially induced, ha, how ironic', but neither the content of your article nor the paper's abstract supports that interpretation at all. (An interpretation that the word 'electrically' in the title does not imply 'artificially' fails because all brain activity is electrically induced, so there's no point in using the modifier 'electrically' unless such inducement comes from outside electricity.)

To support the title of your post, research would need to ask a question something like this: 'Can electrical stimulation (of external origin) induce feelings of free will?' rather than 'desire', which obviously includes desires most people perceive as being in opposition to free will. I suspect that question will someday be answered with a 'yes', but this research does not ask any such question, or any related question.

Actually, there's no disagreement between dualism and this study. If intentions originated outside the physical brain, there could still be a region of the brain that responded to those nonphysical intentions and turned them into physical, elctrochemical ones.

As a study this is certainly interesting, but nothing new and certainly not worth the rather ambitious title.

To begin with this modern and popular thinking "neurological finding x refutes dualism" has been fundamentally misguided. This has been going on for over a century, so no big problems. This has absolutely nothing to do with dualism. In dualism (and not all dualism is of Cartesian kind, nor is Cartesian dualism like i is so commonly presumed to be in modern scientific writings) mind and body (brain) heavily interact. Mind affects and alters brain and vice versa.

To begin with we are not discussing free will or even "will" or source of "intentionality" (philosophical concept) here. What we have here is study focusing on desires and desires are subconscious. After all, who of us can predict what we will want to do five minutes from now. Desires enter our consciousness and then we modify them, make choices between them, repress them etc.

Hunger (and thus desire to eat) is generated by body. Drugs affect body and brain and make addict desire for them. Yet no one has claimed these desires like "I want food" create feelings of free will.

Nor are "intentions" created here. In fact it could be argued that this "parietal cortex" that gets feeded with a lot of these kinds of "high level" process informations acts as one of many translators between body&mind. Thus when it gets these "screwed" shocks it translates them for mind/subconscious where intentions are born. And thus subjects feel these strange, fleeting "wants". It is all about transmission of information between brain and mind. If signals from either ones are, well, "screwed" results like these are expectable.

"Also, on the basis of this model, I was specifically trying *not* to imply that there was a "seat of will" somewhere in the brain. Which is why the headline, and various summarising sentences, describe the electrodes as producing "feelings of free will" rather than broader statements like "free will produced in the parietal cortex"."

Yes, it is highly unlikely such "seat of will" exists. Knowing plastic nature of brain I'd say it is in fact impossible.

There are many other regions in brain that if simulated create "needs" or "desires". Now we've added yet another one to list, rather powerful one in fact. But that's all. This wild chase for "ghost in the machine" thas has gone on for decades haven't progressed anywhere and will not.

I write a bit about this study here.

Mo: You say that Penfield evoked the intention to move. It was my understanding (based on second hand report - I haven't read his work) that he didn't think that was possible... are you sure about that?

You may well be right. And it is rather puzzling that Desmurget et al don't mention Penfield. I would have thought that, at the very least, Penfield must have stimulated the parietal cortex many times.

Once upon the time, when all children have the chips imputed in their heads just after being born (to help to connect Internet as computers were outdated those days), there were some corporations that decided to use this miracle of technology in some unfair way. Everytime a client go through electric gates entering any shop their prepaired shoplists is messed and their feel the unbeatable need to buy the newest product of XYZ company...

It's just my imagination about changing our free will with electrodes. And I hope this won't ever come true.

Very interesting and I applaud Yong for publishing this work. I walk away from this more aware than ever of my every move, including typing this comment, but the reading of this begs the question: it appears even the awareness itself is illusory. Clearly, it seems we are not equipped to penetrate this mystery past our own inherited barriers. I can only imagine what Yong must be contemplating after this study.

Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes

edyong — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:00:38 +0000

Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes

When we're suddenly confronted with a shocking image, our skin becomes moist and we blink strongly. These actions are automatic and unintentional; they happen without conscious thought. So it may come as a surprise that they can also predict some of our most seemingly considered beliefs - our political attitudes.

According to a new American study, the stronger these responses, the more likely people are to support the Iraq War, Biblical truth, the Patriot Act and greater defence budgets. Conversely, people who show weaker "startle reflexes" are more likely to support foreign aid, immigration, gay marriage and abortion rights.

Douglas Oxley from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln led the study and he suggests that the factor that unites these attitudes is an interest in protecting one's social structure from threats. These "threats" can come both from abroad or from within; they can be physical dangers like hostile foreign powers, or threats to the status quo, such as policies that violate longstanding traditions.

That responses so involuntary could be linked to views which we hold to be reasoned and considered is certainly surprising, but Oxley is very careful in how he interprets his results. He notes that so far, he has only found a correlation - an association between the a person's political attitudes and the way their body responds to startling sensations. The results say nothing about whether one causes the other- they don't conclude that reactions to threats predispose people to one end of the political spectrum or conversely, that such beliefs cause people to react to threats in certain ways. And they definitely don't suggest that being easily startled makes you conservative, while nonchalance in the face of threats begets liberalism.

Oxley's conclusion is simply that political beliefs have some foundation in our basic biology and are not solely the product of experience, knowledge or upbringing. To a degree, differences in opinion correspond to differences in the way our bodies work, such that people who, for example, support the death penalty are physiologically different from those who, say, advocate gay marriage.

Startling

Oxley discovered this link by working with a large team of American social scientists. They called a random sample of local people over the phone and recruited 46 of them who held strong opinions spanning the entire political spectrum. The team asked these select few to fill a questionnaire that laid bare their political views, personality traits and demographic characteristics.

Oxley were particularly interested in their stance on 18 issues that he deemed to reflect "a concern for protecting the social unit". These included support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Biblical truth. They also included opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.

Based on their views on these issues, Oxley divided the volunteers into a "High-support" and a "Low-support" group. That split may well correspond to a conservative group and a liberal one, but Oxley states that he wasn't deliberately aiming for such a divide - after all, he ignored their responses to questions about economic issues. Instead, he wanted a split that would reflect how strongly the recruits react to threats to their social unit. He then gave them something to be threatened by.

Each person was hooked up to physiological measuring equipment and made to watch a stream of 33 images, three of which were particularly shocking - a very large spider on the face of a scared person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and a festering, maggot-infested wound. As the images flickered by, the team measured how easily electricity flowed across the volunteers' skin (its 'conductance'). The current's passage is easier when people experience strong emotional reactions because the outermost layer of their skin becomes moist.

They found that the skin conductance readings for the high-support group shot up when they saw the shocking visuals, while those of the low-support group stayed at an even baseline. When non-threatening images were shown, (a bunny, a happy child and a fruit-bowl) both groups reacted in the same unfazed way.

Not content with assaulting the recruits' vision, Oxley's team challenged their hearing too. They were asked to focus on a point on a computer screen while wearing headphones, which occasionally played loud bursts of white noise at them. We all blink involuntarily when we hear startling noises but people in the high-support group blinked more than twice as hard as those from the low-support group.

Cause and correlation

Of course, other factors such as age could affect both a person's physiology and their political view. To account for this, Oxley adjusted all his readings to account for the recruits' age, gender, income and education level (the fact that all but one of them was white meant that adjusting for race was pointless). Even after this fine-tuning, the results held their statistical ground.

As I said earlier, Oxley isn't implying that physiology determines political opinion, or vice versa. Indeed, he thinks that it's most likely that both startle reflexes and viewpoints on socially protective policies stem from a common source. It's possible that this source is an external one - parents, for example, could raise their children with specific beliefs and condition them to respond in specific ways to threats. But Oxley thinks that is unlikely - changes in skin conductance and blinking are both involuntary reflexes that take a sustained programme of conditioning to change.

Instead, he believes that the correlation reflects underlying patterns brain activity, perhaps in an small, almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala. This area is involved in emotional learning and, among its other duties, it shapes our responses to threatening imagery. The amygdala's activity is affected by genetic variation and Oxley suggests that this variation could affect both the way we physically respond to threats to our person and mentally respond to threats to our social order.

Indeed, there's growing evidence that political attitudes themselves are to some extent influenced by genes. These innate foundations could help to explain why people with strong political beliefs tend to be unshakeable in their convictions and why political conflict is so omnipresent.

Reference: D. R. Oxley, K. B. Smith, J. R. Alford, M. V. Hibbing, J. L. Miller, M. Scalora, P. K. Hatemi, J. R. Hibbing (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Science, 321 (5896), 1667-1670 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Image: by Douglas Oxley

edyong Thu, 09/18/2008 - 08:00

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Hokay,
The conclusions of this study are wayy overreaching the evidence. So many factors from the environment affect our "startle response," that reducing it to biology is pointless. Imagine the city dweller, assaulted by so many triggers in their daily environment that their startle response over time begins to respond only to very immediate threats. The country dweller meanwhile in their apparently more stable environment, reacts strongly to minor stimuli in comparison. Given that you can train yourself to lessen your autonomic reactions in a matter of weeks with deep breathing or biofeedback, I would say that reactiveness to stimuli is a poor indicator of concern for the social unit. What we are seeing here is that the more reactive to stimulus cues you are, the more likely you are to harbor reactionary political beliefs. Go figure, a sheltered environment produces conservative politics.

Main Entry:
2nonplus
Function:
transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
nonplussed also nonplused \-ˈpləst\ ; nonplus·sing also nonplus·ing \-ˈplə-siŋ\
Date:
1591

: to cause to be at a loss as to what to say, think, or do : perplex
synonyms see puzzle

Vocabulary FAIL. I wonder what I was thinking of? Hmm... anyway - nonplussed has disappeared from the text.

Fascinating work. Being completely outside the field allows me to get super simple. Are people who startle more easily prone to become afraid more easily? I know fear can be complex but I've observed that some people are more fearful than others.

The actions that I see coming out of the US government look like behaviors based on fear. 'Be afraid' is the message coming from at least some of the press and leadership.

Are some people inherently more fearful than others and can this be manifest in the startle responses?

"Hokay,
The conclusions of this study are wayy overreaching the evidence."

I can't help thinking that uncleroadkill is probably the kind of person who blinks a lot.

When one of these studies that links biology to political and/or religious POV can explain all of us who have changed our POVs over time (as in formerly liberal now libertarian and formerly theist, now atheist, for example) -then- I'll think they're getting somewhere.