I will be at NECSS this weekend – the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, in New York City. This is an excellent conference full of science and critical thinking lectures and panels. My podcast, the SGU, will be recording a live show on stage Saturday.

I will also be running two 1-hour workshops on critical thinking on Friday. I will be moderating a panel debate on GMO which should be very exciting. Finally I will be on a neuroscience panel talking about the uses and abuses of neuroscience.

Our keynote this year is Lawrence Krauss. You can see the full line up of speakers at www.necss.org.

Online registration will remain open today (Thursday), and onsite registrations are welcome. You can register for one day or the entire weekend. There is also a comedy show Friday night, stimulus response, in which, apparently, I will be skewered by a professional improv comedy group. (They did my brother Jay last year and it was hilarious – so he made sure I got payback this year.)

Please come up and say hi if you will be at NECSS. Also, the SGU will have a swag table so you can stop by there as well.

I just saw the trailer of a new movie, The Principle. The movie is produced by Robert Sungenis, who writes the blog Galileo Was Wrong. Sungenis is what we technically call a kook. He believes the earth is at the center of the universe and that there was no Jewish holocaust, but rather the Jews were conspiring with Satan to take over the world.

Sungenis, however, is apparently a kook with money, so he is making a documentary film preaching his bizarre notions to the world. This much is nothing new. There are plenty of such films out there, like What the Bleep Do We Know and Expelled. They superficially follow the science documentary format, but they have an ideological agenda.

This film, unfortunately, will be narrated by Kate Mulgrew, who played Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. Old Star Trek stars lending their fame to pseudoscience is also, sadly, nothing new.

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Indiegogo is rapidly earning a reputation for not caring whether or not they fund pure pseudoscience. This, in my opinion, is a bad business model, not to mention morally dubious.

I wrote previously about an Indiegogo campaign to fund a free energy device – a “home quantum energy generator.”  Indiegogo claims to have a process to weed out fraud from their campaigns, but this one apparently slipped through their process. When I e-mailed Indiegogo to question them about this campaign, I received nothing but a generic response.

Now pandodaily has been covering a new Indiegogo campaign for a “miracle” device – the GoBe by Healbe. The company claims on their Indiegogo page:

GoBe is the only way to automatically measure calorie intake—through your skin. Simply wear it to see calories consumed and burned, activity, hydration, sleep, stress levels, and more, delivered effortlessly to your smartphone.

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We like to categorize and apply labels. This can be helpful in wrapping your mind around complex reality, as long as you avoid the pitfall of allowing labels to become mental straitjackets.

I often discuss various  categories of people who are failing, in one or more important ways, to apply critical thinking. These categories are not meant to be dismissive, but rather to help understand various styles of thinking that lead people astray. For example there are deniers, true-believers, ideologues, and cranks.

Perhaps the most interesting category is the conspiracy theorist. I also find them to be the most consistent in their style of reasoning and argument. I do wonder, however, how much of this consistency is due to and underlying reasoning style and how much is culture. When I get the same fallacious argument over and over again, is that because they are all reading the same source material?

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Change blindness is a fascinating phenomenon in which people do not notice even significant changes in an image they are viewing, as long as the change itself occurs out of view. Our visual processing is sensitive to changes that occur in view, but major changes to a scene can occur from one glance to the next without our noticing in many cases.

(See the color changing card trick for an example.)

One group of researchers believe they have a working hypothesis as to why our brains might have evolved in this way. Their idea is that the visual system will essentially merge images over a short period of time in order to preserve continuity – a process they call the continuity field. In essence our brains are sacrificing strict accuracy for perceived continuity.

This is in line with other evidence about how our brains work. Continuity seems to be a high priority, and our brains will happily fill in missing details, delete inconsistent details, and even completely fabricate information in order to preserve the illusion of a continuous and consistent narrative of reality.

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There has been a recent increase in attention paid to the old question about food dyes and behavior in children. The idea that food coloring causes hyperactivity in children started with Ben Feingold in the 1970s. He popularized his “Feingold diet” for ADHD, which is still being promoted by some today.

Initial research showed a possible connection between certain food dyes, especially synthetic dyes, and hyperactive behavior in children. However, the next 20 years produced better controlled studies that did not show the alleged effect. It seemed like just another case of preliminary positive evidence that did not hold up to later more rigorous replication. Serious scientific interest in the question waned with this negative data.

However, recent popular interest in such issues has caused another wave of research. Dr. Oz’s website, for example, discusses the issue, giving it credence. Unfortunately, while it has renewed interest in the food dye question, the more recent research has not definitively answered the core question.

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