Kastrup begins, unfortunately, with a bit of whining.

While I appreciate his having taken the time to reply, I am also somewhat surprised by the sheer amount of space he dedicates to ad homenen attacks on me, which dilutes his argument and the quality of the debate.

Sure, I got a bit snarky in my reply, but I will point out that my criticisms were all valid. Also my two sharpest barbs were direct quotes from Kastrup against me. It’s bad form, in my opinion, to open up a debate with personal attacks and then whine when you get the exact same thing back.  But fine – let’s get past that and focus on the substance of the discussion. His next point, however, is also about form. He writes:

This is correct. So let me take the opportunity to be explicit: I only read the post that was forwarded to me, and my comments were based on that alone. If Novella’s position in other posts was more nuanced, I’ve missed that, since I do not know Novella’s work.

I don’t expect those who comment on my blog posts to read large numbers of posts by me before commenting. That would be unreasonable. What I do expect is that they will interpret my posts fairly and not criticize me for not exploring issues that I have explored elsewhere. It’s impossible to cover every side issue in every blog post, so I do rely upon prior articles to cover these side issues.

The problem with Kastrup’s original criticism of my post was not that he did not read other posts by me – it was that he misinterpreted the post he did read. He does nothing to address this criticism by me in his new post, but rather entirely misses the point. In his criiticism he accused me as assuming causation from correlation, but I never did. In the very post he was commenting on I never said anything about proof – I said that the conclusion that the brain causes the mind is the best inference from the data available, and I added that not only is there a correlation but it has the proper temporal relationship (brain activity and changes precede mental activity and changes), that there are no other plausible hypotheses, and that other hypotheses that can account for the correlation add unnecessary elements and so violate Occam’s razor. Kastrup distilled all of that to the claim that I was saying correlation equals causation. That was the straw man that he flogged in his criticism.

In his new reply he does not acknowledge his error, or point out where I was wrong, or even give any indication that he understands his error.

He continues:

But if this is an error on my side, Novella has committed the exact same error already in the title of his reply: Had he read anything of my work besides the post he is replying to, he would have seen that I am precisely not a Dualist, but a monist (for instance, see this).

OK, I admit it’s easy to think that I am calling Kastrup a dualist, but I actually never did. I merely said that he was inserting himself into a discussion about dualism. I only referred to his position as “metaphysical.” I deliberately did not call him a dualist or address his specific flavor of metaphysics because that is a different discussion. For those interested, Kastrup believes that reality is a projection of consciousness, and the brain acts mainly as a filter. You can read his description here.

Kastrup is wrong about me calling him a dualist (an unwarranted assumption on his part), and seems to reflect a pattern of not carefully reading those with whom he disagrees. Finally, though, we get to the meat of the discussion when he writes:

In my article, I mentioned several models for the relationship between mind and brain under which the exact same phenomenology is expected: Changes to brain states leading to changes in subjective experience. My post was very clear about this, so I am surprised Novella seems to have difficulties on this point. To be explicit: If the brain merely modulates subjective experience (through filtering and/or localization, for instance), then one would expect precisely that disturbances in the brain would impact the modulation process and, thereby, alter subjective experience. I invite Dr. Novella to acquaint himself a little more with these other explanatory models of mind-brain interaction so we can continue with the debate in a more productive manner.

I invite Kastrup to acquaint himself a little further with my prior deconstructions of this position. I actually did address this, to some extent, in my prior post to which he is responding. It’s not just that brain states correlate with mental states, and it is not even just that brain states precede mental states – further, there is no other hypothesis that does not add unnecessary elements, the equivalent of light switch fairies – a point Kastrup ignores.

The problem with positions like this is that they add nothing to our understanding of the mind as a phenomenon, and they make no testable predictions that would distinguish them from the simpler explanation that the brain causes mind. Kastrup hides behind the fact that there are no good metaphors for the brain as “filter”, but that is not a strength of his position. I get the sense that we are talking past each other a bit, perhaps because he is approaching this issue as a philosopher and I am approaching it like a scientist. Show me evidence and make predictions, give me operational definitions and clearly defined models. He want to work with vague and poorly understood metaphors and talks about absolute proof.

The problem, from a scientific point of view, is that the notion that the brain modulates consciousness becomes operationally inseparable from the notion that the brain causes consciousness, at least in terms of the experimental relationship between brain function and mental function. When I electrically stimulate part of the brain, that affects mental function. There does not seem to be any practical limit to the degree to which we can temporarily or permanently change mental function by altering brain function, and we are steadily progressing in our ability to model what parts of the brain are doing what. There doesn’t seem to be anything coming from outside the brain – but worse, the concept is completely unnecessary. It is sliced away cleanly by Occam’s razor.

Kastrup tried to address the Occam’s razor argument, but failed to do so. First he missed my main point, that by invoking Occam’s razor I was clearly not relying on mere correlation. His response on this score was a non sequitur – that if NDEs are real Occam’s razor favors some flavor of dualism (whatever you call it). First, this is a shaky premise at best (and I think false), but further I also disagree with his logic. If NDEs were real as he characterized them what we would have in an anomaly to be investigated. Introducing noncorporeal mental function would still be a massive new element that would need independent verification. But I agree it would then at least be a reasonable hypothesis. Of course with a premise that is shaky to false, the introduction of something as extraordinary as mental function apart from the brain is completely unwarranted.

Along this line, Kastrup then repeats his contention that there is evidence for mind apart from brain:

To repeat a point I made in my original post: There is strong scientific evidence for mind states that indeed do not correlate to brain states. So if anything is to be scientifically inferred from current observations, I’d say it is that mind states are not caused (but merely modulated) by brain states.

This is an absurd premise on his part. There is absolutely no scientific consensus that there is reliable evidence for mind apart from brain. He is citing controversial (at best) claims as support for his position. What he calls strong scientific evidence is laughable, is not generally accepted by the scientific community and only persists on the fringe. He is using clairvoyance to substantiate claims for ghosts. I have already addressed the near death experience point, which he does not address in his new post so I guess we’ll put that aside for later. He does bring back up the psilocybin example. He cites another post of his, in which he argues:

The first materialist rebuttal is this: Brain activity is composed of both excitatory processes and inhibitory processes. Excitatory processes generate – well, correspond to – subjective experiences (perceptions, feelings, ideas, etc.). Inhibitory processes, on the other hand, dampen excitatory processes down, preventing them from arising. So the idea is that, when brain activity is impaired or reduced, the inhibitory processes are blocked. The consequence is that excitatory processes – which would otherwise be stopped before taking root – can now grow to become major subjective experiences.

 This answer appears wrong on an empirical basis. If it were correct, one should observe not only a reduction of activity in certain brain regions (i.e. the inhibitory processes being blocked), but alongside it also a significant activation of other brain regions (i.e. the excitatory processes that can now take root). However, the study that identified the dampening of brain activity as the mechanism of action of psychedelics did not observe any significant activation elsewhere in the brain.

This is all hopelessly wrong.  First Kastrip is overly simplistic (to the point of being wrong) in seeing brain function as either excitatory or inhibitory. He is confusing different levels of brain activity – this is an accurate description of the effects of specific neurotransmitters on specific receptors on neurons, they will either increase or decrease the activity of those neurons. But this is not a good description of how different parts of the brain interact. I gave a brief description of this in my last post, but to expand on this – different parts of the brain are active in processing information from other parts of the brain. They modify how the other parts of the brain are working, or the net effect of that processing on our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and net subjective experience. When you remove one element from the committee of voices contributing to net experience, that experience changes.

It may be that some some other “voices” are more prominent, because they are not being modified, inhibited, or drowned out by other parts of the brain. Kastrup simplistically interprets this as requiring an increase in raw activity in some part of  the brain, but this is not true. Overall activity can still be decreased.

He gives as an example the intense mystical experiences caused by some drugs or during out of body experiences. The latter is now known to be caused by inhibiting brain regions, not enhancing them. Feeling inside ones body is an active neurological process. Inhibiting that process and decreasing overall brain activity can result in an OOB experience. Likewise the turning off of reality testing and rational parts of the brain will cause an intense mystical experience by  decreasing overall brain function.

Further, this is preliminary research and neuroscientists are still debating how to interpret it, so it is hardly a solid premise with which to discard the materialist paradigm. Previous PET studies showed that psilocybin increased activity in certain brain regions. Now an fMRI study shows that activity is decreased. This probably has something to do with the fact that PET scan and fMRI are measuring different things and inferring brain activity from that – so perhaps some aspects of metabolism are decreased and others increased. We need further research to sort this out. But either way – none of it breaks the predictions of materialism, as Kastrup claims.

Kastrup also makes the simplistic and wrong assumption that intensity of experience must equate to greater brain activity (in the purely materialist model). The massive frontal lobes, however, can have a largely calming effect. They can be furiously active while having the net effect of modulating emotions and experience specifically to make them less “intense,” from a subjective and emotional point of view. Anyone who has dealt with a patient who has had frontal lobe damage (and decreased brain activity) will know this to be true. Intensity of experience does not equal intensity of neuronal firing.

Kastrup concludes:

In conclusion, I believe that he did not at all counter any of the points I originally raised. I’m certainly willing to continue the debate if Dr. Novella addresses, with more substance, the contents of the articles I originally linked to as part of my original post, instead of ignoring them as he has done so far.

It’s easy to claim that the other person is a debate did not counter your points when you ignore the counter arguments or misinterpret them. Kastrup has only succeeded in piling logical fallacies on top of logical fallacies.

Let’s review:

Kastrup claimed that I assumed causation from correlation. False – I made a much more careful and logicalyvalid argument, which I have now pointed out twice. Kastrup has failed to address this correction.

Kastrup claimed that NDEs are strong evidence for mind separate from brain. False, NDEs are not evidence of this, and at best are highly controversial claims. If he wants to pursue this point further he really should read my previous article on the topic which I linked to.

Kastrup claimed that I called him a dualist. False – I merely said his position was metaphysical, which it is (it is also arguably dualist, but that’s a semantic point).

Kastrup claims that the psilocybin evidence contradicts the predictions of materialism, and that I failed to understand this point. False and false – as I describe in detail above, Kastrup’s argument is entirely based on his own simplistic misunderstanding of neuroscience. He should at least exhibit a little tiny bit of humility when confronting neuroscientists about neuroscience (which he does also here  – apparently I am not the first neuroscientist to call his understanding of neuroscience “naive”). This doesn’t mean we’re right and he’s wrong, but it should at least give him pause. I know I get very concerned about my own understanding of a topic if experts in the field contradict me. What Kastrup is doing (with NDEs and the psilocybin example) is latching onto preliminary or controversial evidence and then treating it as a solid scientific premise. This is a common ploy of pseudoscientists, but does not make for convincing arguments.

Kastrup claims that I did not counter any of his points. This is also demonstrably false – see above.

I too am willing to continue this discussion. I ask that Kastrup take a deep breath and read my posts fairly and with a sincere attempt to understand and address my actual positions. Then maybe we can move forward.

Kastrup’s major malfunction is to create a straw man of my position and then proceed to argue against that. He so blatantly misrepresents my position, in fact, that I have to wonder if he has serious problems with reading comprehension or is just so blinkered by his ideology that he cannot think straight (of course, these options are not mutually exclusive). I further think that he probably just read one blog post in the long chain of my posts about dualism and so did not make a sufficient effort to actually understand my position.

Kastrup is responding specifically to this blog post by me, a response to one by Egnor. Kastrups begins with this summary:

I found it to contain a mildly interesting but otherwise trite, superficial, and fallacious argument. Novella’s main point seems to be that correlation suffices to establish causation. He claims that Egnor denies that neuroscience has found sufficient correlation between brain states and mind states because subjective mind states cannot be measured.

There is the crux of the straw man – I never claimed that correlation is sufficient to establish causation. The entire premise of Kastrup’s piece is therefore false, creating a straw man logical fallacy. He goes on at length explaining that correlation does not equal causation. Regular readers of this blog are likely chuckling at this point, knowing that I have written often about this fallacy myself. If you read Katrup’s piece you will notice that at no point does he provide a quote from me claiming that correlation is sufficient to establish causation. He seems to understand also that I was responding directly to Egnor, who was claiming that brain states do not correlate with mind states, so of course I was making the point that they do. But I went much further (perhaps Kastrup did not read my entire post).

I wrote:

In fact I would add another prediction to the list, one that I have discussed but have not previously added explicity to the list – if brain causes mind then brain activity and changes will precede the corresponding mental activity and changes. Causes come before their effects. This too has been validated.

The list I am referring to are the predictions generated by the hypothesis that the brain causes the mind. I contend that all of these predictions have been validated by science. This does not mean the hypothesis has been definitively proven, a claim I never make, just that the best evidence we have so far confirms the predictions of brain causing mind, and there is no evidence that falsifies this hypothesis. Because mere correlation does not prove causation (although it can be compelling if the correlation is tight and multifaceted) I felt compelled to add additional points, like the one above. Brain states do not just correlate with mental state, they precede them. Causes precede effects, so again if the brain causes mind then we would expect changes to brain states to precede their corresponding mental states, and in every case of which we are currently aware, they do. We would not expect this temporal relationship if the mind caused the brain, and it would not be necessary if some third thing causes both or, as Kastrup claims, the correlation is a pattern without causation.

Further, in a section of my post titled “Correlation and Causation” I pointed out that it is highly reproducible that changes in brain states precede their corresponding changes in mental states. For example, we can stimulate or inhibit parts of the brain and thereby reliably increase or decrease corresponding mental activity. The temporal arrow of correlation extends to things that change brain states. You get drunk after you drink alcohol, not before. When researchers use transcranial magnetic stimulation to inhibit the functioning of the temporal parietal junction subjects then have an out of body experience.

To further demonstrate that I was not relying upon mere correlation to make the case for causation, I wrote:

Egnor would have you believe that this growing body of scientific evidence only shows that brain states correlate with the behavior of subjects reporting their experience, and not with the experiences themselves. He would have you believe that even if turning on and off a light switch reliably precedes and correlates with a light turning on and off, the switch does not actually control the light – not even that, he would have you believe that the scientific inference that the switch controls the light (absent any other plausible hypothesis) is materialist pseudoscience.

Perhaps Kastrup does not understand the meaning of the word “inference.” That the brain causes mind is not a philosophical proof (something I never claimed), but a scientific inference. Correlation is one pillar of that inference, but so is the fact that brain states precede mental states. Further, I am clearly invoking Occam’s razor in the example above with the fairies and the light switch. The same correlation exists in that example – flipping a light switch preceded and correlates with the lights turning on and off. The simplest explanation is that the light switch controls the light – it is causing the lights to go on or off. But lets say you didn’t know light switches worked by opening and closing a circuit, and you could not break open the wall to investigate the mechanism. You could still come to the confident scientific inference that the light switch was doing something to directly turn the light on or off. You would not need to hypothesize that there were light switch fairies who were doing it.

I also felt compelled to add, for completeness, “absent any other plausible hypothesis.” Why would I specifically add this caveat if I thought correlation proved causation? Of course, in this one blog post I could not go into a thorough exploration of every supernatural claim made for anomalous cognition. I maintain that there is no compelling evidence of mental states separate from brain states, and I refer you to my many other blog posts to support this position. Here we see that Kastrup’s clumsy and, dare I say, trite, superficial, and fallacious arguments about correlation not equaling causation are really cover for his true position and agenda – he believes that there is evidence for mental activity separate brain activity. He writes:

There is an increasing amount of evidence that there are non-ordinary states of consciousness where the usual correlations between brain states and mind states break (see details here). If only one of these cases proves to be true (and I think at least one of them, the psilocybin study at Imperial College, has been proven true beyond reasonable doubt; see my debate on this with Christoph Koch here.), then the hypothesis that the brain causes the mind is falsified. Novella ignores all this evidence in this opinion piece, and writes as if it didn’t exist.

You can also watch the video embedded in his post for an explanation of his position. I will address his two main points, both of which are erroneous. He seems highly impressed by the fact that neuroscientific studies have shown that psilocybin decreases brain activity and causes a “mystical” experience, as if this contradicts the prediction that the brain correlates with the mind (so in reality he does not accept the correlation and that is the reason for his rejection of the brain-mind hypothesis, not his obvious straw man about correlation and causation). Kastrup’s conclusion, however, is hopelessly naive. There are many examples where inhibiting the activity in one part of the brain enhances the activity in another part of the brain through disinhibition. In fact the very study he cites for support concludes:

These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

Unconstrained cognition is another way of saying disinhibition. The concept is simple – there are many brain areas all interacting and processing information. This allows for complex information processing but also slows down the whole process – slows down cognition. That is the price we pay for complexity. If, however, we inhibit one part of the brain we lose some functionality, but the other parts of the brain are unconstrained and free to process information and function more quickly.

The psilocybin study is a perfect example of this. The drug is inhibiting the reality testing parts of the brain, causing a psychadelic experience that is disinhibited and intense. This is similar to really intense dreams. You may have noticed that sometimes in dreams emotions and experiences can be more intense than anything experienced while awake. This is due to a decrease in brain activity in certain parts of the brain compared to the full waking state.

Kastrup seems to be completely unaware of the critical concept of disinhibition and therefore completely misinterprets the significance of the neuroscience research.

His next point is equally naive. He claims that near death experiences, in which people have intense experiences without brain activity, is further evidence of a lack of correlation between brain states and mental states. I have already dealt with this claim here. Briefly, there is no evidence that people are having experiences while their brain is not functioning. What we do have are reports of memories that could have formed days or even weeks later, during the recovery period following a near death experience. At the very least one has to admit that NDE claims are controversial. They are certainly not established scientific facts that can be used as a premise to counter the materialist hypothesis of brain and mind.

Conclusion

Once again we see a hopelessly naive and confused defense of the mystical position that the mind is something more than the brain. To explicitly detail my position, so that it cannot easily be misrepresented again – if we look at the claim that the brain causes the mind as a scientific hypothesis, based upon the current findings of neuroscience we can make a few conclusions:

- There is a tight correlation between brain states and mental states that holds up to the limits of resolution of our ability to measure both.

- There are no proven examples of mental states absent brain function.

- Brain states precede their corresponding mental states, and changes to the brain precede the corresponding changes to the mind.

- At present the best scientific inference we can make from all available evidence is that the brain causes the mind. This inference is strong enough to treat it as an established scientific fact (as much as evolution, for example) but that, of course, is not the same thing as absolute proof.

- There are other hypotheses that can also explain the correlation, but they all add unnecessary elements and are therefore eliminated by the application of Occam’s razor. They are the equivalent of light-switch fairies.

I have made all these points before, but given the fact that Katrup completely misinterpreted my previous writings it cannot hurt to summarize them so explicitly. Kastrup himself adds nothing of interest to the discussion. He flogs the “correlation is not causation” logical fallacy as if that’s a deep insight, and is unaware of the fact that his application of it is just a straw man. He pays lip service to the notion that brain function correlates with mental states, getting up on his logical fallacy high horse, but this all appears to be a misdirection because his real point is that brain function does not correlate with mental states. He then trots out the long debunked notion of near death experiences as his big evidence for this conclusion, without addressing the common criticisms of this position (even by the person he is currently criticizing). His only other evidence is a complete misunderstanding of pharmacological neuroscience research.

I can see no better way to end this piece than with a quote from Kastrup himself, which applies in a way I believe he did not intend:

“In my personal view, this superficial and intellectually light-weight opinion piece adds nothing of value to the debate about the mind-body problem.”

A more scientific and intellectually honest approach would be to declare such phenomena as anomalous (although I don’t think that they are). Ghost cold would more properly be termed anomalous cold, or a regional cold anomaly, or something like that. One hypothesis for the alleged cold anomaly would be some sort of supernatural entity (call it a ghost) that acts as a heat sink generating cold spots. First, however, researchers should endeavor to find a mundane explanation for the cold. In fact before declaring it an anomaly they should thoroughly rule out any possible explanation. Only when that has been adequately done would they have a tentative anomaly.

It would then be reasonable to generate a hypothesis as to what is causing the anomalous cold, but such hypotheses are only useful if they lead to testable predictions. If the regional cold anomaly phenomenon is the result of “ghosts”, then what might we predict from that and how can we test it? I don’t know of any way to definitively test it, as ghosts are not a well-defined phenomenon, but perhaps there are some preliminary tests that could be done. For example, is there at least a correlation between cold spots and experiences often interpreted as ghosts or hauntings? Perhaps cold spots are just as likely in homes without other such “ghost phenomena.” Such a correlation would not prove the ghost hypothesis, of course, but it would at least be a start, and the lack of correlation would seriously jeopardize the hypothesis.

Ghost hunters, however, skip over all of this scientific methodology and reasoning and simply declare cold spots “ghost cold” and then use them as evidence for ghosts. They are then puzzled when scientists and skeptics don’t accept what they consider to be compelling evidence for ghosts, but what is really compelling evidence for the complete lack of scientific understanding on the part of ghost hunters.

All of the tools of the ghost hunting trade are the same as cold spots – they are common phenomena one might encounter in any location that are simply being declared ghost phenomena without ever a hypothesis being generated or tested. EMF meters, for example, simply detect the ubiquitous EMF in the modern world, which are then declared to be a ghost phenomenon. EMF are particularly satisfying because you can make the little needle move along the gauge, or (if you are digitally inclined) you can make numbers appear on the screen. You can wave around your EMF meter, without having the slightest idea how it works, and see stuff happen. Why are EMF associated with ghosts? There is no logical basis for this notion. It seems to be entirely based upon the fact that EMF is something you can encounter in alleged haunted locations, because you can encounter them almost anywhere.

We can now add the “ghost box” to the list of such equipment. This one is particularly humorous because it seems to be deliberately designed to generate false positive results. The inventor of the ghost box (sometimes called a spirit box) is Frank Sumption (who initially called it “Frank’s box). Here is his own description of the device.

The purpose of the ―box, as it is now referred to, is simply to provide a source of audio bits made up of fragments of human speech, music and noise. This noise is known as ―raw audio, it is the raw material out of which spirits of the deceased, and other entities use to create their own voices out of. ―Presumably by remodulating and remixing the raw audio to make the various noise fragments from words and voices of their choosing. In the box, the raw audio is created by sweeping the tuning of a radio electronically across it’s band, or tuning range, the resulting bits of speech music and noise are the raw audio. Radio is simply a convenient source of raw audio. However, that’s only a guess as to how the box works, there does seem be an RF component, or at times an actual signal received, or some other method of getting an external voice into the radio in the ―the box. Some of the manipulation of the raw audio seems to take place inside the electronics, again, presumably ―they can manipulate the electrical signals. I don’t have the equipment, or know how to be able to test these ideas.

What you hear, then, is what you would hear if you had an old radio with an analogue dial and you simply moved the dial quickly up and down the frequencies. You get a mix of static with snippets of speech or music. It is a perfect set up for generating audio pareidolia. The practice emerged out of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), in which ghost hunters listen to hours of audio recorded in an allegedly haunted location and listen for noise that their brains can interpret as words. They then impose meaning on the random words. The ghost box just speeds up the process by generating “raw audio” for the pareidolia.

There are two layers of pattern recognition that are occurring when we have an eager ghost hunter sitting in front of a radio scanner (sorry, I mean “ghost box”) listening for the ghosts. The first layers is hearing words, names, or phrases. Sometimes the words are actual words coming through from a radio station. Sometimes, however, they are just noise that the brain tries to match to a word. Here is a great example - most of the words and phrases “heard” by the ghost hunter in this video are more imagination than anything else. I suggest you listen to the audio without the video and write down any words that you think you hear. Then watch the video and see if they match what the ghost hunter thought he heard.

On the video the alleged words flash up on the screen, so that suggestion will kick in. This is a well-known phenomenon – when a word or phrase is suggested to you, your brain will hear what is suggested. Here is a funny example  - the “O Fortuna” lyrics misinterpreted as funny phrases. (Perhaps ghosts are trying to communicate through the lyrics of foreign-language music.)

There is also a second layer of pattern recognition, however – the meaning of the words. People are very good at inferring meaning, which is a useful skill in a highly social species. Like many such things, we are too good in that we tend to over-infer meaning. I see people do this all the time with their pets. They assign very sophisticated human understanding and intent to behaviors that probably have a much simpler explanation. We saw this also when researchers tried to teach apes to communicate with sign language. The researchers were very good at inferring what the apes meant even when signing essentially randomly. Sometimes, for example, the animal would try to be funny or playful by signing the opposite of what he meant.

We see the same thing in the ghost box video. The ghost hunter is good at taking the random words and phrases and inferring some meaning from them. He is then very impressed by the pattern of responses, concluding that there must be some intelligence behind them. Of course there is an intelligence at work, but it is at the receiving end of the words. Any apparent meaning to the alleged words  is coming from the minds of those making the connection. In this way it is similar to a cold reading. The person making all the connections in a cold reading is not the reader but the subject. They are finding meaning in the questions and fragments (I see a letter “J”) that the cold reader is throwing out.

This general phenomenon is very common – seeing patterns in randomness and then being overly impressed at the connections. The naive premise for the believer is that if there were not a real external phenomenon going on (in this case, ghosts) then the apparent connections would not be there. This premise, however, is false. Humans are good at finding connections anywhere, and in that way we often deceive ourselves into thinking there is something there when there isn’t.

Conclusion

The “ghost box” phenomenon is no different than the ghost hunting tools that have gone before it – it is a method for generating positive apparently anomalous findings that can then be assumed to be a ghost phenomenon by eager ghost hunters. At no point, however, is any actual scientific research going on. The obvious control experiments are never done – we can, for example, compare the noise generated by a radio scanner in allegedly haunted locations vs control locations. We can also have blinded evaluators listen the audio and see what they hear. We can then perform inter-rater reliability testing by having different people listen to the same audio and see if they hear the same thing.

If you read the comments to the ghost box video I linked to above you will see the occasional skeptic pointing all this out. You will see more true believers declaring this stunning “proof” of the paranormal. Right there is the disconnect between the various believer groups and skeptics. Ghost hunters simply do not understand scientific methodology, they do not understand the nature of scientific evidence nor the pitfalls of generating false positive results. This is, perhaps, an example of the failure of education to teach the fundamentals of science. It is also an opportunity to do some remedial education. Understanding why these ghost hunters are not doing science is a great way to teach what science is, and is not.

In the first experiment researchers Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan assessed subjects with a standard measure of analytical thought – problems in which the initial intuitive answer is incorrect and must be overridden by deeper analysis. Try to solve them yourself, they are:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
If it takes 5 machines 5 min to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake,
how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

You can look at the original paper for the answers. The researchers found that giving the analytic (and correct) answer to the questions above negatively correlated with three related measures of religious belief – instrinsic religiosity, intuitive religiosity, an belief in supernatural agents.

The researchers then did four experiments in which they used methods previously demonstrated to encourage analytic thought to see if they affected one of the above measures of religiosity. They included: showing subjects a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker,  exposing them to analytic words like “think” and “reason” (this method was used twice), and changing the font of the questions (for each there was a control group that had similar stimuli not associated with analytic thought). More difficult to read fonts have been shown to trigger analytic thought. In each experiment the group that received the stimuli associated with analytic thought scored lower on one of the measures of religiosity.

All the results were statistically significantly, although mostly modest in magnitude. The most significant was using The Thinker as a priming stimulus (the control group was exposed to the famous sculpture of the discus thrower), which decreased the mean religiosity score from 61 to 41 (out of 100). In a pilot study the same stimulus was associated with scoring higher on analytic tasks.

Taken together these five experiments show a consistent pattern. One simple interpretation is that engaging in analytic style of thinking decreases religious type beliefs. The authors speculate that the effect is likely occurring within the mildly religious members of the study group, with mild believers acting like mild disbelievers. These type of stimuli are unlikely to dislodge strongly held beliefs.

That is a plausible interpretation, but I have two problems with interpreting these types of experiments. The first, which the authors acknowledge, is that there are often numerous ways to interpret such results. Human thought and behavior is multifactorial and very complex, with many factors coming into play and influencing our behavior. It’s very difficult to tease apart all these influences and isolate the one factor you are interested in – in this case the effect of analytic thought on religiosity.  There always seems to be a trail of assumptions leading up to any one interpretation. Are the measures of religiosity really measuring religiosity? Are the measures of analytic thought really measuring analytic thought? Are the priming stimuli affecting analytic thought, or something else that might produce a similar result?

Perhaps, for example, factors such as the willingness to be honest, or go against perceived social convention were influencing answers to questions such as, do you believe in god? People tend to have multiple psychological and situational influences affecting their behavior in the moment, and often have conflicting motivations. People, for example, may simultaneously view themselves as rational and pious, or have a desire to impress their teachers with analytic performance and their parents by following their religious belief. The priming may have given a nudge to one social pressure over another.

The hard to read font (called a disfluency test) seem particularly subject to alternative interpretations. Perhaps the font just makes subjects more attentive and less distracted, forcing them to process the language more consciously. This could explain better performance on analytic tasks. It might also explain lower reported religiosity – perhaps subjects are not really feeling less religious when working harder to read a font, but are simply more engaged with their “student” role or have less mental energy to worry about appearing pious. These are simply speculations, the point is that interpreting the results of these types of studies is anything but straightforward.

My second concern about interpreting such research is that the priming effects are all immediate, and therefore could simply be situational. One thing psychological studies (and performance magic) have clearly shown is that people are easy to manipulate (at least statistically). There are many situational factors that influence our immediate behavior, by engaging or inhibiting one or more of the many factors that are simultaneously influencing our behavior. In other words – these manipulations may not be changing our personality or the balance of social and cognitive influences on our behavior, but are simply emphasizing one or a groups of such influences in the moment of the study.

In the end what we learn is that human behavior is multifactorial – we have lots of buttons that can be pressed. Psychologists are learning what the buttons are and how to press them, having a modest if statistically significant effect on behavior, but that is not the same thing as identifying a dominant or determining influence on a behavior. It is also probable that those subjects in such studies who are affected by the button-pushing have a balance of influences on the thing being measured, so that subtly pushing on one will change their behavior. But most subjects are not affected, because other influences are dominant and not subject to easy manipulation. In these studies, having deeply held religious beliefs or being a confirmed atheist was unlikely to be influenced the priming. Being conflicted in the first place, however, may make someone easy to push in one direction or the other.

Despite all my concerns, I do think the researchers have likely zeroed in on one influence of religious belief (broadly conceptualized). Most people have both the tendency to think intuitively and to think analytically, in some balance, and can engage in either one or both depending on the situation. Some people are obviously more intuitive and others more analytic. Research (such as that in cognitive therapy) also does seem to suggest that people can change the way they think with training and effort. Thinking style is probably a combination of inherent tendency and habit, the latter can be changed over time with effort.

What I really want to know is  - how can we get people to shift their balance of thought style to be more analytic, at least in the appropriate situations. The questions above, for example, have objective correct answers, so this is not just a matter of style or personal choice. Part of the goal of organized skepticism is to give people the tools to think analytically and the motivation to do it when necessary. This research doesn’t tell us anything about how to do this or how easy or difficult it is to do so.  There is other research that sort-of addresses these questions, but it too is subject to interpretation.

This kind of research is difficult, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or that the results of such studies are worthless. It means we have to be cautious when interpreting the results, and it takes many many studies to triangulate to and isolate specific variables and the role they play in our thought and behavior. These studies are interesting, but they are one tiny piece in a large and complex puzzle.

Recently I was asked about another member of this category – coherent breathing. I bet you didn’t realize that you could use training in how to breath optimally. You probably naively assumed that the elaborate autonomic, respiratory, and circulatory systems that evolved over millions of years would have already optimized something as basic to life and physiology as breathing. You lazily just let your brainstem drive your respiration based on things like blood CO2 and oxygen levels, and let your autonomic nervous system regulate your heart rate and blood pressure. Why bother making a conscious effort to control your breathing when it will happen all by itself without any effort on your part.

Well, if you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a seminar you can learn how to synchronize your breathing with your heart rate. What will this accomplish, you may ask? Absolutely nothing – but it will make money for the guys running the seminar.

Here’s the idea – you can synchronize your breathing with your heart rate. This makes pretty pictures of pressure waves that people can graph and they will look really impressive to the scientifically illiterate. This will allow the blood that flows out from your heart through the arteries to match the blood that returns to the heart through the veins – because otherwise… Wait, there must be something more to this. I’m sure the Coherence website will have a coherent explanation for what is happening. They write:

When we don’t breathe productively over a long period of time, the parasympathetic nervous system becomes dysfunctional.

So if I don’t breathe correctly my autonomic nervous system will become messed up. I wonder why we evolved that way? You would think that if breathing properly was so critical to health and performance we would just naturally breath that way.

Seriously, I cannot find an understandable explanation on any of the available articles or websites on this issue for what is supposed to be happening. They talk endlessly about synchronization, and they talk about the real relationship between breathing and pressure in the cardiovascular system (as if they discovered it). This is all basic physiology, but then they add a layer of nonsense without ever making a real explanation for it. It’s wonderful pseudoscientific technobabble – lots of sciencey sounding words, but no real content.

Apparently a martial artist named Stephen Elliott invented this particular health pseudoscience. I could not find any publications by him or regarding coherent breathing. This is always a good indicator of the status of such claims. Having a trail of published research is no guarantee that a claim is true – most new ideas in science are wrong, and most preliminary studies will be false positives. But when a paper trail of research seems to be completely lacking, that probably indicates you are dealing with a “just make shit up” pseudoscience.

There are vague references to “our research” on the websites, but no actual research.

Typically, when I write about such obscure health products or notions some distributor or devotee will show up in the comments. They will commonly make two claims. First they will claim there is research, and sometimes they can even provide a link. This is usually to research that has nothing directly to do with the claims but is just being used to make it seem like the claims are evidence-based. I’m sure, for example, that coherent breathing proponents can link to physiology research demonstrating the relationship between breathing and blood pressure. This is just basic science that deals with the same topic. They can’t, however, link to peer reviewed independent research that actually demonstrates their claims. Sometimes they link to in-house studies that are completely worthless and are not published in a peer-reviewed journal, or are published in the obscure journal of alternative nonsense.  This is often accompanied by the claim that we just don’t know the research.

Many people falsely believe that if you can link to even a single study, or a single researcher, that is making a claim then it is evidence-based. This is completely wrong, however. In order for a new phenomenon to be established you need to see a pattern of research, with replication and verification of basic concepts, and exploration of alternative interpretations, with a consensus building toward the new conclusion. We don’t see that with these fringe claims (that’s why they are fringe). Rather we typically see either nothing, or bad research by an  isolated group or proponents.

The second type of claim that proponents often make when they stumble upon my blog deconstructing their favorite pseudoscience is their own anecdotal experience. They tell us how it has changed their life or their health, and apparently have no idea about placebo effects or the misleading nature of anecdotal experience. They then quickly become frustrated when their naive claims are met with skepticism.

We’ll see if that happens here (or perhaps my preemptive strike will prevent it). I hope it does anyway, as true believers do a better job of showing  how vacuous and pseudoscientific their beliefs are than I can.

I and other science bloggers can only scratch the surface of the many made up claims that are out there, proliferating on the internet. That is why it is important to develop the skills to evaluate such claims for yourself. It is good to at least develop some “red flags” that will make you skeptical of the claims. Coherent breathing has many such red flags: the lone guru who has apparently discovered something missed by the rest of the relevant scientific community, the lack of a history of published peer-reviewed research, the use of jargon that you cannot make sense out of (in other words, the inability to explain the phenomenon in plain language so that it makes sense), and extraordinary claims for wide ranging benefits.

While it may be difficult to tease out the contribution of genetic hard-wiring to things like belief in fairies, I think it remains an open question and it is not implausible that there is a significant contribution in some cases. Perhaps to some extent the conflict between skeptics and true believers is really a competition between different  versions of human brain wiring. Perhaps we will need to just accept this neurodiversity (its existence, if not its effect on our culture).

While this is a fascinating question, at the same time I feel there is a tendency in popular culture, especially among journalists and (ironically) some purveyors of dubious products and services, to reframe many phenomena with specific reference to the brain. Old fashioned learning is now “training your brain,” for example. While this is technically true, it makes it seem like a new, targeted, reductionist technology when in fact it’s just practice and learning.

A recent study explored one small aspect of the question of brain function and spirituality – researchers asked themselves if those healers and gurus who claim to be able to see a human aura are really synaesthetes, people with a hyperrobust connection among different brain regions that make them smell color, taste sound, feel numbers, or otherwise experience one sensation or experience with an overlay of another sensation. There is a form of synaethesia in which people experience the faces of those familiar to them as having a specific color.

This is a reasonable and interesting hypothesis. I generally try to avoid speculating about people’s motivations, but it I do often wonder what is going on in the minds of someone who claims to see something (like an aura) that is simply not there. I tend to chalk it up to the power of suggestion and self-deception, but perhaps in some cases the person really is seeing something. If true, the face-color synaesthesias hypothesis would bring aura reading in line with many other similar phenomena in which people are sincere, they are just misinterpreting a brain phenomenon as if it were an external phenomenon.

My favorite example of this is hypnagogia, or waking dreams. People have a real experience in which upon awakening they are paralyzed and feel a threatening presence. It is a real and scary experience, and is often interpreted as a demonic visit, alien abduction, or whatever is culturally appropriate. However it is really a well known neurological phenomenon, a parasomnia or abnormal sleep phenomenon. In other words – it is an internal brain experience, but can seem like a real external experience to the person having it.

It would be nice to have a similar explanation of something like seeing auras. It’s a tidy little explanation, and it is a bit easier to explain to people that they are experiencing a real brain phenomenon rather than that they are likely just self-deluded.

Unfortunately, the hypothesis seems to be wrong. The researchers analyzed the subjective reports of four people with face-color synaesthesia. They then compared this to reports and descriptions of people seeing alleged auras. They concluded:

“The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar.”

That means they are probably not the same thing. For example, synaesthetes see color superimposed over a person, while aura reader see it as a halo. Synaesthetes see one color, while aura readers often discuss layers of color. Synaesthetes generally experience their phenomenon from childhood, while aura reading can apparently be learned.

Of course this is a small study, and is therefore not the final word on this notion. However, there is no evidence for the synaesthesia-aura hypothesis. It is simply a new hypothesis without any evidence. The authors did a preliminary test of this hypothesis and found it to be lacking, so it is probably not worth pursuing further. Other researchers may decide to revisit the question, now that it has been raised, but until then all we have is a hypothesis that failed to get out of the gate.

Amazingly, the media has universally (as far as I have seen so far) misreported this item and have come to the opposite conclusion. Science Daily writes:”Synesthesia May Explain Healers Claims of Seeing People’s ‘Aura’”. Other outlets remove the “may”, and some even substitute the word “prove.”

This is an example of terrible science news reporting, and a major weakness of the current internet-based news infrastructure. It seems that the many news outlets reporting this story are mostly just reprinting one original source – a news report from the University of Granada. Somehow they got the story exactly wrong (erring on the side of sensationalism), and this error has been propagated throughout countless science news outlets and paranormal websites throughout the web. No one, apparently, clicked through to the original article. The article is behind a paywall, but the freely available abstract plainly states the phenomena are not the same.

Now a hypothesis that may be interesting but is without a shred of evidence, and in fact the one test of the hypothesis is negative, is being reported as if it were proven, and this meme-genie is out of the bottle.

Interestingly, this is also not the first time this hypothesis has been raised. In an article in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2011, Bridgette M. Perez and Terence Hines write about auras and bring up the synaesthesia hypothesis. They refer to prior case reports of color synaesthesia, such as the case of GW reported on in 2004. In this case GW sees color associated with people he has an emotional connection to, and even words or concepts that are emotional, such as love. This is one of those features that do not, however, fit well with seeing aura, which are not limited to people with a personal or emotional connection. While GW does not believe in mysticism, Perez and Hines report:

“It is especially interesting that in two separate samples, Zingrone, Alvarado, and Agee (2009) found that individuals who reported seeing auras were significantly more likely to report synesthetic events.”

Interesting, but circumstantial. Given the weight of the evidence it seems that the connection between auras and synaesthesia is speculative and based on superficial similarities that are likely coincidental. The new study, if anything, is a deeper look at the question, finding the hypothesis lacking.

You will learn none of this, unfortunately, reading the lay press, but instead will be led toward the exact opposite (but more headline worthy) conclusion.

Let’s go through and count the logical fallacies and contradictions. She wonders:

What exactly makes a medical treatment accepted and trusted by mainstream society? Does it make a difference if a practitioner wears a white coat and gets employed through the health service? Do they need a certificate and letters after their name? Or do we trust someone who has learnt ancient teachings using the laws and patterns of nature?

She begins by begging the question about what creates medical authority, and in so doing creates a straw man (a nice double). She cites some of the superficial trappings of legitimacy (formal recognition, degrees, and the standard uniform of the trade), as if this is what people trust about mainstream medicine. She could have asked – is it the years of training and education, the culture of science and self-criticism, the mountain of hard-won evidence, or perhaps the layers of regulation?

She then follows with another double: a false assumption that again begs the question, leading to the naturalistic fallacy – do ancient teachings reflect legitimate laws and patterns of nature? Pre scientific cultures generally did not understand much about how nature works (the laws and patterns). Even ancient cultures had certainly accumulated a great deal of practical knowledge about their environment, but they had no clue about underlying laws. So they invented fanciful philosophies to explain the mysteries of nature. They invented mysterious energies, spirits, astrological connections and cycles, and bizarre notions about how our bodies work. To venerate these hopelessly superstitious ideas from the perspective of 21st century science is curious.

By the way – she managed to squeeze in an argument from antiquity as well. I hope you’re keeping count.

The logical fallacies keep coming:

In East Asia however, it is regarded as being commonplace with it accounting for an estimated 40 per cent of all health care delivered. When you take that percentage and consider the population of China (roughly 1.3 billion) compared to the world population (roughly 7 billion), that’s a lot of people who trust TCM.

This is a clear argument from popularity – people in China trust TCM, so maybe we should also. In addition to being a logical fallacy, this argument betrays a superficial understanding of the history of medicine in China. Large cities in China and those with resources seek and rely upon modern scientific medicine. TCM was mostly a traditional practice of rural and poor China. This practice was significantly increased by Mao’s “barefoot doctor” program. Unable to provide modern medicine to the masses, he instituted a program of giving some medical training to traditional practitioners as an inexpensive way to provide some care to the masses.

Acupuncture is widely used, but mainly as an adjunct for pain relief, not it’s own medical system. This reflects the fact that acupuncture is deeply culturally embedded, as is the underlying belief in chi – or life energy. Traquair is essentially arguing that we should take acupuncture seriously because it is a popular superstition in a densely populated country.

It gets worse:

So let’s take a step back and consider why we seem to trust “new” medicine more than Mother Nature and treatment of symptoms rather than an analysis of their cause. There was a time when our scientific medicine was viewed as a type of witchcraft.

Let’s see – argument from antiquity (framed as a distrust in things “new”, with scare quotes), then naturalistic fallacy, followed by a straw man and then capped off by a non sequitur. Wow. Let me address the new fallacy here, the claim that modern medicine treats symptoms and that “natural” medicine analyzes their cause. First let’s list all the underlying causes of disease and illness discovered by TCM or other ancient medical traditions: there’s the blockage of chi, imbalance of the four humors, miasmas, evil spirits… Oh wait, those things are all fake.

Meanwhile, one major premise of science-based medicine is to always look for underlying causes, as much as possible. Of course, when modern medicine does this it is often criticized by advocates of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) as being “reductionist.” Modern medicine has discovered germs, nutrition, genetic disorders, anatomical and physiological causes of disease, toxins, abnormal electrical signals in the brain, and much more. Modern medicine is built upon a large body of knowledge concerning biology, physiology, biochemistry, genetics, developmental biology, anatomy, and psychology. Understanding the pathophysiology of disease is nothing less than an obsession of modern medicine and the focus of thousands of research papers every year. It boggles the mind that someone (an investigative journalist, no less) can wave their hand dismissively and discount this all as “treating symptoms.”

Now here comes the major self-contradiction of the article. She writes:

For nearly 2000 years, bloodletting was the most common medical practice performed by doctors. It was used to treat almost every disease and involved bleeding a patient by puncturing an artery in the forearm or the neck. Barbers rather than physicians used to perform this procedure, which is why we still see red and white poles outside barber shops today. Thankfully it petered out in the late 19th century.

That’s right – and what can we learn from this? That 2000 years of use (the argument from antiquity) is no guarantee of being legitimate, or even not being rank pseudoscience. That being the popular belief of a major portion of the world (popularity) says nothing about legitimacy. Traquair fails to make the obvious analogy here – acupuncture is bloodletting. Bloodletting did not just “peter out” – it was replaced by scientific medicine, by the embrace of western physicians of the burgeoning scientific tradition. This was formalized in the Flexner report, which significantly transformed modern medicine and solidified its science-based culture. This did not happen in China. Instead they got Mao’s barefoot doctors, solidifying their equivalent of bloodletting as traditional medicine.

In fact, acupuncture has more in common with bloodletting than Traquair probably supposes. I have already written about this – the historical connections between the eastern ideas of chi and acupuncture and the western ideas of the humors and bloodletting.  Throughout most of its history, acupuncture was just a form of bloodletting. It was transformed in the early 20th century into something closer to its modern concept, of altering energy. In traditional Asian thinking, however, chi and blood were the same. The chi flowed through the blood, and you freed it by releasing the blood. Acupuncture is bloodletting.

It gets worse:

It’s easy for us in the 21st century to snigger at our ancestors’ attempts at curing illness. Are our ancestors sniggering in their graves as we tackle modern diseases caused by our convenient, man-made and chemically enhanced lives? Who is to say we won’t get sniggered at by future generations? Will they laugh at our attempts to cut out, burn and poison cancer?

This passage is so confused and nonsensical it barely even rises to being a logical fallacy (which requires at least some logic, even if fallacious). Essentially she is making an appeal to future authority. This is a common and non-falsifiable ploy – in the future, those wise and knowledgeable people will know that I am right and you are wrong.

Let us also try to imagine our ancestors from a time before modern medicine. Their life expectancy was about 40 years, at which time they probably did not have teeth, had lost many family members to now-treatable diseases, and likely suffered from many ailments from which there was little relief available. If they did live long enough to get cancer, they had no hope of any treatment. It would slowly ravage their bodies until they died a horrible death. Perhaps they were lucky enough to live in a time of surgery without modern anaesthesia – at least then the tumor might be removed and they would probably pass out from the pain before the procedure was done. Yes, I am sure they are sniggering at our 80 year life expectancy and our treatments for every minor ailment.

She does give us a flicker of understanding, but then quickly snatches it away:

I’m not for one second criticising the amazing advances we’ve made in medicine. It is, quite frankly, miraculous what modern medicine does and we must continue to fund research so more cures can be found and causes identified.

What I am doing is questioning why we discard ancient treatments as alternative. Note: I mean treatments that DON’T involve draining your body of blood.

Yes, yes – we have to give grudging acknowledgment of the amazing advances of modern medicine – even though she is contradicting what she just said about treating symptoms. So which is it? But then she gives us another naive straw man. Ancient treatments are not discarded because they are “alternative.” That term was invented by proponents, not science-based critics. Ancient treatment are discarded because they do not work and are based on ideas we now know to be wrong. It is ironic that she draws our attention to her fallacy by bringing up bloodletting again. It’s as if she is almost making the connection but is drowning in too much CAM propaganda to see straight. It is OK, apparently, to discard some ancient treatments, like bloodletting, if they come from your own culture and are not currently in vogue. But why dismiss treatments from other cultures that are just as superstitious and unscientific?

She finishes with an endorsement of cupping, because the irony of her self-contradiction was not thick enough:

It looks bizarre and feels even weirder as small glass cups heated by s flame get stuck to your body. It’s like a reverse massage because your skin and muscles get sucked away from the body. This treatment I found just plain old relaxing.

I have a news flash for our intrepid investigative journalist – cupping is bloodletting. The whole point of the cups is to draw blood to the surface so that it can be lanced. Notice the blood in this video. Like acupuncture, cupping has been rebranded by some to give it a more modern appeal, so now practitioners are not sucking out blood, they are sucking out “toxins.” Don’t worry about which toxins and how they are drawn out or any of those sciencey “reductionist” details – you know our modern society is swimming in toxins, and that superficial notion should be enough.

Conclusion

This article by Traquair is a product of decades of marketing propaganda by those selling and promoting quackery. She regurgitates the standard fallacious arguments that have been endlessly promoted by CAM advocates for years, without even realizing when she is contradicting herself. They are isolated memes and ideas, like commercial jingles and slogans, and not a substitute for actual analysis and thought. Ancient and natural is good, modern is bad. They treat symptoms, Mother Nature cures, etc.

The only investigation apparent in her article is a couple of anecdotes about her own experience. It is obvious she has not spoken to anyone who holds the position she is attempting to criticize. She has not looked into the background of the topics she discusses. This also is not an isolated example of pro-CAM logical fallacies. This is the standard within the CAM community. She may be a little more clumsy than some of the leading lights of the CAM movement, but her fallacies are their fallacies. CAM apologetics is an intellectually hollow endeavor, but apparently is effective with the naive and incurious.

In 1998, a retired cable TV executive named Clint Ober sat on a park bench in Sedona, Arizona. As he watched the passing parade of tourists, it occurred to him that almost everybody—him included—wore synthetic plastic or rubber soled shoes. He wondered if such footwear, which had increasingly replaced leather since the 1960s, could impact health.

This follows the typical guru narrative – an individual makes a single observation or hits upon an idea, which is then presented as if it’s a breakthrough scientific discovery. From this one notion that rubber soles have replaced leather soles in recent years, Ober makes up his pseudoscience of earthing. Science-babble gobbledygook follows:

The research that followed has produced fascinating evidence demonstrating that Earthing generates a powerful and positive shift in the electrical state of the body and restores natural self-healing and self-regulating mechanisms.

We know that Earthing allows a transfer of electrons (the Earth’s natural, subtle energy) into the body. We know that inflammation is caused by free radicals and that free radicals are neutralized with electrons from any source. Electrons are the source of the neutralizing power of antioxidants.

Ober is taking a very simplistic view of the whole concept of grounding. The term has several specific meanings, but the one Ober is going for is the connection of a system to the earth to provide a low resistance path for the flow of electrical charge (either positive or negative). The earth essentially serves as an infinite reservoir, which can be either a source of electrons or a bottomless pit for them.

Grounding is used as a safety precaution for electrical equipment and working with metal or other conductive material that might come into contact with electricity (from lightning or power lines, for example). The low resistance path to the ground means that any static electrical build up or any short circuit or lightning strike can be dumped harmlessly into the earth, rather than cause damage to the equipment or an operator.

Ober distorts this concept, claiming that the earth is a source of electrons that gently flow into the body curing whatever ails you. A further premise is that simply by wearing shoes with rubber soles we are so thoroughly isolated electrically that our bodies cannot reach their natural electrical homeostasis. Our bodies, according to Ober, must be craving electrons, but simply cannot get them from the environment without a special connection to the ground. I guess sitting, lying down, and touching objects in our environment are not enough. Those rubber soles are just too efficient at isolating us (according to Ober).

The fact that electrons flow to and from us through everyday contact is made apparent by static electricity. If you ever got a shock from touching a door nob, then you experienced the transfer of electrons.

Completely blowing the physics aside, Ober and his accomplices then go on to butcher biology. The earthing site claims, as in the quote above, that inflammation is caused by free radicals. This is simply not true. The relationship between free radicals and inflammation is a complex one. It is probably more true to say that inflammation (which is caused by specific cells and proteins produced in an inflammatory response) causes the production of free radicals, which are used to cause cell damage. Free radicals are part of the weapons the immune system uses to damage invading organisms, for example. This also causes damage to host tissue as a necessary byproduct. Abnormal inflammation, of course, can primarily cause tissue damage.

Further, reducing free radicals is not a panacea. Free radicals are part of normal physiology and are used not only as part of the necessary function of the immune system but in many regulatory systems. Suppressing free radicals may therefore cause more harm than good.

Finally, in order to neutralize free radicals you need specific chemicals (anti-oxidants), not just free electrons. Free radicals, in fact, cause their damage because they have an unpaired electron. Electrons want to be paired, so free radicals are highly chemically reactive, stealing electrons from other chemicals and causing damage. Those chemicals then lack an electron and will steal it from another chemical in a chain reaction.  Anti-oxidants are able to provide an extra electron without becoming a free radical themselves, so they break the chain reaction. Their extra electron, however, is part of their chemical structure. It is not dependent upon being connected to an external source of electrons. That makes as much sense as saying that water is essential for life, and hydrogen is part of water, so hydrogen gas is healthy for you.

Every link in the earthing chain of argument is therefore wrong. It is little more than free associating with sciencey terms (i.e., making shit up).

Earthing is a true pseudoscience in that it claims to be scientific. Here is a list of allegedly supporting research from the earthing institute. The studies are typical of the kind of worthless studies designed to generate false positives – the kind of “in house” studies that companies sometimes use so that they can claim their products are “clinically proven.” Reading through the individual studies (summarized here) you can see that they are all small pilot or preliminary studies with atrocious methodology. They are little more than documenting placebo effects, subjective findings, and anomaly hunting.

What is lacking are rigorous studies that are designed to establish the basic claims of earthing or to show convincing evidence of a positive clinical effect.  Once study reports:

Most grounded subjects described symptomatic improvement while most in the control group did not. Some subjects reported significant relief from asthmatic and respiratory conditions, rheumatoid arthritis, PMS, sleep apnea, and hypertension while sleeping grounded. These results indicated that the effects of earthing go beyond reduction of pain and improvements in sleep.

This is actually not evidence for wide ranging effects from grounding, but for poor study design. When a treatment appears to treat everything that is evidence for poor controls and blinding. It is likely evidence that it treats nothing. Obstructive sleep apnea is an anatomical problem – closing off of the airway during sleep. It is not treatable physiologically. There is no plausibility to the notion that anything like earthing (even if it did something in the body) could relieve sleep apnea. The inclusion of sleep apnea in the list of ailments that earthing seems to treat simply invalidates the entire list.

Conclusion

The pattern of pseudoscience displayed by the claims for earthing is endlessly repeated, but tends to contain the same elements. One person is typically portrayed as a scientific visionary, who hits upon something the rest of the scientific community has missed, often based on a single observation (a eureka narrative). The basic claim is then connected to a series of claims that distort and misrepresent our current understanding of science. The claims are sometimes supported by terrible scientific studies designed to produce false positive results. All of this leads to marketing claims for some product or products. A cynical person might suspect that the entire thing was invented out of whole cloth in order to sell dubious products at inflated prices because of their astounding health claims.

As with any complex area of scientific research, perhaps the best way to evaluate the question is to put together a panel of experts to review all the existing evidence and then come up with a consensus opinion about that evidence. This is no guarantee of being right – the primary issue that tends to come up with such expert panels is that they were systematically biased toward one side of the debate. But assuming no major asymmetry in the constitution of an expert panel, they are an excellent way to evaluate the current state of the evidence on a specific question. Even better, of course, is when multiple independent panels all agree.

Recently an expert panel for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA) reviewed the evidence for cell phone safety concluded that there is no clear evidence for any harm. This is good news. Their findings are similar to other reviews of the evidence, although often there is a difference in emphasis. For example, last year the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reviewed the same evidence and concluded that:

 ”the evidence, while still accumulating, is strong enough to support a conclusion and the 2B classification. The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”

They are not really saying anything different from the HPA – both groups concluded that there is no clear evidence of risk, but that further monitoring is prudent. The HPA, however, chose to emphasize that there is no conclusive evidence of risk, while the IARC chose to emphasize that there is no conclusive evidence that there is no risk. There  classification means that there may or may not be a risk, but further research is warranted. Meanwhile the FDA has concluded that: “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked cell phones with any health problems.” The Federal Communications Commission has this to say:

“There is no scientific evidence that proves that wireless phone usage can lead to cancer or a variety of other problems, including headaches, dizziness or memory loss. However, organizations in the United States and overseas are sponsoring research and investigating claims of possible health effects related to the use of wireless telephones.”

These all sound like variations of the same conclusion – there is no clear evidence of harm or risk, but we should continue to do research and monitor the results. Overall there is more caution when children are concerned, because there are fewer studies, children’s heads are smaller, and if cell phone use is started at a young age then lifetime use will be greater. Still there is no evidence of harm, but there are a priori reasons for greater caution.

Getting back to the new review by the HPA, here are their key conclusions:

• The evidence suggests that RF field exposure below guideline levels does not cause symptoms in humans and that the presence of RF fields cannot be detected by people, including those who report being sensitive to RF fields.
• A large number of studies have now been published on cancer risks in relation to mobile phone use. Overall, the results of studies have not demonstrated that the use of mobile phones causes brain tumours or any other type of cancer.
• As mobile phone technology has only been in widespread public use relatively recently, there is little information on risks beyond 15 years from first exposure. It is therefore important to continue to monitor the evidence, including that from national brain tumour trends. These have so far given no indication of any risk.
• Studies of other RF field exposures, such as those at work and from RF transmitters, have been more limited but have not given evidence that cancer is caused by these exposures.
• Research on other potential long-term effects of RF field exposures has been very limited, but the results provide no substantial evidence of adverse health effects; in particular for cardiovascular morbidity and reproductive function.

Pigeons, therefore, may get a general direction and orientation so that they know which direction to head in. Once they get to familiar territory they then can use visual and olfactory information to zero in on their home. There has been robust research and at times fierce debate about all of these mechanisms. The one that seems to get the most attention in the press is the orientation to the earth’s magnetic field, which is the subject of a new interesting study.

Researchers looking at the brains of pigeons have found 53 neurons that appear to fire in response to the presence, strength, and orientation of an external magnetic field. If true this would point to an important component of the pigeons “gps” system for sensing not only their directional orientation, but perhaps even their general location. The neurons also seemed to have a maximal response to the approximate field strength of the earth’s magnetic field.

This is all very cool, and could add significantly to our growing model of how pigeons and perhaps other birds sense the earth’s magnetic field and use it for direction. But now let’s consider some important caveats.

First, this is a single study. It needs to be independently replicated with more subjects and better controls. At this point we cannot assume the phenomenon is even real. Many initial findings of this sort do not hold up to replication. If it does hold up, then we will also need to learn more about how these neurons are actually working together to create a positional sense, and see how their function correlates to pigeon behavior.

Further, this study is looking at the “neural correlate” of the pigeons magnetic sense. We still need to discover what the sensing organ is – what organ is actually sensing the magnetic field and sending that information to this cluster of neurons? There have been several hypotheses, but none have been proven. Recently one hypothesis, that the sensing organ was a certain group of iron-containing cells in the pigeons beak, was disproved. It turns out the cells in question were macrophages - cells of the immune system. But it is still possible there are other cells in the beak, or there may be a sensing organ in the inner ear or even in the eyes of pigeons. We simply don’t know.

This is a great example of science at work. We have a phenomenon that is well-established – the ability of pigeons to sense and partly navigate according to the earth’s magnetic field. Scientists have been trying to explain this phenomenon in reductionist terms for decades. The pigeon must have some sensing organ that is capable of responding to the magnetic field, and the pigeon brain must respond to this sensory input in a meaningful way that correlates with direction and/or position. Various hypotheses are being explored and sometimes rejected. Different lines of evidence are also being compared to see if they correlate or conflict.

This is all leading to the goal of developing one coherent model of navigation by magnetic field sensing that explains the phenomenon from beginning to end and not only is consistent with but actually explains every aspect of the phenomenon. It taking time as it’s turning out to be a tricky problem to solve, but I have no doubt that scientists will eventually solve this puzzle.

For those of us who deal with fringe science often it’s easy to forget that regular science is happening all the time, without any paranormal or pseudoscientific controversy. No one is complaining about hyper-reductionist pigeon science, or how “Big Homing Pigeon” is distorting the science.  There are no “Western” or “Eastern” approaches to homing pigeons. There’s probably some crank out there claiming that pigeons use their favorite form a magic to navigate, but if so it’s obscure enough to comfortably ignore.

It is helpful to see how real science operates. It is also helpful to see how the press reports such genuine and ongoing scientific controversies. Typically each study is presented with little context as if it is a definitive blow for one side or one theory. In reality, each study is a baby step adding to the overall endeavor, and only has meaning when put into the proper context of all the other research. That takes good science journalism, however, which is often lacking.

This new study is interesting but it needs to be replicated, at the very least. Then we can see how it fits into the bigger picture of pigeon navigation. It is a fascinating scientific question, one that I have followed for years. I will probably have to follow it for many years to come before a consensus solution emerges. Real science takes time.