Yesterday I discussed a recent article claiming 10 lines of evidence supporting the claim that consciousness can directly alter reality. I addressed the first five claims in the list. Here are the next five.

6. The Placebo Effect

The author claims:

“It suggests that one can treat various ailments by using the mind to heal. Many studies have shown that the placebo effect (the power of consciousness) is real and highly effective.”

This is a common misconception, but it is demonstrably not true. Placebo effects (plural) are mostly reporting bias, regression to the mean, investment justification, researcher bias, and other sources of self-deception. They are transient, and significant only for subjective symptoms where reporting bias can play a major role. Studies have shown, in fact, that there is no significant “healing” that occurs due to placebo effects – no objective biological improvement.

I discuss placebo effects at length here, here, here, and here.

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I love the documentary series, The Day the Universe Changed, by James Burke. It’s a follow up to his equally good, Connections (I know, they have their criticisms, but overall they are very good). The former title is a metaphor – when our collective model of reality changes, for us the universe does change. When we believed the earth was motionless at the center of the universe, that was our reality.

But Burke was not arguing that the nature of the universe actually changed, just our conception of it. Thinking alone cannot directly change external reality. That is magical thinking.

Such thinking, however, lies at the center of much new age spiritual claims. The secret of The Secret is that you can change your world by wishing. Proponents of such ideas are desperate for scientific validation of their basic premise. Such evidence does not exist. In fact over a century of such research shows rather conclusively that there is no such effect in operation in our world to any significant degree.

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One of the new realities of social media is that old news can be dredged up and spread around. In this way old memes can keep coming back to life like the Terminator, and we have to kill them over and over again.

The antivaccine crowd, for example, has their narrative of conspiracy and evil and their cherry-picked factoids to support their narrative. In their world vaccines don’t work and are all bad all the time, and only corporate evil and public malfeasance can support them. They scour the internet for anything to support their beliefs, and then splash it around as if it’s news.

In this case, they have resurrected a terrible survey from 1992. The survey was conducted in New Zealand by the Immunization Awareness Society. Unsurprisingly, when this anti-vaccine group surveyed their own anti-vaccine members, they found a higher incidence of disease among vaccinated children compared to unvaccinated children.

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I have argued that HIV treatment is one of the shining examples of the success of reductionist modern medicine. In three decades we went from knowing nothing about a new disease that was almost universally fatal over a few years, to having an extensive understanding of the disease and reducing it to a manageable chronic illness. We still have not created an effective vaccine, nor have we figured out how to cure the disease entirely, but those are both active research programs with promising results.

Recent developments show how sophisticated our technology is becoming. Researchers just published a safety study in the NEJM in which they took the white cells from patients with HIV, treated them to make them resistant to the virus, and then transfused them back into the patients. There was one serious infusion reaction, but otherwise the procedure seemed safe.

HIV enters T-cells (part of the immune system) by attaching to a coreceptor called CCR5. There are rare individuals who have a mutation in the CCR5 gene which makes them resistant to HIV, demonstrating how important the receptor is to the life cycle of HIV. Researchers at the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility at the University of Pennsylvania used used a zinc-finger nuclease (ZFN) to render the CCR5 gene permanently dysfunctional in the T-cells taken from the patients, and then transfused the cells (about 10 billion of them) back into the patients.

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A new article published in PNAS warns of, Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security. They reviewed crop production worldwide over the last 50 years and found that:

“The increase in homogeneity worldwide portends the establishment of a global standard food supply, which is relatively species-rich in regard to measured crops at the national level, but species-poor globally.”

In other words, there has been a globalization of crop production, with more nations looking very similar to each other in terms of which crops they grow in what amounts. This has caused a shift to the major energy-dense crops (wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, and sugar) and a relative reduction in more nutrient dense foods. At the national level, species diversity remains high. However local varieties around the world are being displaced by the same energy dense crops internationally.

This has allowed countries around the world to increase their calorie production to help feed a growing human population. However, the trend also raises several concerns discussed by the authors.

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Five years ago I wrote a blog post about the product, Your Baby Can Read. I concluded:

While the background concepts are quite interesting, the bottom line is that we have another product being marketed to the public with amazing claims and no rigorous scientific evidence to back them up. This product also falls into the broader category of gimmicky products claiming to make children smarter or more successful academically.

Anxious parents wanting to give their kids every advantage is a great marketing demographic, in that they are easily exploited. But like all gimmicky schemes promising easy answers to complex or difficult problems (weight loss, relationships, or academic success) in the end it is likely to be nothing but a costly distraction from more common sense approaches – like just spending quality time with your kids and giving them a rich and safe environment.  What such products often really provide is a false sense of control.

The comments quickly filled with parents who had used the system, which claims to teach even infants how to read, saying that the system worked for them.

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