For those of you who watched the latest television special by Derren Brown, Derren Brown Investigates: The Man Who Contacts the Dead, this might be of some interest. For those who haven’t, please feel free to either immerse yourself in the scenario or else simply to avert your gaze and twiddle your thumbs for the next few moments.

The show, which aired on Channel 4 at 10pm on Wednesday of this week (you can watch it here on 40D) featured the self-styled psychic medium Joe Power. Derren approached the show from a sceptical perspective, which means that he suspended his opinion the subject of psychic mediumship until his investigation was finished and he was able to draw a conclusion based on a convergence of the available evidence.

Joe Power, however, seems to have taken umbrage to this and made a recent post on his website, which you can view here. In the post, he criticises Brown’s sceptical approach, apparently misunderstanding the meaning of the term, and accuses him of using foul play and coercion in an attempt to publicly defame him.

I composed a quick guestbook entry on Joe’s website, the content of which is moderated before posting. The entry in question suspiciously has not yet manifested on the website, which seems odd since others have been able to post quite freely since my attempt. For fear that it might never see the light of day and be condemned to lay lifeless on the cavernous floor of my laptop hard drive I have decided to reproduce the email here. You can read it in full by clicking here

I genuinely am curious as to what his reply might be and welcome any explanation that he might be able to provide in regards to my questions.

Feel free to peruse it at your leisure.

Filed under: Funny Stuffs, Like Woah... Interesting..., Reasoning, Scary Shiz-am!, Supernatural?, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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Whilst gently perusing the clinical pages of a certain Magazine written especially for New Scientists, I happened to chance upon the most compelling of articles. Amongst the latest auto-erotica on Darwinism, which no one but the most heinous, mustachioed, cat-stroking scientific types would deem noteworthy reading material, I found myself squinting at a piece written on a rather engorged group campaigning against allowing the inefficacy of the homeopathic method to creep into medicine. Their plan was to have a mass overdose of the so called “alternative” remedies, followed by a physical examination, on a specific date simply to prove that the whole matter is a rather large load of your mother’s best bologna sausage. In fact, you would probably receive more nutritional supplementation from devouring a large loaf of sausage meat than throwing the homeo-bollocks into your system. Anyway, overdose they did and guess what? Go on, have a little guess.

The experiment yielded very much the same sort of results you would expect to find in any objective and scientific test. Homeopathy does not cure illness, nor does it cause any. It left everyone precisely as they were. If that’s what a health care product is supposed to achieve then I would advise you all to start bottling air and selling it under the guise of being practitioner in Aereopathy. You might even like to devise some sort of theory based around the first piece of unfounded hocus-wankery that strikes you as quasi-intellectual.

Whilst I could indeed bore you, dear reader, with the usual bout of, “homeopathy would simply become medicine if it were proved anything other than as or less effective than a placebo”, I won’t. I am simply going to provide the link to the website of the campaign, which is rather extensive in its educational content, in the hope that you might read it and enrich yourself no end by realising that “alternative” remedies are for idiots who have a degree in business whilst medicine is championed by the refined, tested and proved-to-be-effective-on-a-regular-basis community known as science. Doctors might well, if they are lucky, have a degree in what stuff does stuff when you put it into your body and would therefore be a little more well intellectually-situated to make an objective judgement on your welfare than the money grabbing, prick-tits who prefer to thrust a sugar pill, dabbed with piss water, under your strangely unprotesting tongue.

If you believe that homeopathy, “works for some,” then CLICK HERE and learn yourself a thing or two.

If you don’t, then click it anyway and join the rest of us in laughing at the complete idiots who do.

Filed under: Funny Stuffs, Like Woah... Interesting..., Reasoning, Science, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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Recently rumours have been circulating in magazines and news articles about people who are being cured of their chronic fatigue syndrome (or M.E) by a fantastic new treatment, known as the Lightning Process by Phil Parker. The final straw that spurred me on to making this post was noticing a recent a BBC news segment, featuring the daughter of some jumped-up celebrity – no doubt with a penchant for New Age remedies and biting tree bark, or whatever these hippies like to do. She, like a few others, claimed that her post-viral fatigue (which these hippy-hoo-ha types always enjoy misrepresenting as M.E) was cured in a matter of hours by this wondrous method. The Lightning Process can, they say, render them completely fit and well after a ten minute session with a trained Lightning Process practitioner. It is, they continue to ramble, based on  an exciting and new technique called NLP.

Phil Parker himself claims to be a graduate of osteopathy and cranial osteopathy. He also pedals that he has training in applied kinesiology. He confidently asserts that he is a guru in NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming – which is, suspiciously, a registered trademark).

The problem is that I know precisely what NLP is, having researched the subject for a number of years. It is a crude falsification of psychotherapy, which makes use of its own brand of pseudoscientific jargon, designed to baffle the unwitting customer (yes, people pay for this bullshit) into believing that it has a foundation in tested and approved science. I also know that the rest of these complicated nouns are designed to appear as scientific fields, with their Greek derivations of “logos” tagged surreptitiously onto the end. However, they all remain ridiculous descriptors of nothing more than Voodoo-pseudo-chunga-dunga-hubba-chububba-witchcraft. Much like homeopathy, these other practices have never been proven to work or, in fact, proven not to work respectively by science.

Phil Parker doesn’t even seem to mind that the pseudosciences that he claims to be a master of aren’t even suited to remedying a bum-rash, let alone a complex physical syndrome like CFS. Chronic fatigue, contrary to the expert opinion of our world media, is a physical condition. It is not, as country-bumpkin types enjoy sneering, ‘all in your head’. It has physiological causation and there is an actual academic debate, based on medical science, as to its source happening right now between leading American research universities and our own British ones. The focus of those concerned with helping people and curing them of this debilitating ailment should be placed firmly on this fact, rather than allowing our media to pander to the underhanded, scheming money grabbers who have a tendency to play on people’s sense of wish fulfilment.

Having suffered with chronic fatigue syndrome for over five years, I have spoken to medical doctors and specialist CFS/ME clinics at length. I have spoken at conferences for the medical community and the educational community. Both myself and others have all raised our curiosities, before now, to doctors and psychologists (not psychiatrists) about the Phil Parker Lightning Process, perhaps out of that same sense of wish fulfilment. I would love to sit in a chair for ten minutes, be told that my illness was a result of my own overactive imagination and be sent home with my life whole and intact. Sadly this was not to be the case. Every legitimate doctor that I mentioned the Lightning Process to actually laughed. Of course the medical community have examined the Lightning Process and concluded that it was probably less effective than popping a stuffed toy up your bottom. I suppose that the old adage, “ask a stupid question and receive only stupid answers,” is appropriate in this case. Of course having someone chat with you isn’t going to cure a physiological illness. The world simply doesn’t work that way.

Now, I was entertaining the idea of writing a full-length article on the workings (or shortcomings, as is the case) of the Lightning Process, but I noticed that the website, ‘The Skeptic’s Dictionary’ has completed the task better than I could. Therefore, I would delight in redirecting you to that very same article:

CLICK HERE

Hopefully this will clear up any deluded ideas that you might currently possess about CFS/ME and indeed the Lightning Process itself.

Happy reading.

Filed under: Reasoning, Scary Shiz-am!, Science, Supernatural?, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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I find surprising the amount of commonly held misconceptions there are about evolution by natural selection. Popular misconception all too often leads to misinformed discourse. I offer the anecdote of a discussion I once had with a college philosophy teacher who, when teaching the basic principles of biological materialism and Darwinism, asserted that natural selection was an idea founded on a principle he described as ‘survival of the fittest’. Whilst one can make the intellectual leap in using the term ‘fit’ in an archaic context, it ultimately ends up confusing modern people who are simply seeking to gain a grasp on Darwin’s powerful ideas.

Within this one misnomer there exists a library of discrepancies with Darwin’s original phrasing, providing loopholes which tend to usher in unwarranted criticism. The first of which is the assumption that Darwin himself coined the misleading term. Darwin never used ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe the process of evolution by natural selection, as popular culture, fueled by a host of BBC documentaries, would have you imagine. In fact, the rather disgusting little piss-term was first used by one Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology some half a decade after the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). When one actually reads Darwin’s original text, it becomes apparent that ‘survival of the fittest’ is not a tautology, but a grave misinterpretation. Let’s examine Darwin’s own words on exactly the same subject (I have highlighted the important sections in bold type):

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

It seems uncontroversial to state that this makes perfectly clear Darwin’s intention to actively dissuade a ‘survival of the fittest’ type of interpretation of his work. He asserts that neither strength nor intelligence are the fundamental characteristics of a species well inclined for survival. Rather, both of these are resulting properties of adaptation. It might seem intuitive to think of an array of characteristics like strength, intelligence, speed and size as crucial to the survival of species and, for many examples, they are. However, when one considers the examples of species such as ants or the crane fly, it becomes apparent that there isn’t a characteristic in the animal kingdom which can’t be outmatched by a member of another species. Put simply, where one species excels others might fail.

Other examples include a hypothetical fight between a lion and a bear. Since the lion has always relied heavily on its speed and upper body strength to bring down antelope, it has never had any biological necessity for a particularly strong skull. In this sense the lion has been completely successful in its evolution, but it soon becomes apparent that it would not necessarily fair well if it was forced into locations anew. Consequently, if a lion were to ever come into contact with a grizzly bear of the forest it would likely have its head caved with a single strike. This is because the lion has adapted its attributes based on its surroundings, rather than simply evolving specific ones. If the individuals of a species cannot be successful in their versatility then they are likely to perish. Perhaps if the lion’s ancestors had been moved to a different part of the world by the continental drifts we might look upon a completely different animal. It might not even exist today. We cannot predict with any degree of certainty though since, being completely absent of consciousness, evolution has no foresight.

This notion of biological adaptation is central to Darwin’s theory. Herbert Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ not only undermines the power of natural selection as a general theory, but also grossly misleads and prevents a wide understanding of the topic. It can tend to encumber people with unfounded and poorly researched criticism. Unless one wishes to read On the Origin of Species in the same sense that they might interpret a metaphor, Darwin could not have been clearer about his meaning. Natural selection is not survival of the fittest, it is survival of those that adapt to their ever changing surroundings.

Filed under: Like Woah... Interesting..., Philosophical Thought, Reasoning, Science, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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Religious apologist: If there is no God, then where do morals come from?

I: Morals are a tool which evolved to facilitate altruism. We’d all be dead by now if people couldn’t behave nicely towards one another.

That is all.

Filed under: Philosophical Thought, Reasoning, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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We all know (or should by now) that the practice of homeopathy is a psuedo-science. However, with indoctrinating mantras such as, “Your homeopath understands,” and defiant slogans like, “Homeopathy worked for me!” the industry still continues to convert people searching for an “alternative” health care programme.  Homeopaths are paid on a private basis to practice a crude form of counseling on their patients. This method of simply sitting, listening for an hour or so and then plugging the customer with a large bill for ineffective “treatments” seems to appeal to certain people more than actual medicine. In fact, it is in stark contrast to scientific medical schemes such as the NHS who have a completely different perogative altogether. Perhaps it is this fact that makes the practice of homeopathy so apparently addictive to customers.

Though if you are concerned with what’s true in life, as I am, rather than simply choosing to subscribe to comforting lies you might find this sort of faux medical treatment slightly disturbing. So if you are a user of homeopathy and looking to break out of your current predicament, I have prepared a list of seven alternatives to their method which don’t make use of blatant falsehoods as fundamental building blocks.

Number 1:  Find yourself a friend
If it’s the aural aspect of homeopathy that appeals to you the most, I would ask if you have simply ever considered the free alternative of talking to a close friend. They tend to listen and give you an opinion back. They’re quite wonderful; one of my better inventions, I must say. However, if you prefer to discuss your innermost fears with complete strangers to alleviate a whole host of emotional pressures and obligations, the next option might be for you.

Number 2: Talk to a hobo
Hobo’s are slightly more expensive than friends. They do require the occasional tip of loose change or a sip of that whiskey from your brown paper bag, but they remain effective nonetheless. They will also give you a rather interesting alternative world view, as with the homeopath, if you book your appointment for the early hours of the morning. Although, if you prefer the more silent approach keep on reading.

Number 3: Talk to an animal e.g. a cat
Cats are wonderfully low-maintainence. They don’t talk much but they’re perfectly able to listen. They’re approximately as effective as a homeopath and I’ve read somewhere that if you share a saucer of milk with them, under the light of a full moon, they’re quite likely to do a little liquid number on your pillowcase (which is a wonderful remedy for earache).

Number 4: Talk to the ‘invisible people’
If you subscribe to homeopathy then the chances are that you can already hear them. Just have a natter back. Go on, it’s dead fun. Give yourself a tickle.

Number 5: Poke pennies up your bottom… Then talk to the tree in your garden
Don’t ask me why. It’s just about as effective as the treatments.

Number 6: Draw a face on a football, call it Wilson and prop it on a stick
What?! It worked for Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

Number 7: Talk to the Flying Spaghetti Monster
He does exist, trust me. I have this really old book that was compiled by forty different authors, around 100 years after all events pertaining to him took place. Since then it’s been revised and retranslated around seventy million times but the essence of the account is still there. It’s just those pesky scientists who keep disproving the historical validity of the accounts in the text that don’t believe. Who cares? They’re going to the simmering furnace in the center of the universe anyway.

Filed under: Funny Stuffs, Like Woah... Interesting..., Science, The Mind and Suggestibility, What Mark\'s Up to by Mark Brewer
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“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” – Aristotle

Sadly, the postmodern era has given rise to a dangerous idea. Dangerous in the sense that it is in idea in disguise. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, waiting to pounce. It is, you realise after a few glances, a despicable notion. It is one that can have quite terrifying implications and yet dresses itself as a sweetly innocent and fair concept, drawn up with bows ribbons.  Some might even be blind enough to praise it as a virtue in these modern times. I am speaking, of course, of the idea that everyone’s opinion holds equal merit.

This idea is appealing to the postmodernist and can be preached from that perspective with a kind of justice, but that justice is misplaced. In practicality the idea breaks down instantly. Like most examples of bad thinking, this one derives from a common misconception. People usually make some sort of salient connection between an individual’s opinions and their character value. The perception is that if someone makes commentary on a person’s opinion or beliefs, they are also making a commentary about that person themselves. This is not the case. Opinions are transient and can be altered by many factors, including the acquisition of knowledge. Using the learning process, opinions can gradually be proven fact (or at least, as close to a fact as humanly possible). In fact, if our opinions didn’t change during the course of our lifetime, or even daily lives for that matter, living and progressing in linear time would be made impossible.

Opinions are not facts. Wittgenstein defined facts as states of affairs within the model of reality. Facts are truths about our picture of the world. Facts are that which is. Opinions are can be described as subjective statements made about those facts. There is a great distinction. We as humans also have an odd tendency, due to our powers of imagination, to use opinions as a substitute for facts where knowledge of the said fact is nil. For example, when people encounter a phenomena that they cannot logically explain they tend to dub it a “paranormal” experience. However, terms like “supernatural” and “paranormal”are, in themselves, paradoxes.

Think about it for a second. Words and ideas like “reality” and “nature” are directly describing what is true about existence. Something either does or does not exist in reality. Reality means what truly is. Therefore, to introduce a term like “supernatural” means nothing, because once you have discovered a fact about the natural world then it is obviously part of that reality. Nothing can exist outside of reality because reality is, by definition, everything that exists. The purpose of science is to discover that which is real so that we might have a better understanding of the way in which existence works. If some tangible evidence was discovered tomorrow that ghosts and goblins existed then they would become part of reality and could be explained by scientific means. It would be accepted that they have always been part of reality. However, since we can’t seem to find any real evidence for this kind of phenomena, besides personal and subjective testimony, they remain consigned to the category of “non-existent” and will do so until proven otherwise.

Likewise, if far in the future we were to discover that some higher dimensional space existed outside of our own universe (which, by the way is right on the frontier of contemporary physics) it would then become part of our understanding of reality and would be accepted as a natural part of existence. Until then, theories such as Superstring Theory will remain within the realms of scientific opinion rather than fact. I hardly need to mention that up until incredibly recently in human history, we were ready to believe that the Earth was a flat surface and created laws prohibiting sea captains to sail their crews too far into the horizon under threat of death, for the fear of plumeting off its edge. However, with the benefits of modern science we can now casually verify, in everyday conversation, with incredible conviction and accuracy that the Earth is, along with most other heavenly bodies, a globe.  Not to mention the fact that a select number of us have actually seen the globe from outside of Earth’s atmosphere and photographed it.

This is a perfect example of how learning from a massive convergence of evidence can help to substantiate the truth of our world model. This is the only aim of science. It is not, as “alternative thinkers” would have you believe, to sit in its rocking chair, smoking its pipe blissfully whilst sarcastically making a mockery of every piece of black magic, voodoo hogwash that scuttles across its highly vacuumed Persian rug.

The comedian Dara O’Briain phrased this next paragraph better than I ever could, but I will try all the same. Pedallers of “hollistic”, “homeopathic”, or “nutritionalistic” remedies would screech to the hilltops the value of herbal remedies and their healing properties. Scientists would counter that they spend a great deal of time scouring the world for those herbal and naturally occurring chemical compounds that work and turning them into what we know as medicine. During that process they also spend a great deal of time testing  and double testing things that might work so that there can be no real argument.

It is with these maxims and this frame of thought in place that we must pass judgment on individual’s opinions.  It is, quite frankly, ridiculous that the opinionated belief systems that drive multimillion dollar industries such as homeopathy or psychic-mediumship run unchecked whilst science with its massive convergence of evidence and research remain criticised. People even choose to believe those blatant falsehoods over what is real, substantiated and proven. This is proven and propagated time and time again by media corporations and our government who shout that we must not disagree with our fellow’s opinion or belief system in public discourse. It’s not even enough that we have to respect their belief system any longer. We literally cannot voice an opposing opinion and contend that someone is talking rubbish anymore in the name of political correctness.

Examples of this can be found literally every day on BBC programming. It seems to have opted to produce a “junk-food” style of public debate, centered on equality of opinion, rather than focusing on delivering informative facts to people and allowing them to come to the best possible decision based on them. This in itself feeds bad thinking. If people are allowed into an intellectual discourse, before reviewing any real fact-based material, believing that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old as creationists do then the whole concept of being informed and intelligent is thrown out of the window.

I simply ask the question of why? I have absolutely no problem with respecting an individual’s privacy, relationships, personal choices or any of the things that make them who they are, but this is different from actually being made to respect the content of their subjective opinion. I don’t even mind respecting the fact that they hold the opinion. It’s the content that should be allowed to be brought into contention.

For instance, I am a Manchester United fan and it happens to be my opinion that they are a good team. The statistical data over the past 20-25 years also swings to support that hypothesis. However, I am constantly criticised by friends and peers who inform me that they are a terrible team to support and that I am a moron of the highest order. I have no problem with that. There is no problem with that whatsoever. They are criticising the content of my subjective opinion. My opinion about Manchester United is not based on a vast array of supporting evidence. I simply like them. When asked why I like them I can’t really come up with any satisfactory argument. Neither could any other fan of sport. Some might support their local team because they were born in the general area, but they have no real ties with the club anymore than they have real ties with the geographical area. All reasoning behind sport-based opinion making is generated by a sense of pride within the individual fans themselves.

So the name-callers are not trying to lie to me, criticise me as a human being or trying to alter my perception of what is true in any way. In reality, Manchester United re no better than a lot of other teams in the Premier League.

This sort of opinion, about football, is clearly not equal to that of a medical practitioner who tells me that, through the convergence of evidence including my personal testimony, objective blood testing and some cardiovascular monitoring, they have concluded I have a viral infection. Nor is the unfounded opinion that a mashed toad will cure my headache equal to the conclusion that each living human has 23 pairs of chromosomes, one pair from each parent, based on genetic evidence. Understanding this principle is essential to formulating opinions that hold merit and real-world application. The opinions of those rancid individuals who remain in denial of the holocaust do not hold equal value to those who believe it did certainly happen based on the massive amount o f evidence which proves that it did.

Everyone has the right to their own subjective opinion and we must completely respect that. That is the purpose behind the concept of opinions. However, as we have seen, this does not make them equally valuable by default in the realms of intellectual discourse and real-world application. Therefore we do not, or should not, be made to respect the content of those opinions or belief systems in the name of a false sense of balance. No individual on this planet is better than anyone else, but that is not to say that their view point is equally valid.

People can be wrong and that is one of the wonders of progression.

So if you come to me with any of this mumbo jumbo… Take a deep breath and then remove the silly dunder-thoughts from your brain-capsule. Then stick them up your toffee-bott.

Filed under: Philosophical Thought, Reasoning, Scary Shiz-am!, Science, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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This was probably one of the most satisfying pieces to watch that I’ve ever seen on BBC 3. It’s quite wonderful to watch the reactions of the so called ‘spirit mediums’ when it is revealed that the whole backstory was fictional.

Filed under: Funny Stuffs, Reasoning, Scary Shiz-am!, Supernatural?, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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A popular creationist piece of misdirection (and sometimes merely a popular misconception) is cleared up in this concise video. Dawkins answers the frequently asked question of, “why, if we descended from apes, are there still apes around today? Why have they also not evolved into more complex or intelligent species?”

The simple answer is that we did not evolve from any of the apes that are currently living in the world today. We share common ancestors with all of them and they are all as developed as we. If we must add consciousness into the process at some point to satisfy certain people then I suppose we could say we “got lucky”. In some sense chance favoured us to learn and further develop our bipedal gait which, in turn, triggered the evolution of our larger cranial capacity.

We did not evolve from chimpanzees, gorillas or any other current monkey that you care to mention. When scientists say that we “evolved from apes” it merely means that we have all shared common ancestry with hominid “ape-like” creatures.

Filed under: Like Woah... Interesting..., Reasoning, Science, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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Anybody that has ever held any interest in looking for objective truth in the world will likely have stumbled across the concepts of rationality, reason, science and logic at some point during their perusal of pertinent proofs. Ever since the postmodern era was unceremoniously ushered into western culture, bringing with it all of the counterintuitive paradigms that facilitate abominations such as homeopathy and psychic mediumship, we seem to have all fallen prey to the immensely bad idea that what is true for me could be a completely different state of affairs to what is true for the next individual.

This idea, of course, seems immensely appealing since it allows us to fill our respective boots with the warming notion that we alone can know a truth that nobody else can know. It makes us special from within our own perception. Homeopathy does this immensely well. It makes claims about the real world that simply will not be tested and verified by any worthy method, and then goes on to add the clause of, if you don’t believe then it won’t work.

This clearly creates a problem, because the real world just does not work in this way. If all truths are simply inside our heads then there is nothing out there at all. The whole concept of universal truth is reduced to introspection and nothing of what is outside of our own head can ever be known. However, we know that there is something beyond our own perspective because we experience and interact with it every day of our lives. We have theories that can model the universe, from the very big to the very small, with staggering accuracy and absolutely repeatable real-world practical application. We’ve put men on the moon, invented satellites that measure the background radiation from the big bang and can show us ‘baby pictures’ of our universe. We don’t claim that these theories are entirely complete, but humanity is working on it.

If something works then it works, and should be able to be repeatedly tested and verified as a truth. If it doesn’t hold up to a convergence of processes that attempt to both prove and disprove the validity of the claim, then it is likely amongst thousands, perhaps millions, of phenomena that are simply anomalies that can be explained by minute mathematical probability. Evidence is the key. We call this way of thinking science.

Science tries immensely hard to place it’s perspective outside of the mind and perceptual framework of the observer. The scientific mind knows some of the many psychological biases that impede our judgment and can take steps to attempt to eliminate them from any experiment that you care to mention. Here I have compiled some of these biases and attempted to sketch an outline of the way that they affect our perspective of what is truly out there in the real world. (Note: they affect everybody. There is nobody that doesn’t experience these every day of their lives. It’s part of being human.) :

The Confirmation Bias
The confirmation bias is the psychological process which filters out the misses and only notices the hits in support of what we wish to believe. This is the human trait that most psychic mediums who work on a face-to-face basis prey on when they employ the ‘cold reading’ technique. They make use of a set of sweeping, generalised statements, designed to probe at the sitter’s (the poor person who has usually paid good money to experience this violation is called a ‘sitter’) personal situation. Usually, the sitter gives enough information away, either by physically indicating or actually answering, for the medium/cold reader to continue making general statements and if the ‘hits’ outweigh the ‘misses’ the sitter goes away feeling that they have just been given an incredibly specific reading. This example actually goes one step further, since the sitter will often ignore misses anyway and simply cling to what fits and ‘feels right’ for the sake of not feeling stupid.

Whenever proper testing has been carried out on such proprietors, they tend to get results of roughly (mostly below) 50% which is a slightly lower result than you can achieve for guessing.

The Blind Spot bias
A Princeton University study has revealed that test subjects can recognise the cognitive biases of other subjects but fail to see the same biases in themselves.

The Self Serving Bias
Studies have also shown that people have a tendency to perceive themselves in a more positive light than the light in which others view them. In other words, we all tend to believe we are the main character of our own ‘life movie’, and why should we not? After all, we evolved with survival as a primary concern. At a primordial level, surely if we view ourselves as the central roll then we can focus  on making the most of our own life.

Studies to support this include national surveys which reveal that 60% of American high school seniors would place themselves in the top 10% in, “ability to get along with others.”

B.F Skinner’s Habitual Pigeon Experiment
It turns out, as American psychologist B.F Skinner revealed in his infamous experiments, these cognitive biases are not local to homo sapiens.  He, quite roughly I should imagine, threw some pigeons into cages and after shaking them profusely set about beginning the experiment… I am obviously lying. B.F Skinner was never, to my knowledge, charged for animal cruelty. He did however monitor the ritualistic habits of such animals. He would place the little blighter into a bird box and have a food releasing mechanism, wired to a timing device, thrust pellets of food unto them at random intervals. He observed that they would carry out rituals, such as tapping their heads on the floor, in an attempt to make the food appear faster. If their ritual seemed to them to be effective no more than a few times, they would adopt it as a behaviour and continue to do it regardless of the fact it had no bearing on anything other than possibly giving them a headache.

This phenomenon is symbolically representative of human behaviour such as prayer. Usually, if a person’s prayer appears to be answered, even in completely coincidental terms, they will repeat the process for the rest of their life. They completely disregard the reality of the matter in favour of what seems to be the truth for them subjectively.

Consider for a moment that a person of religious faith would pray to feel better after two days of suffering from the common cold virus. She has been taking paracetamol regularly for the past day, but nothing seems to be effective in making her feel better. On the third day, after the prayer, she wakes up and feels much more healthy. She completely disregards, or remains ignorant of, the fact that a cold virus runs it’s course over a three day span. In all likelihood the antibodies in her immune system have done their natural job and neutralised the virus.  Besides, there is no medical cure for the common cold, so paracetamol would only serve to lessen her neuralgia symptoms. She would mistakenly ascribe the increase in her mood and health status to the prayer, usually without thinking about the reality of the scenario, because it is simpler than considering the truth.

The Bandwagon/Cromo Effect
This will likely be a well recognised cognitive phenomena. The notion is simple. A belief, claim or idea spreads more quickly if there are more people that have already invested in it. For example, if there is a group of three friends and two of them become interested in a particular musical artist, the third is likely to become interested in it too. In turn, each of them will likely pass it on to their respective friends who will do the same, ad infinitum. This allows fads, trends and cult thinking to form quickly. However, if ideas form under the influence of the aforementioned bias, we can easily see how bad ideas can spread into mainstream culture. This is how we have arrived at this age of bad thinking in the first place, so quite a literal sense bad thinking can self perpetuate.

Placebo Effect
The placebo effect is immensely interesting and involved. I could never hope to do it justice with a tiny outline in a blog that no one will ever read and so I will keep it short. The placebo effect proves that the grimy subject of pain is indeed just that: subjective. During some operations, surgeons discovered that they could operate with lower, or in some cases no, anesthetic if the patient ‘believed’ they were under the influence of such a drug.  More recently placebo pills (usually just a combination of sugars) have been shown to reduce pain in test subjects if they believe it to be some form of medicine. However, as a rule of thumb this only has efficacy in pain related ailments, so don’t expect that eating sugar is going to regrow your broken arm, or cure your viral infection. That’s just a cuckoo idea.

Since we humans are generally looking out for our best interests, I would imagine most of you will be wanting to gain something from this lengthy and likely exhausting lecture. (Yes, a lecture) So what can you selfish, idle miscreants expect to take from all of this wisdom that I have kindly enforced upon your supple minds? I suppose the main point would be never to invest in an idea or belief system, such as new age paradigms or mystical frameworks, that somebody else subscribes to without investigating it for yourself first. In the same vein, never invest in it just because ‘it feels right’ to do so. We have seen how ‘right’ something can feel even though it holds no real-world application, validity from evidence or any repeatable substance thanks to cognitive bias. Is that so much to ask? Literally just asking some questions about these beliefs before granting them room inside your, I am sure, well organised filing cabinet of a mind.

The next time your mystical friend tells you she has some wonderful energy crystals (believe me, these people do exist) that will accelerate the growth of your petunia bush (take the euphemism as you will) simply ask her if she has ever considered trying to grow a separate pot of the same flower in the same conditions, but without use of the crystals. This is merely healthy curiosity. It doesn’t even borderline the dreaded notion of skepticism that so many people are ready to leap away from at the sign of the first venom-tipped pincer. In likewise fashion, if anyone has ever tried to force echinacea upon your vulnerable and influenza ridden form, then take heed to this wonderful factoid. Echinacea has recently been proven no more effective than a placebo. That’s a sugar pill to you and I.

Additionally, never ever believe that something that has real-world application (i.e. medicine) can work for you and you alone. Neither is it a good idea that it will work if you simply believe it. That, my wonderful little bosom-chum, is just silly-talk. You have to consume a little opiate for that.

Filed under: Like Woah... Interesting..., Philosophical Thought, Reasoning, Scary Shiz-am!, Science, The Mind and Suggestibility by Mark Brewer
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