June 11, 2004 |
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The Same Old Same Old, Astrology for the Kids, The Fabulous QXCI Quack Machine, More Sleep Paralysis, A Change of Direction, Positive Proof, Geller the Healer, Where's That Damn Camera, Blue Vibrations, Scientific Feng Shui in Wales, Beam Me Up in Seattle, A Century Ago in Spiritualism, and In Conclusion….
Table of Contents:
The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds was produced in 1841 by Scottish author, editor, musician Charles Mackay (1814-1889) and has been republished under slightly varying titles and with varied additions many times since. It's a remarkable production dealing with the foibles of the public and the disasters brought about by general lack of knowledge of how the world works. Ever the unbelieving skeptic, MacKay concluded about "animal magnetism practitioners" a pervasive quack notion of the day that their ideas of a mystical "magnetic fluid" that was said to flow through humans, was nonsense:
Sound familiar? The same sort of alibis that are still being used today. The M. Deleuze he refers to, had published in his instructions to would-be quacks, Historie Critique du Magnetisme Animal in 1813:
And: Never magnetise before inquisitive persons! This should give us a pretty good idea of the modus by which this scam worked, obviously right from the mouths of those who originated it! Of course, we cannot find any indication here that Deleuze was a conscious fraud. These rationalizations are resorted to by true believers, to maintain their belief despite the failures and paradoxes that they constantly encounter. It can all be found at: www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/relg/socialeccltheology/MemoirsofPopularDelusionsV3/chap47.html, courtesy of Australian reader Brian Miller, member of the Australian Skeptics, and the World Wide School Library.
Reader Martin D. Brazeau, with the Redpath Museum, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, directs us to a responsible web site that he happened upon, but which at first glance rather dismayed him. He writes:
Martin, I only hope that careless and/or naïve readers will not fail to see that this is a joke; I've seen "real" horoscopes that don't look that much different, or any less silly…!
THE FABULOUS QXCI QUACK MACHINE Excerpts from a message sent by reader Alan Poulter:
Evidently, according to his web site, Bill was "identified as a genius from an early age." I'll let you judge for yourself, weighing these statements from his site, with what your readers know about physics and the way the world works. All the spelling in these quotations is exactly as in the original.
From these calculations several other ramifications can be surmised. The bioresonance of the system can be measured. The reaction of the body to nosodes, isodes, allersodes, sarcodes, classic homeopathic, herbals, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, hormones, bacteria, fungus, parasites, nerves, vertrabrae, muscles, and thousands of other compounds. The resonance of the system is measured by determining the evoked potential or reaction of the body to these compounds.
The QXCI system can also perform intricate therapies, such as, electro acupuncture, rife, Mora, Bicom like, bioresonance, scalar, color therapy, NLP, etc. The cybernetic link of therapy and diagnosis makes this the QXCI the truly complete energetic medical system of the future.
This system is calibrated to measure the very line and subtle electrical and subspace reactions to a group of biological and medical substances. The sensitivity is set so fine so as to pick up the earliest sign of disease and distress. Therefore the results might be below the client recognition. The readings should be evaluated by trained staff. No claims are made on the system or the results.
An additional hoot, is that he has a "prayer wheel computer program" that allows your computer to pray for sundry things. And this comes with the satisfaction that of approximately 300 studies relating to the Prayer Wheels, "One of these showed a significant (10% plus) improvement in approximately 500 people whom were not." (???) Here are some of the extraordinary claims made for this wheely thingy:
The retail price of the program is 300 USD for 'QXCI' owners and 500 USD for no owners. Alan, it's evident that "Dr. William Nelson, MD, PhD" merely looked up all the technical and scientific "buzz words" he could find, and assembled them into sentences, without any regard for continuity or usage. The naïve reader can easily accept this sort of language to be superficially similar to what he would find in any really scientific article though used in that fashion, it would make sense and thus it seems to be acceptable. I'd not be at all surprised to find this scam artist obtaining a patent of some sort which as we know will convince many that there must be some merit to his gibberish and thus induce them to invest money in his scheme. It was ever thus…. Ask about those degrees….
Reader Crystal Moore of Carbondale, Illinois, continues the ASP discussion:
Like Grant [web page correspondent from May 21 on the subject], he finally figured out what was going on from consulting the Internet. Incredible as it seems, he had never told anyone about what was happening to him. If he hadn't discovered the cause online, I shudder to think where he'd be today, or what beliefs he'd be espousing, especially given that the rest of his family's bent towards religious lunacy. He, like me, is now an atheist and skeptic although I fear he'll fall back into faith someday, given how sad he seems to find the idea of no afterlife. Me, I find the concept immensely cheering.
When I learned about his condition, I immediately thought of how many ghost stories, UFO abductions, and other accounts of the paranormal started with "I woke up and..." After all, the range of experiences that this condition provides, fits quite nicely with the range of accounts of the paranormal. My boyfriend has experienced people he knows screaming in pain and clawing at his bedroom door, as well as phantom assaults, evil voices calling to him from other rooms in an empty house.... I'm sure many people are driven to embrace irrational beliefs based on such experiences, never knowing their true cause.
I myself have been interested in such stories since I was quite young, reading large Time/Life books full of them at grandma's house. I admit I was a full-fledged believer as a youngster, getting more skeptical as the years went by but always maintaining a strong interest. The subject is charming, in its wide-eyed way, and as my family was irreligious it fulfilled that childlike need for a hidden world full of mystery and excitement.
I had begun leaning towards the idea that some kind of phenomena, mostly subjective but partially objective, led to reports of all kinds of supernatural events, from UFOs to religious visions, to fairies and so forth. Little did I realize that the phenomena are often simply the results of erratic human perception. The more I learn about the unreliability of simple perception and memory, the more amazed I am that so many accept such preposterous crap as fact. It's very easy to fool the eye and the mind, but most people consider their perception infallible.
I credit you with my turning point more specifically, with a copy of Flim-Flam that my local used bookseller had filed in with all the supernatural hooey. It was a most entertaining read that motivated me to look for you online. Since then, I get more skeptical every day. I've particularly enjoyed your tearing into John Edward and Sylvia Browne. I wish I believed in a rewards-based afterlife, because they would surely get their just desserts...
Enough rambling, I think. Thank you for all you've done to further the cause of rationality. Crystal, you mention "the unreliability of simple perception and memory," but most folks out there have a very difficult time accepting that our senses are often unreliable in some ways. True, most of the time the input we get is correct or at least accurate enough to act upon; this is an important survival need. As for my own way of handling this, rather than saying, "The car was red," and "There were four persons," I tend to say, "I believe the car was red," and "I recall four persons present." Though I'm somewhat better equipped than most, to handle vagaries of sensory input, I don't trust my own perception to be faultless, ever.
Reader Curt van den Heuvel offers these additional observations on this same subject one that has attracted a lot of attention here:
Randi comments: Curt, the "UFO abductees" will never accept this; their delusion is far too valuable to them. Even though this phenomenon explains their experiences very aptly, they prefer and will maintain the UFO angle because it gives them status. It's not just a common psychological event. Incidentally, your wife is describing here classic hypnagogic or hypnopompic experiences, commonly referred to as the "old hag" phenomena, in which victims often hallucinate that a demon of some sort is perched, sitting on them and causing breathing difficulties. This has been a part of folklore for more than a century. Curt continues:
Fast forward about ten years. Over the course of that time, we both lost faith in religion in general, and became, to all intents and purposes, enlightened atheists. What is interesting is this: while the frequency and emotional impact of her paralysis sessions did not abate, the content of her hallucinations did. No longer was she faced with demons and supernatural evils, but with more mundane (though no less terrifying) visions. On one occasion, she related that she clearly saw our (then) two-year old son running through the room with a large kitchen knife. She screamed at him to stop, but to no avail. When she did awake, she discovered Jared fast asleep in his cot, with no sign that he had been loose.
I'm no medical expert, but my research has led me to the following suspicions. Sleep paralysis is (as your correspondent pointed out) somehow caused by different parts of the brain waking up at different times. When faced with this condition, the higher brain functions invent situations in an attempt to explain the inability to move. Usually, these "explanations" take the form of the patient's deepest fears. Thus, when my wife was a firm believer in the supernatural, the hallucinations would consist of malevolent, demonic figures. When she lost faith in the supernatural, these archetypes no longer held the power to cause fear, and so the hallucinations were replaced by different content, in this case a mother's fear that her child was in imminent danger of hurting himself. Randi again: Curt, it's believed that most regular dreams are also due to this situation-inventing process, that extraneous noises and other peripheral sensory perceptions are incorporated into dream-stories so that there need be no conscious rationalization of this input though the mind does process the sensory impressions to evaluate them for possible danger content. This would also support the change of attribution from religious to family-needs that your wife made. Curt continues:
Here we have the two experiences I mentioned above hypnagogic or hypnopompic, falling asleep or awakening, respectively. Also note that most regular dreams go through this "time dilation" process. Even what appear to be long dreams are known to take place in about thirty seconds or so. I find these parallels to be very interesting!
"L.K." from the UK tells us:
She then contacted the mother of a child who also had OCD, who first asked her the birth sign of the woman's daughter. It was Virgo, the same as her child. She now thinks this proves that Virgos have a predisposition to OCD, because of their desire for perfectionism. What a stunning conclusion, after checking on a whole two people! You can see how believers use statistics whichever way suits them. This is another instance of the unhappiness and despair that people go through trying to get something out of quack procedures because they're just not well enough informed. The following item is another example….
Just a year ago on this page, I reported that a UK stripper known only as "Jordan" had approached Uri Geller's daughter Natalie at what was proudly trumpeted as "a glamour model's Pimps and Prostitutes-themed 25th birthday party." She took Natalie aside and asked her to talk to her dad about curing her year-old baby Harvey's blindness. The child was born blind and doctors say that he will never see; he's missing the nerve that sends the message from the eye to the brain. It seems that Uri's record on psychic healing hadn't reached Jordan. Well, now she claims that the spoon-bender has helped to cure her son of blindness, working miracles just by touching the child's head. "Uri said, let me feel his head, so I did and now Harvey can see so much more from a distance. . . . I don't believe in anything like this but I swear he can see so much now, considering he's supposed to be blind," she told the press. "So much more"? "From a distance"? I think I need clearer statements than those before I'll go into raptures over this miracle….
A magician buddy, Chris, reports:
Now, that's a great line…. I agree, Chris, and I can just see the Master of Chutzpah saying this with a perfectly straight face. I've attached here a video file that shows the man doing what I call a trick, but that he describes as a genuine psychokinetic feat the changing of the time on a watch-face. Warning: the video file is over 2 MB and requires Apple Quicktime to view. The first segment, titled "BEFORE" shows Mr. Geller taking the host's watch in both hands, as if it were very heavy (?) handling it in an interesting fashion, and offering it to a camera for a close-up shot, so that the time can be seen on the watch-face. Pause: I should tell you that this RAI-TV studio where the show was shot, is unique in one respect: no cameras are visible, being at a great distance from the stage area, using very powerful lenses to provide images. There are no "tally lights" visible, either the red "on" indicators that normally show that a camera is the one actually taking the "live" shot so the performer cannot tell where to face, or where to direct an action. It appears that Mr. Geller was at a disadvantage during this session, since he's seen looking around to try presenting the best view for his needs. But that allows us to clearly see in the close-up that now the winding-stem has somehow been pulled away from the body of the watch perhaps accidentally? as a result of all that two-handed action. The time on the watch-dial is seen to be 12:13. What follows then is the watch suddenly goes completely off-camera briefly, then there's a 52-second procedure of Geller gesturing magically over the face-down watch, while appealing to viewers to chant, "move!," disclaimers of "Look, there's no magnet, I don't touch the stem!" and then the denouement shown here in the scene labeled "AND AFTER," in which the winding stem is seen to have been pushed back into place somehow and the time is shown to now be 12:55. A miracle….
Reader Karel de Pauw comments:
And what would that be? "Squeeze the juice of one fresh lemon into two glasses. Place one glass next to the bottle of Blue Water. Keep the other at least 5 feet away. Wait 5 minutes. Try the "closer" juice first. Most people notice an amazing change caused by the natural energy of Blue Water. Seeing is believing. Tasting is knowing."
Now, if they'd just let us amend that to a proper double-blind trial, we would be really impressed.
From an anonymous correspondent in Wales:
Reader Dan Green:
Too late, Dan. My patent application is already in….
David P. Abbott (1863-1934) was a prolific inventor of magicians' illusions, a performer himself, and the author of "Behind the Scenes with the Mediums" (1907) a thorough exposé of the methods used by the fakers of the day. I give you here the opening paragraphs of the book, in which the situation of a century ago can be seen to be little different from today:
Such persons seem to feel that if a race of thinking beings were slowly evolved upon a flying world, the majority of ideas which such beings would evolve in their minds, if unproven, would not correspond with objective facts; that only those which could be proven in some manner would possess a value; that the chances are greatly against the probability of the truth of unproven ideas of things and existence in general; also that minds which could in a superstitious age evolve and believe in such superstitions as witchcraft, sorcery, etc., might in the same age evolve and believe in other superstitions that are unwarranted by the facts, although pleasing to the individual.
Such persons as these would solve the mystery of mysteries by the power of their intellect alone. Such as these would unlock the lips of nature and rob her of her secret, but to such as these no answer framed in words of hope has ever come.
Is there beyond the silent night The above quotation was taken from Declaration of the Free, by Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), prominent US agnostic, lawyer, and orator, but it is not thus attributed in the Abbott book. Abbott continues:
If the structures which are our bodies must dissolve at death, does the innerness of these structures which is spirit vanish utterly? Does death hold for us but the promise of the same unfathomable gulf of blackness out of which we came at birth? Is the eternal future to be to us the same as was the eternal past? Is life but a temporary abode on a peak that is touched by the fingers of light for a day, while all around yawns an infinite, shoreless gulf of impenetrable darkness, from one side of which we appeared and to whose other side we hurry to meet our destiny?
We feel certain that both our material and spiritual parts are actualized by elements eternal and indestructible. But does that something, other than these elements that which they actualize, that creation which appears as a result of their combination in a special form, that something else which is ourselves vanish utterly with the dissolution of the elements which temporarily actualize both our bodies and our spirits? Much to my surprise, though Abbott was so very much aware of all the tricks used by the mediums to fake communication with the dead, and was in fact one of the greatest experts on the subject, in this book he does not declare his personal convictions of whether or not there exists proper evidence for survival after death. It appears that he had a weakness of reasoning in some respects connected with this field. As interested readers will eventually find out, in the book that Teller of Penn & Teller is now working on, at least one clever operator befuddled him, and he harbored a belief in at least the possibility of telepathy and other doubtful phenomena. I will keep readers informed on the progress of the Teller book, which should be very interesting indeed.
If you've not yet gone to join-skeptics@lyris.net, and subscribed free to their on-line magazine, why haven't you? Shermer's got something strong and valuable here and the price is right. Free. Click now. Also very well worth your attention is www.sas.org/tcs, if you're not already a regular visitor…. Go to our links page www.randi.org/education/links.html to see other places you should be dropping in on….! Error! The quotation ascribed last week to Homer, was actually from Horace, as Dan Milton tells me. Love both Homer and Horace…. And thanks, Dan. Next week, another video clip from that same RAI-TV program, this one involving the difficult art of bending keys when you can't tell when or if you're on camera…! And, another befuddled applicant, plus the one-and-only Rolling Baba! Not to be missed!
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