Neurobabble

Confirming something that people like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz figured out years ago, researchers at Villanova University and the University of Oregon have shown that all you have to do to convince people is throw some fancy-sounding pseudoscientific jargon into your argument.

The specific area that Diego Fernandez-Duque, Jessica Evans, Colton Christian, and Sara D. Hodges researched was neurobabble, in particular the likelihood of increasing people's confidence in the correctness of an argument if some bogus brain-based explanation was included. Fernandez-Duque et al. write:

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing?  Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure?  To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types.  Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences.  In Experiment 1, superfluous neuroscience information increased the judged quality of the argument for both good and bad explanations, whereas accompanying fMRI pictures had no impact above and beyond the neuroscience text, suggesting a bias that is conceptual rather than pictorial.  Superfluous neuroscience information was more alluring than social science information (Experiment 2) and more alluring than information from prestigious “hard sciences” (Experiments 3 and 4).  Analytical thinking did not protect against the neuroscience bias, nor did a belief in dualism or free will.  We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline.  

So this may explain why people so consistently fall for pseudoscience as long as it's couched in seemingly technical terminology.  For example, look at the following, an excerpt from an article in which Deepak Chopra is hawking his latest creation, a meditation-inducing device called "DreamWeaver":

About two years ago I got interested in the idea that you could feed light pulses through the brain with your eyes closed and sound and music at a certain frequency.  Your brain waves would dial into it and then you could dial the instrument down so that you would decrease the brain wave frequency from what it is normally in the waking state.  And then you could slowly dial down the brainwave frequency to what it would be in the dream state, which is called theta, and then you even dial further down into delta.

What the hell does "your brain waves would dial into it" mean?   And I would like to suggest to Fernandez-Duque et al. that their next experiment should have to do with people immediately believing claims if they involve the word "frequency."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NascarEd, Sleep Stage N3, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then we have the following twofer -- an excerpt of an article by Deepak Chopra that appeared on Dr. Oz's website:

Try to eat one of these three foods once a day to protect against Alzheimer’s and memory issues.  

Wheat Germ - The embryo of a wheat plant, wheat germ is loaded with B-complex vitamins that can reduce levels of homocysteine, an amino acid linked to stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.  Sprinkle wheat germ on cereal and yogurt in the morning, or enjoy it on salads or popcorn with a little butter. 
Black Currents [sic] - These dark berries are jam-packed with antioxidants that help nourish the brain cells surrounding the hippocampus.  The darker in color, the more antioxidants black currents [sic] contain.  These fruits are available fresh when in season, or can be purchased dried or frozen year-round. 
Acorn Squash - This beautiful gold-colored veggie contains high amounts of folic acid, a B-vitamin that improves memory as well as the speed at which the brain processes information.

Whenever I read this sort of thing, I'm not inclined to believe it; I'm more inclined to scream, "Source?"  For example, I looked up the whole black currant claim, and the first few sources waxed rhapsodic about black currants' ability to enhance our brain function.  But then I noticed that said sources were all from the Black Currant Foundation (I didn't even know that existed, did you?) and the website blackcurrant.co.nz.  Scrolling down a bit, I found a post on WebMD that was considerably less enthusiastic, saying that it "may be useful in Alzheimer's" (with no mention of exactly how, nor any citations to support the claim) but that it also can lower blood pressure and slow down blood clotting.

So I suppose that the only way to protect yourself against this kind of nonsense is to learn some actual science, and be willing to read some peer-reviewed papers on the subject -- which includes training yourself to recognize which sources are peer-reviewed and which are not.

But doing all this research myself leaves me feeling like I need some breakfast.  Maybe a wheat germ, black currant, and acorn squash stir-fry.  Can't have too many antioxidants, you know, when your hippocampus is having some frequency problems.

**********************************

Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Profound bullshit

Considering what I write about six times a week, it's nice to have some validation on occasion.

The topic comes up because of a paper by Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek J. Koehler, and Jonathan A. Fugelsang that just came out in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, and which has the wonderful title, "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."

I want all of you to read the original paper, because it's awesome, so I'll try my hardest not to steal their fire.  But you all have to see the first line of the abstract before I go any further:

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation.

Just reading that made me want to weep tears of joy.

I have spent so many years fighting the mushy, sort-of-scientificky-or-something verbiage of the purveyors of woo-woo that to see the topic receive attention in a peer-reviewed journal did my poor jaded little heart good.  Especially when I found out that the gist of the paper was that if you take someone who is especially skilled at generating bullshit -- like say, oh, Deepak Chopra, for example  -- and compare his actual writings to phrases like those generated by the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, test subjects couldn't tell them apart.

More specifically, people who ranked high on what Pennycook et al. have christened the "Bullshit Receptivity Scale" (BSR) tended to rate everything as profound, whether or not it made the least bit of sense:

The present study represents an initial investigation of the individual differences in receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit.  We gave people syntactically coherent sentences that consisted of random vague buzzwords and, across four studies, these statements were judged to be at least somewhat profound.  This tendency was also evident when we presented participants with similar real-world examples of pseudo-profound bullshit.  Most importantly, we have provided evidence that individuals vary in conceptually interpretable ways in their propensity to ascribe profundity to bullshit statements; a tendency we refer to as “bullshit receptivity”.  Those more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to ontological confusions and conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.

That... just... leaves me kind of choked up.

No, it's okay.  I'll be all right in a moment.  *sniffle*

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then, there's this passage from the conclusion:

This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit.  The development of interventions and strategies that help individuals guard against bullshit is an important additional goal that requires considerable attention from cognitive and social psychologists.  That people vary in their receptivity toward bullshit is perhaps less surprising than the fact that psychological scientists have heretofore neglected this issue.  Accordingly, although this manuscript may not be truly profound, it is indeed meaningful.

 I don't think I've been this happy about a scholarly paper since I was a graduate student in linguistics and found the paper by John McCarthy in Language called "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," which explained why you can say "abso-fuckin-lutely" but not "ab-fuckin-solutely."

The paper by Pennycook et al. has filled a void, in that it makes a point that has needed making for years -- that it's not only important to consider what makes someone a bullshitter, but what makes someone an, um, bullshittee.  Because people fall for platitude-spewing gurus like Chopra in droves, as evidenced by the fact that he's still giving talks to sold-out crowds, and making money hand over fist from selling books filled with lines like "The key to the essence of joy co-creates the expansion of creativity."

Which, by the way, was from the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator.  Not, apparently, that anyone can tell the difference.

And it brings me back to the fact that what we really, truly need in public schools is a mandatory course in critical thinking.  Because learning some basic principles of logic is the way you can immunize yourself against this sort of thing.  It may, in fact, be the only way.

Anyhow, I direct you all to the paper linked above.  The Pennycook et al. one, I mean.  Although the paper by John McCarthy is also pretty fan-fuckin-tastic.

The cult of personality

The cult of personality is a dangerous thing.  Whenever a person's brand becomes more important than what (s)he is claiming, there's the chance that herd mentality will take over -- and you'll follow the leader without question.

Dr. Oz.  Oprah.  "Food Babe."  And, most spectacularly, Deepak Chopra, who regularly publishes something called -- and I am not making this up -- the "Chopra-centered Lifestyle Newsletter," which should win some kind of Narcissistic Title Award.  Because I regularly check out the publications and claims of these people -- risking the loss of countless innocent brain cells -- I have more than once seen comments like, "We love you, Dr. Oz!" and "Go Food Babe Army!" appended to articles that would leave any sensible, scientifically-literate person doing repeated facepalms.  I'm left with the unsettling impression that these people could claim that you can prevent cancer by eating red onions, and their audience would simply sit there nodding and smiling.

Oh, wait, Dr. Oz did claim exactly that.  My bad.

But Chopra is in another league.  This guy has made millions writing book after book of quasi-mystical, pseudoscientific bullshit, and he's as popular as ever.  His followers have a devotion to him that borders on fanaticism.  He still does the lecture circuit to sold-out auditoriums.  And this despite the fact that what he says is so vague and fact-free that someone made a Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator that produces convincing-sounding Chopra-isms on demand.  (Here's the one I got:  "The invisible is the womb of visible choices."  I feel myself becoming wiser already.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As an example of the bizarre, fact-free clickbait that Chopra dishes out, consider the recent article on his website called "What is Primordial Sound Meditation?" in which we find out that we each have a personal "mantra or sound" that if we chant it, will bring us "profound peace and expanded awareness."

How do we find out what our personal mantra is?  Well, the implication is that such information isn't available to most of us unenlightened slobs, so we have to sign up for "Chopra's Primordial Sound Meditation Workshop" at the "Chopra Center."  Once we do, they'll tell us what to chant.

Money first, enlightenment next, that's the motto over at the "Chopra Center."

And it's not just some random noise, they tell us:

A mantra is a specific sound or vibration—which when repeated silently—helps you to enter deeper levels of awareness...   The mantra you will receive is the vibration the universe was creating at the time and place of your birth, and it is calculated following Vedic mathematic formulas.

So what he's done is taken three pieces of mystical nonsense -- astrology, numerology, and New Age woo -- and combined them to make an all-new Bullshit Mélange.  We also have one of our favorite words, "vibration," which of course makes it even more scientific.  All we need is "quantum" and "frequency" and we'd be all set.  (They didn't show up in the article, but I'd be willing to bet you my next month's salary that they're used in the workshop.)

And what will happen if you use your magic personal mantra?  All sorts of good stuff:

When you silently repeat your mantra in meditation, it creates a vibration that helps you slip into the space between your thoughts, into the complete silence that is sometimes referred to as "the gap."  Your mind is no longer caught up in its noisy internal chatter and is instead exposed to its own deepest nature: pure awareness.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm completely in favor of meditation.  It is great for relaxation and reducing stress.  And there's no doubt any more that stress is contributory to poor health, so anything you can do in the way of decreasing it is probably going to do you nothing but good.

But saying "you'd probably feel better if you did some meditation" is different than making bogus claims about universal vibrations at the moment of your birth creating a Special Sound Just For You, and then telling you that you can only find out what it is if you sign up for an expensive workshop.  What Chopra et al. are doing is nothing more than a calculated, callous campaign of using people's ignorance about science, and anxiety over their health, to make money hand over fist.

And it works.  Chopra, Oz, Food Babe, and the rest are as popular as ever, despite study after study debunking their wild claims.  "Food Babe" was roundly ridiculed a few months ago for her claim that airlines were trying to kill us by pumping "impure air" into airplanes that "was not pure oxygen."  Dr. Oz, especially, has come under significant fire, receiving a harsh rebuke last year from the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection for his support of sketchy diet recommendations.  And earlier this year, a group of prominent doctors sent a scalding letter to Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons demanding that Oz be fired from his faculty position there, citing "an egregious lack of integrity."

But none of that seems to make much of a dent in their popularity.  They're still out there, still making ridiculous claims lo unto this very day, still bringing in money hand over fist.

Leading me to the troubling conclusion that however persuasive science is, it will never wield the power that the cult of personality does.

Neurobabble

Confirming something that people like Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz figured out years ago, researchers at Villanova University and the University of Oregon have shown that all you have to do to convince people is throw some fancy-sounding pseudoscientific jargon into your argument.

The specific area that Diego Fernandez-Duque, Jessica Evans, Colton Christian, and Sara D. Hodges researched was neurobabble, in particular the likelihood of increasing people's confidence in the correctness of an argument if some bogus brain-based explanation was included.  Fernandez-Duque et al. write:

Does the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information make explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing?  Do fMRI pictures further increase that allure?  To help answer these questions, 385 college students in four experiments read brief descriptions of psychological phenomena, each one accompanied by an explanation of varying quality (good vs. circular) and followed by superfluous information of various types.  Ancillary measures assessed participants' analytical thinking, beliefs on dualism and free will, and admiration for different sciences.  In Experiment 1, superfluous neuroscience information increased the judged quality of the argument for both good and bad explanations, whereas accompanying fMRI pictures had no impact above and beyond the neuroscience text, suggesting a bias that is conceptual rather than pictorial.  Superfluous neuroscience information was more alluring than social science information (Experiment 2) and more alluring than information from prestigious “hard sciences” (Experiments 3 and 4).  Analytical thinking did not protect against the neuroscience bias, nor did a belief in dualism or free will.  We conclude that the “allure of neuroscience” bias is conceptual, specific to neuroscience, and not easily accounted for by the prestige of the discipline.  It may stem from the lay belief that the brain is the best explanans for mental phenomena.

So this may explain why people so consistently fall for pseudoscience as long as it's couched in technical terminology.  For example, look at the following, an excerpt from an article in which Deepak Chopra is hawking his latest creation, a meditation-inducing device called "DreamWeaver":

About two years ago I got interested in the idea that you could feed light pulses through the brain with your eyes closed and sound and music at a certain frequency.  Your brain waves would dial into it and then you could dial the instrument down so that you would decrease the brain wave frequency from what it is normally in the waking state.  And then you could slowly dial down the brainwave frequency to what it would be in the dream state, which is called theta, and then you even dial further down into delta.

What the hell does "your brain waves would dial into it" mean?  And I would like to suggest to Fernandez-Duque et al. that their next experiment should have to do with people immediately believing claims if they involve the word "frequency."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then we have the following twofer -- an excerpt of an article by Deepak Chopra that appeared on Dr. Oz's website:

Try to eat one of these three foods once a day to protect against Alzheimer’s and memory issues. 

Wheat Germ - The embryo of a wheat plant, wheat germ is loaded with B-complex vitamins that can reduce levels of homocysteine, an amino acid linked to stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Sprinkle wheat germ on cereal and yogurt in the morning, or enjoy it on salads or popcorn with a little butter. 

Black Currents [sic] - These dark berries are jam-packed with antioxidants that help nourish the brain cells surrounding the hippocampus. The darker in color, the more antioxidants black currents [sic] contain. These fruits are available fresh when in season, or can be purchased dried or frozen year-round. 

Acorn Squash - This beautiful gold-colored veggie contains high amounts of folic acid, a B-vitamin that improves memory as well as the speed at which the brain processes information.

Whenever I read this sort of thing, I'm not inclined to believe it; I'm more inclined to shout, "Source?"  For example, I looked up the whole black currant claim, and the first few sources waxed rhapsodic about black currants' ability to enhance our brain function.  But then I noticed that said sources were all from the Black Currant Foundation (I didn't even know that existed, did you?) and the website blackcurrant.co.nz.  Scrolling down a bit, I found a post on WebMD that was considerably less enthusiastic, saying that it "may be useful in Alzheimer's" (with no mention of exactly how, nor any citations to support the claim) but that it also can lower blood pressure and slow down blood clotting.

So I suppose that the only way to protect yourself against this kind of nonsense is to learn some actual science, and be willing to do some research -- which includes training yourself to recognize what a credible source looks like.

But doing all this research myself leaves me feeling like I need some breakfast.  Maybe a wheat germ, black currant, and acorn squash stir-fry.  Can't have too many antioxidants, you know, when your hippocampus is having some frequency problems.

Chopra on AIDS

At what point does someone cross the line into giving advice so dangerous that the people involved in promoting him are morally culpable if they participate?

Look, it's not that I'm against free speech.  I also believe strongly in the caveat emptor principle -- that people have a responsibility to be well enough informed on matters of science and medicine that charlatans can gain no traction.  But influential people also have a responsibility, and that is to use that influence with care, to consider the harm their words could do, to make certain that what they're saying is scientifically correct (and making amends when they misspeak).

Of course, the most egregious example of how this can go wrong is the current measles outbreak in California, which has sickened 84 people so far and is still accelerating.  The CDC states that the outbreak is "directly attributable to the anti-vaxxer movement," and notes that even with treatment, measles "is a miserable disease" that can cause serious complications and death.  And we can lay the blame for the resurgence of this disease at the feet of such purveyors of unscientific bullshit as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy, who despite mountains of verified, reliable research are still claiming that vaccinations are unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst.

But we've talked about the anti-vaxxers before, and they're hardly the only example of this phenomenon.  Just a couple of days ago, for example, we had none other than Deepak Chopra putting his two cents in (although that's vastly overestimating its worth), and he gave his opinion about AIDS...

... and said it wasn't caused by HIV.

The HIV virus [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Chopra was being interviewed by Tony Robbins, and the following exchange took place:

Chopra: HIV may be a precipitating agent in a susceptible host. The material agent is never the cause of the disease. It may be the final factor in inducing the full-blown syndrome in somebody who’s already susceptible. 

Robbins: But what made them susceptible? 

Chopra: Their own interpretations of the whole reality they’re participating in. 

Robbins: Could that be translated into their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their lifestyle? 

Chopra: Absolutely.

He goes on to say, "I have a lot of patients with so-called AIDS... that are healthier than most of the people who live in downtown Boston.  They haven't had a cold in ten years...  Someone's told them they have this disease, and they've bought into it.  The label is not the disease, the test is not the disease."

Robbins responds with a comment about a doctor who has stated that HIV is only capable of killing "one helper-T cell out of ten thousand," and Chopra agrees, saying that to get sick from it, we have to "facilitate the process with our own thoughts and beliefs, convictions, ideas, and interpretations."

Then they have the following discussion:

Robbins: There's a test that doesn't even test for the virus, and when they get a positive test, what happens to them? 

Chopra: Then they make it happen. 

Robbins:  Maybe they take something like AZT, a side effect of which is immune suppression...  What keeps us locked into this trap?  What keeps us locked in this trap where we keep promoting a philosophy of fear where we must depend on someone or something outside of ourselves to keep ourselves healthy? 

Chopra:  It's the collective belief system.  It's the hypnosis of social conditioning.  It's cultural, religious, social indoctrination.  

The way out, Chopra says, is realizing that "you are the field of all unbounded possibilities."

Are you mad yet?  I hope so.  Chopra is using his influence -- which is considerable -- to push people away from conventional treatment into accepting vacuous psychobabble, risking their own lives in the process.

You have to wonder how he explains the millions of deaths from AIDS in central and southern Africa.  Many of those people don't have access to medical tests and treatments; a considerable number of them don't have the scientific background to understand what the virus does to the immune system.

You also have to wonder how he'd explain the deaths of young children who contracted HIV from their mothers.  Was their disease due to their parents' lack of acceptance of "the field of unbounded possibilities?"  Or did the children themselves have problems with their "interpretation of the whole reality they were participating in?"

Chopra once was simply a laughable purveyor of woo-woo pseudoscience, of the kind that he evidenced by a statement made earlier in the interview: "You go beyond the molecules, and you find atoms.  You go beyond the atoms, and you find particles.  You go beyond the particles, and you find nothing.  You go beyond the nothing, and you find absolutely nothing."  But now he's crossed the line into endangering people's lives with his claptrap.

I'd much prefer it if people would come to recognizing how dangerous this man is through a greater understanding of science; but the unfortunate truth is that there will always be gullible, credulous, and poorly-educated people out there, and it is immoral to allow people like Chopra to prey on their lack of understanding.  I wish fervently that radio and television stations who are giving this man air time, and book publishers who are promoting his views in print, would say, "I'm sorry, sir, but you are a quack, and you're hurting people, and we're not participating."

But the sad truth is that even if what he's saying is garbage, it's lucrative garbage.  Given the profit motive that drives most of our society, I suspect that Deepak Chopra is going to continue to get richer at the expense of people who are ignorant enough or desperate enough to buy the nonsense he's selling.

Cult of the week

It appears that we have a new religion on our hands.

Vice reported this week that actor Andrew Keegan has founded his own cult, called "Full Circle," in (surprise!) California.  Keegan, you may recall, was one of the actors in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, and is also known for his bravura performance as "Gotham PD Police Officer In Fight At End" in The Dark Knight Rises.

So you can kind of see why he might have turned his attention away from acting.  Keegan's nascent religion attracted the attention of reporter Brett Mazurek not only because of Keegan's debatable fame, but because it's a pretty peculiar belief system.  "Full Circle" members don't see it that way, of course; they describe it as "the highest spiritualism founded on universal knowledge" and say that Mazurek came to talk to Keegan and his followers because he "came through the vortex of Keegan's energy."

Whatever that means.

Oh, and one of Keegan's inner circle said his name was "Third Eye," following in the great tradition of being known for having non-standard numbers of body parts, such as Six-Fingered Man in The Princess Bride and One-Legged Man in Treasure Island.  (Yes, I know he's talking about the "mystical Third Eye," not an actual extra eye in the middle of his forehead, or anything.  But there isn't the slightest bit of evidence that the "mystical Third Eye" exists, so I'm not sure how else someone like me is supposed to interpret it.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What do the Full Circlers believe, you might be wondering?  Here's the belief system explained, in Keegan's own words.

Synchronicity.  Time.  That's what it's all about.  Whatever, the past, some other time.  It's a circle; in the center is now.  That's what it's about...  We're very, very aware of the shift that's happening in the mind and the heart, and everybody is on that love agenda.  We're very much scientifically, spiritually, and emotionally aware of how it works, meaning that there's power in the crystals, there's power in our hearts, there's an alignment, there's a resonance... and it transfers through water...  (T)he mission is to take the war out of our story, which is essentially peace, but activated peace.

All of this puts me in mind of the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, which strings together words and phrases from Chopra's Twitter feed, and comes up with fake Chopra quotes that sound convincingly like the real thing (i.e., they have lots of New Age buzzwords, but don't really mean anything).  Here's the one I got: "Eternal stillness is the wisdom of universal sexual energy."  Which I think should be added to Keegan's mission statement.

In fact, they should just use the Random Deepak Chopra Quote Generator to create their entire dogma.  It'd probably be more sensible than what Keegan himself said about it.

As far as how Keegan came to found Full Circle, he told Mazurek that he had been attacked by two gang members on the same day as the tsunami hit Japan -- March 11, 2011.  That had to mean something, Keegan said.  And after that, he had some odd experiences:

I had a moment where I was looking at a street lamp and it exploded.  That was a weird coincidence.  At a ceremony, a heart-shaped rose quartz crystal was on the altar, and synchronistically, this whole thing happened.  It's a long story, but basically the crystal jumped off the altar and skipped on camera.  That was weird.

So I suppose at that point, he had no choice but to form a cult.

So far, Keegan has attracted what looks like about three dozen members of his church.  Which is kind of surprising, not only from the standpoint that most of what he talks about seems to be woo-woo gibberish, but also because they apparently believe that everyone should have regular colon cleanses. That would have turned me away all by itself.  I mean, I'm all for seeking enlightenment, but I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with what amounts to sticking a garden hose up your ass and turning it on.

So there you are.  A new religion, because evidently we didn't have enough of them before.  I'm guessing this one won't last very long; these things have a way of coming and going pretty quickly.

Although people would probably have said the same thing about L. Ron Hubbard when he founded Scientology.  So maybe we should keep our eye on this one.

Deepak Chopra and the attractiveness of nonsense

There are a variety of reasons to learn some science.  First is, it's cool, and is the only game in town when it comes to understanding what's actually going on around you in the natural world.  Second, there are some issues we're facing (climate change and genetic modification come to mind) that you can only evaluate properly if you understand the science behind them.  These issues are having an increasing impact on humanity, and most of us are coming around to the idea that handling them properly will require some deep thought -- deep thought that requires you to understand what the research actually says.

The third reason is that some knowledge of science will keep you from falling prey to purveyors of bullshit.

Take, for example, this article from Huffington Post entitled "Deepak Chopra On How to Modify Your Own Genes."  The article begins thusly:

Physician and best-selling author Deepak Chopra has an empowering message: You can actually modify your own genes through your actions and behaviors. 

Well, Dr. Chopra, it may be "empowering," but that doesn't change the fact that it's wrong.  Modifying your gene expression is not the same thing as modifying your genes.  Your body responds to changes in environmental conditions all the time -- but that is altering the expression of the genes you already have, not making any sort of permanent changes to the genes themselves.

Alteration of gene expression happens continuously, throughout our lives.  If you hadn't altered gene expression as you developed from a single-celled fertilized egg, for example, you would right now be an amorphous blob of undifferentiated cells, and you would be unable to read this post, because you wouldn't have a brain.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, lest you think that it's just the writer at HuffPost who got it wrong, and that the passage above was taking something that Dr. Chopra said out of context and making it sound like he believes that experience alters your genes, here's an actual quote that proves otherwise:

“We are literally metabolizing something as ephemeral as experience or even meaning," Chopra said in an interview this week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “If somebody says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m in love with them, I suddenly feel great, and I make things like oxytocin and dopamine, serotonin, opiates. And if someone says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m really thinking they’re manipulating me, I don’t make the same thing. I make cortisol and adrenaline.”

First off, what does "literally metabolizing... experience" even mean?  Metabolism is one of those words that's used in common parlance in a variety of ways, but for which scientists have a precise definition.  You can metabolize the protein in your dinner, but "metabolizing experience" is a meaningless phrase -- and it's almost funny that he put the word "literally" in front of it.

Chopra, of course, has become notorious for this kind of thing.  He once said, in a talk, "We are each a localized field of energy and information with cybernetic feedback loops interacting within a nonlocal field," a phrase that is kind of admirable in how tightly it packs meaningless buzzwords together.  He specializes in a style of speech and writing that I call "sort of science-y or something" -- using words like frequency and quantum and resonance in vague, handwaving ways that have great appeal to people who aren't trained in science, and who don't realize that each of those words has a precise definition that honestly has nothing to do with the way he's using them.  In fact, he's so well-known for deep-sounding bullshit that there is an online Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, that strings together words to create an authentic-sounding Chopra Quote.  (Here's the one I just got: "The secret of the universe arises and subsides in descriptions of truth.")

This hasn't diminished his popularity, though.  RationalWiki says that he has millions of followers, has a highly lucrative speaking circuit, and has written 57 books to date.

As we've seen so many times before, bullshit sells.

But back to the HuffPost article.  Here's where you have to be on your guard -- because people like Chopra and his pal Rudy Tanzi, who is a professor at Harvard Medical School and clearly should know better, have a true gift for bait-and-switch.  Throw out a little bit of science fact, hook the unwary listener, and then reel him into WooWooWorld.

The bait that Chopra and Tanzi use in the article, and also in their new book Super Brain (of course the article is free advertising for a book!), is epigenetics -- inheritable changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes to the DNA itself.  It is a new, and rapidly advancing, subfield of molecular genetics, and there have been some tantalizing experiments done that have elucidated how this can happen.  Most of them seem to have to do with phenomena such as methylation, chromosome remodeling, and RNA interference -- but the science is new and changing, and in ten years it may well be that we'll know a great deal more about how it happens, and how it effects gene expression.

I find it interesting how slyly Chopra and Tanzi slip this in.  They cite a paper by Michael Skinner et al. called "Epigenetic Transgenerational Factors of Environmental Factors in Disease Etiology" as supporting their viewpoint -- and I suspect the authors of the paper would probably cringe to find out that they'd been linked to someone like Chopra.  But if you read the actual paper, which I doubt many people did, you find the following statement:

Epigenetic transgenerational phenomena generally require the involvement of the germline to allow the transmission of an epigenetic abnormality down several generations. The ability of environmental factors or toxicants to alter the epigenome will be common in somatic tissues, but is less common for the germline because of the limited developmental period it is sensitive to reprogramming.

Put more simply: in order to be passed down, epigenetic changes have to affect your eggs or sperm, it's likely that most epigenetic changes in the organism don't.  So it's probable that some diseases are epigenetic in origin, but most of those epigenetic changes won't become inheritable.

That's a far cry from "when my brain is happy, it changes my genes," isn't it?

Okay, I know that Chopra and his ilk probably fall into the category of "what's the harm?"  He's peddling a lot of feel-good woo-woo nonsense, but so what?  Who is he really hurting?

Myself, I consider "selling an untrue view of the world" to constitute harm.  What he's telling you, at its foundation, is simply a false understanding.  And he's getting filthy rich in the process.

But if you're content to buy what he's got for sale, I suppose you have that right.  My own opinion is more in line with what Carl Sagan said years ago: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."