Dream weavers

In Ursula LeGuin's amazing and disturbing novel The Lathe of Heaven, a very ordinary guy finds that he has a completely unordinary ability.

When he dreams, he wakes up and finds that whatever he dreamed has become reality.

George Orr, the protagonist, is terrified by this, as you might imagine.  It's not like he can control what he dreams; he isn't able to program himself to dream something pleasant in order to find he has it when he wakes.  No, it's more sinister than that.  Consider the bizarre, confusing, often frightening content of most of our dreams -- dreams that prompt you to say the next morning, "Where the hell did that come from?"

That is what makes up George's reality.

The worst part is that George is the only one who knows it's happening.  When his dream content alters reality, it alters everything -- including the memories -- of the people he knows.  When he wakes up and finds that the cityscape has changed and that some people he knew are gone, replaced with others he has never seen before, everyone else's memories changed as well.  George wakes to find he has a girlfriend, but she doesn't think it's sudden and weird; being George's girlfriend is what she remembers.

Only George sees that this is just the latest version of a constantly shifting reality.

So when he tries to explain to people what he can do, and (if possible) find a way to stop it, no one believes him.  No one... except a ruthless and ambitious psychiatrist who realizes that if he can figure out how to manipulate George's dreams, he can fashion a world to his own desires, using George as a tool to create the reality he wants.

LeGuin's terrifying vision of what happens when grasping amorality meets a naïve but useful skill is turning out not to be far from being realized.  George Orr's paranormal ability is the stuff of fiction, of course; but the capacity for influencing our dreams is not.

Nor, apparently, is the potential for using our dreams as a conduit for suggestions that might alter our behavior -- with or without our permission, possibly with or without our knowledge.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons stephentrepreneur, Hurtle Square dreams, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I found out yesterday from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia that there is a cohort of powerful corporations who have teamed up to see if there's a way to insert advertising content into our dreams.  Xbox, Coors, Microsoft, and Burger King, among others, have been experimenting on volunteers to see if they can introduce targeted advertising while we're asleep, and (especially) while we're at the neurologically hyperactive REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, in order to induce people to alter their behavior -- i.e., purchase the product in question -- once they wake up.  They've had some success; a test by Coors found that sixty percent of the volunteers were susceptible to having these kinds of product-based suggestions influence their dream content.

Forty sleep and dream researchers are now pushing back, and have drafted a document calling for regulation of what the corporate researchers are calling "dream incubation."  "It is easy to envision a world in which smart speakers—forty million Americans currently have them in their bedrooms—become instruments of passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission," the authors state.

My fear is that the profit motive will outweigh any reluctance people might have toward having their dreams infiltrated by corporate content.  If cellular service providers were willing to give users a discount on their monthly fees, provided they agreed to allow themselves to be exposed to ads during the nighttime hours, how many people would say, "Sure, okay, go for it"?  I know for myself, I'm often willing to tolerate ads on games and video streaming services rather than paying extra to go ad-free.  I'd like to think that I'm able to tune out the ads sufficiently that they're not influencing my behavior, but what would happen if I'm exposed to them for all eight to ten hours that I'm sleeping every night?

Not all scientists are concerned about the technique's efficacy, however.  "Of course you can play ads to someone as they are sleeping, but as far as having much effect, there is little evidence," said Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University.  "Dream incubation doesn’t seem very cost effective compared with traditional advertising campaigns."

Even if it doesn't have the manipulative capability the corporations are hoping, the idea still scares the hell out of me.  When every moment of our days and nights become just another opportunity for monetization, where will it all stop?   "I am not overly concerned, just as I am not concerned that people can be hypnotized against their will," said University of Montreal dream researcher Tore Nielsen.  "If it does indeed happen and no regulatory actions are taken to prevent it, then I think we will be well on our way to a Big Brother state … [and] whether or not our dreams can be modified would likely be the least of our worries."

Which is it exactly.  As I've pointed out before, my main concern is about the increasing control corporate interests have over everything.  And here in the United States, the problem is that the people who could potentially pass legislation to limit what the corporations can get away with are being funded largely by corporate donors, so they're not anxious to put the brakes on and see that flow of cash dry up suddenly.  It's a catch-22 that would require the government to police its own behavior for no other reason than simple morality and ethics.

And you can guess how successful that is likely to be.

I'm hoping that at least someone is listening, though.  I tend to agree with Nielsen; I don't think our dream content will be as easily manipulable, or as behavior-altering, as the corporations hope.  But what I'm more worried about is that once we refuse to delineate a hard line around our personal lives, and say to them, "Here, and no further," we've opened ourselves up to there being no part of our personal space that isn't considered a target for monetization.

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

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

Purging the experts

One of the political trends I understand least is the increasing distrust of scientists by elected officials.

It's not like this disparagement of experts is across the board.  When you're sick, and the doctor runs tests and diagnoses you with a sinus infection, you don't say, "I don't believe you.  My real estate agent told me it sounded like I had an ulcer, so I'm gonna go with that."  When you get on an airplane, you don't say to the pilot, "You damn elite aviation specialists, you're obviously biased because of your training.  I think you should hand over the controls to Farmer Bob, here."  When you have your car repaired, you wouldn't say to the mechanic, "I'm not going to do the repairs you suggest, because you have an obvious monetary interest in the car being broken.  I'll get a second opinion from my son's kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Hinkwhistle, who is a disinterested party."

But that's how scientists are treated by politicians.  And it's gotten worse.  Just yesterday, Scott Pruitt, who is the de facto leader of the Environmental Protection Agency despite his apparent loathing of both the environment and the agency, announced that there was going to be a purge of scientists on EPA advisory boards.

"What’s most important at the agency is to have scientific advisers that are objective, independent-minded, providing transparent recommendations,” Pruitt said when he spoke to a group at the Heritage Foundation, an anti-environmental, pro-corporate lobby group.  "If we have individuals who are on those boards, sometimes receiving money from the agency … that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way."

Well, of course environmental scientists get funding from the EPA, you dolt.  One of the EPA's functions is providing grants for basic research in environmental science.  Saying that environmental scientists can't be on EPA advisory boards is a little like excluding doctors from being on medical advisory boards.

Can't have that, after all.  Those doctors are clearly biased to be in favor of policies that promote better health care services, because then they get money for providing those services.  Better populate the medical advisory boards with people who know nothing whatsoever about medicine.

Of course, I am morally certain that the purging of trained scientists from EPA advisory boards is not simply because of this administration's anti-science bent, although that clearly exists as well.  The fight between corporate stooges like Scott Pruitt and the scientific community stems from the fact that much of what the scientists are saying runs counter to economic expediency.  You know, such things as:

• Climate change exists and is anthropogenic in origin
• Dumping mining waste into streams and lakes is a bad idea
• Corporations need strictures on the impact of what they do on the environment, because they have a poor track record of policing themselves
• Reducing the allowable amounts of air pollutants improves air quality and eases such conditions as asthma and chronic bronchitis
• Oil pipelines have a nasty habit of breaking and leading to damaging oil spills
• It's a stupid idea to store pressurized natural gas in unstable underground salt caverns

All of which we environmental types -- by which I mean, people who would like future generations to have drinkable water, breathable air, and a habitable world -- have had to fight in the past year.  The Trump administration's approach to environmental policy is like the Hydra; you cut off one foul, pollution-emitting head, and it grows two more.

The whole thing is driven by a furious drive toward deregulation, which in turn comes out of unchecked corporate greed.  Jennifer Sass, senior scientist for the National Resources Defense Council, nailed it:  "Pruitt’s purge has a single goal: get rid of scientists who tell us the facts about threats to our environment and health.  There’s a reason he won’t apply the same limits to scientists funded by corporate polluters.  Now the only scientists on Pruitt’s good list will be those with funding from polluters supporting Trump’s agenda to make America toxic again."

Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy, agreed.  Halpern said that if Pruitt succeeds in his purge, he "would be willfully setting himself up to fail at the job of protecting public health and the environment."

The problem is, stories like this get buried in the ongoing shitstorm that has characterized the leadership of the United States in the last ten months.  It's another Hydra, and people simply can't pay attention to all of the horrible news at the same time.  That's what they're counting on -- that with outrages over kneeling athletes and disrespect by the president of military widows and allegations of sexual impropriety, we'll just ignore the fact that while all this other stuff is happening, our leaders are gutting every protection the environment has gained in the last fifty years.

You'd think that with the natural disasters this year -- unprecedented hurricanes and wildfires and floods -- we'd wise up and say, "You know, maybe it's time we started paying attention to the damage we've done."  But unfortunately, we're heading in exactly the opposite direction.  My fear is that by doing this, we're making the eventual backlash from the environment unstoppable.

And it would be a Pyrrhic victory, but I hope Scott Pruitt is around to watch it happen.

The Common Core product placement conspiracy

I've been asked, at times, if I think it's possible that some conspiracy theories may be true.

And my answer is: of course.  Humans conspire.  It's the evil side of being a social animal; we sometimes use our social proclivities for immoral reasons.  So clearly there are some cases where "conspiracy theory" is actually "conspiracy fact."

It's just that I don't think most of the best-known ones -- the 9/11 inside job/controlled demolition claim, the Sandy Hook crisis actors claim, the HAARP weather modification claim -- have a scrap of evidence in their favor.  But other ones?  They have to be evaluated on their own merits, or lack thereof.

This comes up because I ran into a story yesterday that has all of the hallmarks of a conspiracy -- and yet I find it entirely believable.  I will say up front that I have no hard evidence that my claim is true.  It may be that what occurred here was entirely innocent, and the individuals involved are being straightforward and aboveboard.

But my opinion is that this stinks to high heaven.

I found the article because I was doing some reading about the latest on the Common Core, the ill-conceived and poorly-executed fad of the month for fixing public education by administering more standardized tests.  Oh, the standards themselves look okay: more understanding of math holistically, with less focus on minute details of symbol manipulation; more reading from source materials and writing to express understanding.  But the way it has been implemented has been haphazard at best, with an emphasis on test preparation, leading up to nationally-administered exams that put millions of dollars in the pockets of corporations like Pearson Education.

There has been a groundswell of anger about the whole thing, not only from teachers and administrators, but from parents.  This has led to a growing opt-out-of-the-tests movement, which is gaining traction across the country.  Oh, the fourth grade reading exam is tomorrow?  I'm sorry, my son is sick.  The make-up exam is in three weeks?  Oh, darn, I'm sorry.  He's going to be sick then, too.

But right here in my home state of New York, there's been a revelation of an even darker side of the whole thing.  A story in the Syracuse Post-Standard ran a few days ago that described the fact that the Common Core exams, provided by Pearson, include multiple examples of...

... product placement.

Yes, you read that right.  This has gotten out despite Pearson's tight control on the exam content -- teachers and students are expressly forbidden to reveal, much less copy and distribute, test materials, even once the test has been administered.  But you can't keep something this egregious a secret.  So the 3rd through 8th grade assessments were barely collected and scored when it came out that Barbie, Nike, iPod, Life Savers, and Mug Root Beer had all made their way into the exams.

And not in subtle ways, either.  The Nike brand and slogan appeared in a paragraph about risk-taking.  A story about a busboy cleaning up a root beer spill was specified as cleaning up Mug (a trademark owned by PepsiCo).  They weren't even taking the trouble to hide the product placement, the way that television sitcoms do -- such as placing a two liter bottle of Coca-Cola on a counter in the background of a scene.  This was blatant.

Everyone involved, of course, has denied that Pearson is receiving kickbacks from the corporations that produce the products mentioned.  "There are no product placement deals between us, Pearson or anyone else," Tom Dunn, an Education Department spokesman, said in an interview on Fox News. "No deals.  No money.  We use authentic texts.  If the author chose to use a brand name in the original, we don’t edit."

Mmm-hmm.  And if several of those texts mention products from multi-million dollar corporations, that's purely a coincidence.

Right.

The growing influence of corporations on education is a horrifying trend.  Kevin Kumashiro, writing for the American Association of University Professors, writes:

Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own.  They, the millionaires and billionaires from the philanthropic and corporate sectors, are experimenting in urban school districts with educational reform initiatives that are not grounded in sound research and often fail to produce results.  And yet, with funding for public education shrinking, the influence of these wealthy reformers is growing...  The result is a philanthropic sector that is inseparable from the business sector, advancing school reforms that cannot help but to be framed by corporate profitability.

And that's just it, isn't it?  The corporate leaders are not specialists in education; they have never been teachers, administrators, served on school boards.  It is just that by virtue of the money they have, they feel entitled to direct educational policy.  And the sad fact is, because of the increasing desperation of school districts to stay afloat financially, the corporations are succeeding.  More and more, state educational systems are making deals with the devil, and sacrificing our children as a consequence.

So could the appearance of product placement in Common Core-based exams be an accident, a result of random choice of textual material that mentioned modern corporate products that are appealing to children?  Could it have nothing to do with the ongoing attack on the public school system by special interest groups and money-hungry boards of directors?  Could Tom Dunn have been telling the truth when he said that Pearson got nothing for their blatant product placement?

Sure.  It could be.

But I don't believe it for a moment.