What's the harm?

One of the questions I get asked pretty frequently, apropos of my work as a debunker and critic of woo, is "What's the harm?"  So what if people want to believe in astrology or divination or whatnot?  Surely it's harmless to check your horoscope daily or make your decisions on your latest Tarot card reading.  Just leave people alone and let them do whatever floats their boat.

The problem is, these kinds of beliefs aren't harmless.  I see three different ways in which such practices generate a potential for direct harm.  First, belief in something despite a complete lack of evidence establishes a habit of credulity; so your acceptance of something fairly benign (like astrology) can predispose you to believe something that isn't benign at all (like the claim that homeopathy is a legitimate way to treat human disease).  Once you've fallen for one bit of nonsense, the next one is that much easier to fall for.

Second, a great many of the people who are purveyors of this nonsense are in it for one reason: money.  They are happy to relieve you of your hard-earned cash in exchange for a tissue of lies.  One good example of this is faith healing, which even today brings its practitioners millions of dollars a year, ripped off from the gullible and the desperate.

Last, though, is that some forms of woo -- the ones that, like homeopathy and faith healing, claim to alleviate something real, something with an actual physical cause -- lead people to abandon practices that might actually work, and seek out what amounts to magic.  And that brings me to Christina Lopes, a self-styled "healer and life coach."

I ran into Christina Lopes over at the r/skeptic subreddit, where someone posted one of her videos along with some rather acidic commentary.  I'd never heard of her, so I decided to watch the video.

In order to save you a half-hour of your life that you'll never get back, allow me to summarize the main points.

First, she says we're all "ascending."  Our bodies, supposedly, are in the process of transforming into something "higher."  What she means by "higher" is never defined in any rigorous way, but apparently it has to do with two things -- your "light quotient," the amount of light your body can hold, and the rate at which you're vibrating.  Lopes subscribes to the idea that the faster something is vibrating, the better it is, an idea you'd think anyone would realize is false just based on sound waves.  (If you don't believe me, you listen to a guy playing a solo piccolo for an hour, and I'll listen to a guy playing a cello, and we'll see who has a headache afterward.)  Better still, consider that claim applied to the light she likes talking about so much; compare the effect on the body of very high-frequency light (e.g. gamma rays) as compared to lower-frequency light (e.g. visible light).

I know which one I'd want bombarding me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Salma2789, Spirit man, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So far, nothing so different than a lot of these kinds of wacky spiritual claims.  But then she goes into the health effects of "ascension," and that's where things get dangerous.

She says that when you start "ascending," it's hard on the body.  Our cells (which she claims are sentient) "literally purge themselves of lower energy."  If she means "literally" literally, it's hard to fathom why the scientists have never detected this energy purge, since you'd think it would be measurable somehow.  But she goes on to tell us that this phase of things creates some real physical symptoms -- muscle inflammation, which "could be anywhere" including your chest, and mental agitation (disjointed, dark, or violent thoughts).  If this happens to you, she says, don't be afraid, because fear is a "dense emotion" which will just make things worse.  You should also increase water intake, because "water is a conductor of energy."  (Good idea, but for the wrong reason.)

At this point, she's moved into the realm of advice that could cause actual harm.  The symptoms she describes -- inflammation and mental agitation -- can be the result of real, and potentially serious, medical conditions.  Believing her bullshit explanation about this being just a natural result of "ascension," and nothing to worry about, means someone might forgo legitimate medical treatment, perhaps until it's far too late.  (For fuck's sake, chest pains and mental agitation are signs of a heart attack.  If you're feeling this, don't mess around with wondering if you're "ascending," get your ass to a hospital now.)

It's to be hoped that the scope of damage she's doing is limited; not only is she not especially widely-known (I couldn't find any mention of her on RationalWiki, for example), but fortunately a lot of the little aches and twinges we experience, and many of the disjointed or chaotic thoughts, are completely normal and not the sign of any dire problems.  But one person dying of cancer because he thought his symptoms were signs of "ascension," and he put off seeing a doctor, is way, way too many.

It's amazing how quickly beliefs can move from "weird but basically harmless" to "actively dangerous."  The problem is, setting aside rational thought so you can accept the former means you'll be much more likely to accept the latter without question.  All the "your body is light" and "high-frequency vibrations are good" stuff is innocuous enough; but as you can see from Lopes's video, those lead directly to "here are some real physical symptoms you shouldn't worry about."

I don't see any way to stop her from posting her videos; her advice is mostly vague enough that trying to establish culpability for harm in a legal sense would be next to impossible.  Failing that, the best we can do is to stress once again how important education in critical thinking is.  Not to mention a solid background in actual science.  If enough people call this out as the bullshit it is, purveyors of snake oil like Christina Lopes will be permanently out of a job.

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Watching the clock

 If I had to pick the scientific law that is the most misunderstood by the general public, it would have to be the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that the total quantity of energy and mass in a closed system never changes; it's sometimes stated as, "Mass and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed."  The Second Law states that in a closed system, the total disorder (entropy) always increases.  As my long-ago thermodynamics professor put it, "The First Law says you can't win; the Second Law says you can't break even."

Hell of a way to run a casino, that.

So far, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly non-intuitive about this.  Even from our day-to-day experience, we can surmise that the amount of stuff seems to remain pretty constant, and that if you leave something without maintenance, it tends to break down sooner or later.  But the interesting (and less obvious) side starts to appear when you ask the question, "If the Second Law says that systems tend toward disorder, how can a system become more orderly?  I can fling a deck of cards and make them more disordered, but if I want I can pick them up and re-order them.  Doesn't that break the Second Law?"

It doesn't, of course, but the reason why is quite subtle, and has some pretty devastating implications.  The solution to the question comes from asking how you accomplish re-ordering a deck of cards.  Well, you use your sensory organs and brain to figure out the correct order, and the muscles in your arms and hands (and legs, depending upon how far you flung them in the first place) to put them back in the correct order.  How did you do all that?  By using energy from your food to power the organs in your body.  And to get the energy out of those food molecules -- especially glucose, our primary fuel -- you broke them to bits and jettisoned the pieces after you were done with them.  (When you break down glucose to extract the energy, a process called cellular respiration, the bits left are carbon dioxide and water.  So the carbon dioxide you exhale is actually broken-down sugar.)

Here's the kicker.  If you were to measure the entropy decrease in the deck of cards, it would be less -- way less -- than the entropy increase in the molecules you chopped up to get the energy to put the cards back in order.  Every time you increase the orderliness of a system, it always (1) requires an input of energy, and (2) increases the disorderliness somewhere else.  We are, in fact, little chaos machines, leaving behind a trail of entropy everywhere we go, and the more we try to fix things, the worse the situation gets.

I've heard people arguing that the Second Law disproves evolution because the evolutionary model claims we're in a system that has become more complex over time, which according to the Second Law is impossible.  It's not; and in fact, that statement betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of what the Second Law means.  The only reason why any increase in order occurs -- be it evolution, or embryonic development, or stacking a deck of cards -- is because there's a constant input of energy, and the decrease in entropy is offset by a bigger increase somewhere else.  The Earth's ecosystems have become more complex in the 4.5 billion year history of life because there's been a continuous influx of energy from the Sun.  If that influx were to stop, things would break down.

Fast.

The reason all this comes up is because of a paper this week in Physical Review X that gives another example of trying to make things better, and making them worse in the process.  This one has to do with the accuracy of clocks -- a huge deal to scientists who are studying the rate of reactions, where the time needs to be measured to phenomenal precision, on the scale of nanoseconds or better.  The problem is, we learn from "Measuring the Thermodynamic Cost of Timekeeping," the more accurate the clock is, the higher the entropy produced by its workings.  So, in effect, you can only measure time in a system to the extent you're willing to screw the system up.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbert van der Steeg, Eternal clock, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The authors write:

All clocks, in some form or another, use the evolution of nature towards higher entropy states to quantify the passage of time.  Due to the statistical nature of the second law and corresponding entropy flows, fluctuations fundamentally limit the performance of any clock.  This suggests a deep relation between the increase in entropy and the quality of clock ticks...  We show theoretically that the maximum possible accuracy for this classical clock is proportional to the entropy created per tick, similar to the known limit for a weakly coupled quantum clock but with a different proportionality constant.  We measure both the accuracy and the entropy.  Once non-thermal noise is accounted for, we find that there is a linear relation between accuracy and entropy and that the clock operates within an order of magnitude of the theoretical bound.

Study co-author Natalia Ares, of the University of Oxford, summarized their findings succinctly in an article in Science News; "If you want a better clock," she said, "you have to pay for it."

So a little like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the more you try to push things in a positive direction, the more the universe pushes back in the negative direction.  

Apparently, even if all you want to know is what time it is, you still can't break even.

So that's our somewhat depressing science for the day.  Entropy always wins, no matter what you do.  Maybe I can use this as an excuse for not doing housework.  Hey, if I make things more orderly here, all it does is mess things up elsewhere, so what's the point?

Nah, never mind.  My wife'll never buy it.

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When people think of mass extinctions, the one that usually comes to mind first is the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction of 66 million years ago, the one that wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a good many species of other types.  It certainly was massive -- current estimates are that it killed between fifty and sixty percent of the species alive at the time -- but it was far from the biggest.

The largest mass extinction ever took place 251 million years ago, and it destroyed over ninety percent of life on Earth, taking out whole taxa and changing the direction of evolution permanently.  But what could cause a disaster on this scale?

In When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, University of Bristol paleontologist Michael Benton describes an event so catastrophic that it beggars the imagination.  Following researchers to outcrops of rock from the time of the extinction, he looks at what was lost -- trilobites, horn corals, sea scorpions, and blastoids (a starfish relative) vanished completely, but no group was without losses.  Even terrestrial vertebrates, who made it through the bottleneck and proceeded to kind of take over, had losses on the order of seventy percent.

He goes through the possible causes for the extinction, along with the evidence for each, along the way painting a terrifying picture of a world that very nearly became uninhabited.  It's a grim but fascinating story, and Benton's expertise and clarity of writing makes it a brilliant read.

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

Algae aura

Can I just say that I am sick unto death of people misrepresenting science?

Some scientist somewhere makes a discovery, and it seems to take only milliseconds before every woo-woo with a favorite loony idea about how the world works is using it to support their claims.  These people have taken confirmation bias and raised it to the level of performance art.

A long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a particularly good (or bad, as the case may be) example of this yesterday, in the form of an article by Michael Forrester called "People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do," that is apparently getting passed all over social media.  So let me illustrate my point by telling you what some of Forrester's conclusions from this scientific research are, and afterwards I'll tell you about the actual research itself.

See if you can connect the two.

Forrester says that we absorb "energies" from our surroundings.  He never defines what he means by "energy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the standard physics definition, because he includes stuff about being around "negative people."  He cites "psychologist and energy healer" Olivia Bader-Lee, who says:

This is exactly why there are certain people who feel uncomfortable in specific group settings where there is a mix of energy and emotions...  The human organism is very much like a plant, it draws needed energy to feed emotional states and this can essentially energize cells or cause increases in cortisol and catabolize cells depending on the emotional trigger...  Humans can absorb and heal through other humans, animals, and any part of nature.  That's why being around nature is often uplifting and energizing for so many people.

We're then given specific recommendations for how to "absorb and heal" efficiently.  These include:

• Stay centered and grounded
• Be in a state of non-resistance
• Own your personal aura space
• Give yourself an energy cleanse
• Call back your energy

I was especially interested in the "energy cleanse" thing, and fortunately, Forrester tells us exactly how to accomplish this:

The color gold has a high vibration which is useful for clearing away foreign energy.  Imagine a gold shower nozzle at the top of your aura (a few feet above your head) and turn it on, allowing clear gold energy to flow through your aura and body space and release down your grounding.  You will immediately feel cleansed and refreshed.

So all I have to do is imagine it, eh?  Given that I spent 32 years working with teenagers, I wish I'd known that "owning your personal aura space" was something that would happen if I imagined it.  Teaching a room full of tenth graders is like trying to herd hyperactive puppies.  Since I found that yelling "BACK OFF" was seldom effective, it would have been nice if all I'd had to do was to picture my "aura space" (gold-colored, of course) and the teenagers would have been repelled backwards in a comical fashion, sort of like Yoda did to Count Dooku at the end of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

But I digress.

Okay. So you're probably wondering what scientific research led Forrester and Bader-Lee to come to this conclusion.

Ready?

The discovery by a team of scientists in the Biotechnology Department of Bielefeld University (Germany) that a species of algae can digest cellulose.

If you're going, "Um, but wait... but... how... what?" you should realize that I had exactly the same response.  I spent several minutes thinking that I had clicked on the wrong link. But no. In fact, Forrester even mentions the gist of the research himself:

Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants.

And from this he deduces that all you have to do to be happy is to picture yourself underneath a gold shower nozzle.

I've seen some misrepresentations and far-fetched deductions before, but this one has to take the grand prize.

I get that people are always casting about looking for support for their favorite theories.  So as wacky as Forrester's pronouncements are, at least I see why he made them.  But what baffles me is how other people can look at what he wrote, and say, "Yes!  That makes complete sense!  Algae that can digest cellulose!  Therefore aura spaces and energetic quantum vibrations of happiness!

Okay, I admit that I can be a hardass rationalist at times.  But seriously, what are these people thinking?

Not much, is my guess.

So anyhow, watch out for those negative energies.  Those can be a bummer.  But if you're feeling like your vibrations are low, don't despair.  I hear that getting into psychic communication with algae can help.

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

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

DNA energy field laser frequency vibrations!

Every once in a while I'll run across a claim that is so wildly ridiculous that I question, for a time, if it is meant as a joke.  Sadly, the majority of them aren't.  As hard as it is for me to believe, given that we currently live in the most scientifically and technologically advanced society that the Earth has ever seen, there are a lot of people who believe stuff that is unrefined bullshit.

I ran into an example a few days ago, when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me an article entitled "Scientists Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed By Words And Frequencies," by Grazyna Fosar and Franz Bludorf.  The word "frequency" always acts like a red flag to me, as it is for some reason a word woo-woos like a lot, and throw about in absurd ways despite its having a rigid, and not especially thrilling, definition in the scientific world (three others are "energy," "vibration," and "field").  So I read the article, and found ample fodder for faceplanting right in the first paragraph, to wit:

THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET and superior in many aspects to the artificial one.  Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more.  In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.

So -- DNA causes auras and clairvoyance, not to mention "weather patterns." And here I thought weather patterns were caused by air masses moving around, and all that sort of thing.

But what do I know?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons gerlos (original picture), modification: Mielon, Thunderstorm 003, CC BY-SA 2.0]

In any case, the authors are far from done:

The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA...  The bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.”  This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.

Ooh, there we are -- "vibration!" That's two down, two to go.  My favorite part of this is that "no DNA decoding is necessary."  You don't have to know anything about how DNA actually works, apparently, to experience "endogenous DNA laser radiation."  Maybe it'll grant you superpowers, you think?  If so, I want to be able to fly.  You know, big feathery wings coming from my shoulders.  It'll make fitting into shirts tricky, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

But let's not get sidetracked, here.  Back to the article:

One can simply use words and sentences of the human language!  This, too, was experimentally proven!  Living DNA substance (in living tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even to radio waves, if the proper frequencies are being used...  Esoteric and spiritual teachers have known for ages that our body is programmable by language, words and thought.  This has now been scientifically proven and explained.  Of course the frequency has to be correct.  And this is why not everybody is equally successful or can do it with always the same strength.  The individual person must work on the inner processes and maturity in order to establish a conscious communication with the DNA.  The Russian researchers work on a method that is not dependent on these factors but will ALWAYS work, provided one uses the correct frequency.

"The human language" reprograms DNA?  Hmm.  I wonder if it has to be a specific language?   Russian, given that that's what the "scientist" who did this "research" speaks?   Would English do?   How about Sanskrit?  Or Swahili?  What about Pig Latin?  "This is Ordon-gay attempting to eprogram-ray your NA-Day."

But that's not all your DNA can do, when the proper "frequency" is achieved:

The Russian scientists also found out that our DNA can cause disturbing patterns in the vacuum, thus producing magnetized wormholes!  Wormholes are the microscopic equivalents of the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridges in the vicinity of black holes (left by burned-out stars).  These are tunnel connections between entirely different areas in the universe through which information can be transmitted outside of space and time.  The DNA attracts these bits of information and passes them on to our consciousness.  This process of hyper communication is most effective in a state of relaxation.  Stress, worries or a hyperactive intellect prevent successful hyper communication or the information will be totally distorted and useless.

I've been kind of stressed lately, which is probably why there have been no wormholes forming in my vicinity.

When hyper communication occurs, one can observe in the DNA as well as in the human being special phenomena.  The Russian scientists irradiated DNA samples with laser light.  On screen a typical wave pattern was formed.  When they removed the DNA sample, the wave pattern did not disappear, it remained.  Many control experiments showed that the pattern still came from the removed sample, whose energy field apparently remained by itself.  This effect is now called phantom DNA effect.  It is surmised that energy from outside of space and time still flows through the activated wormholes after the DNA was removed.

Yay! "Energy" AND "field!" We've scored four for four with this one! At this point, my DNA was tired of hypercommunicating at high frequencies and my wave frequency patterns felt like they needed a double scotch, so I pretty much stopped reading, although I did notice further along that the article mentioned the Schumann resonance, Princess Diana's funeral, remote sensing, UFOs, "troubled children," and anti-gravity.  So they've got their bases pretty well covered, woo-woo-wise.

And yes, this article appears to be entirely serious.  As do the comments, the first one of which was, "This appears to be how Jesus performed miracles.  The power of God is within us!" 

 Because Jesus had lasers, and all.

I find all of this simultaneously hilarious and discouraging.  Hilarious because the claims are so bafflingly stupid that I can't help but laugh when I read them; discouraging because there is, apparently, a large group of people who actually find them plausible.  As a science teacher, we try to provide what Carl Sagan calls "a candle in the dark" -- a way of seeing the world that gets past superstition and credulity, and bases our knowledge instead on evidence, logic, and rationality.  And to be sure, we've come a long way since the Dark Ages, when people believed that there were only four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and frogs were spontaneously created from muddy water.   When I read stuff like this, however, it makes me realize how far we still have to go.

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This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Shiny happy energy

As part of the ongoing effort by my readers to drive me completely insane, today I have two links that were sent to me with a "You Gotta See This" message.  And far be it from me not to want to share the experience with all of you.

I'll just assume you're showering me with thanks right now, shall I?

The first has the encouraging title Love Has Won, which sounds awfully nice although you'd think if love really had won, I'd have heard something about it.  When I read the news, it seems to be as much of a raging shitstorm as ever.  Be that as it may, the site is pretty optimistic about everything.  It opens with a bang:

With the arrival and crystallization of the God and Goddess energies within Gaia’s new energy grid the depolarization process begins!  The old eon worked on polarization of the masses and of the individual.  The new eon works very differently! 

It may come as no surprise that humanity has become highly polarized these last few years.  This polarization was the manifestation of the last of the old eon energetics.  The process that is now underway neutralizes all polarization completely and leaves the masses and individuals squarely in the same life circumstances but without the polarization or sense of urgency previously experienced.

Okay!  Right!  What?

I guess the problem here is that I'm starting from the admittedly silly assumption that when people use scientific terms, they actually understand what they mean.  Things like "depolarization," "crystallization," "energy," and so on.  I did read the entire piece to try to determine what the author was trying to tell us, and what I got out of it was that if you can depolarize your energetics, you will take part in ascension, an event that will make the Earth's aura really pretty.

Or something like that.

The aurora.  Not aura.  Which are not the same thing.  [Image courtesy of NASA]

So you don't have to read the whole thing, which I wouldn't suggest in any case unless you have a bottle of scotch handy, let me cut to the chase and let you take a look at the last paragraph:

Energetic activity will remain at the level of its origin unless transmuted consciously to other levels.  To creatively manifest something physically, the process must be driven by physical life force energy.  This means either hard physical work or magical tantric practices.  The astral levels have segregated and the beginning of all great cycles activates the lowest level first, that of life force energy and magic.  That is where we now find ourselves, in a completely magical world.  All the upper astral levels are energetically dead in regards to manifesting things physically.  All other energies will remain in their respective levels unless consciously transmuted.

So I guess that clears that up.

Then we have the site Earth Keeper: Energy Activation of the New Planet Earth, a somewhat flashier site that starts out by telling us about an event to be held in the third week of September in Little Rock, Arkansas, that is called, I shit you not, "ArkLantis."  It is, we are told, a "Crystal Vortex Star-Gate Event," which sounds pretty impressive.  I have to share the description of the event with you, because putting it into my own words just wouldn't convey the full effect, particularly since I wouldn't capitalize every other word:

Join the Earth-Keeper Family in the Incredible Transformational Energy of the Sacred Ark Crystal Vortex ...  The Epi-Centre of the Crystalline Shift.  Arkansas is a Geological Wonder, Containing the Largest Singular Strata of Quartz Crystal on the Planet. Beginning in Little Rock, The Amazing Crystal Deposits Extend 177 miles SW from Little Rock to Hot Springs National Park & onward to Talimena Ridge.  Within the Astonishing Crystals are Rare World Renowned Deposits of Magnetite (at Magnet Cove), the Toltec Mounds Pyramids, Renowned Natural Thermal Healing Springs, Aquifers, Mystical Massive Caverns, Sacred Mountains, Crystal Clear Rivers, Holy Lakes, Amethyst, and an Active Diamond Mine ( Crater of Diamonds State Park).  Arkansas was A Crystal Colony of the Benevolent Law of One Atlanteans.  There are Utterly Astonishing, Enormous Crystals Beneath Arkansas the Size of Buildings.  Three Temple Crystals Were Placed in the Underground Caverns Before the Final Sinking of Atlantis.  The Energy Has Awakened & The Crystal Vortex is Now the Most Potent Crystalline Energy Field on Earth ! Come Experience this Amazingly Sacred Vortexial Land of Ancient Atlantis, Spirit, Multidimensionality & Vision.

I have a good many friends in Arkansas -- it's the home of Oghma Creative Media, which publishes my books -- and I bet they'll be as gobsmacked as I was to learn that what is now Arkansas was once part of Atlantis.

Although, isn't the whole point that Atlantis sunk to the bottom of the ocean?  Arkansas, last time I went there, was dry land.  So that's kind of odd.  Maybe they were kept afloat by the Crystalline Shifted Sacred Vortexial Transformational Energy or something.

You can see how that could happen.

Downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, and/or Atlantis [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, many thanks to my loyal readers, who with the best of intentions keep making me do near-fatal faceplants directly into my keyboard.  Me, I wondering how to recover from the aftereffects of reading Love Has Won and Earth Keeper in preparation for writing this post.  I guess my only reasonable option is to have a second cup of coffee, since it's still a little early for a double scotch.

Brain energy frequency

If there's one thing that gets me really bent out of shape, it's people using scientific words in completely screwy ways.

After all, these days it's not hard to find definitions of words.  If you want to know what a quantum is,  all you have to do is take a thirty-second trip to Wikipedia, wherein you can find not only the scientific definition of the term, but the following wonderful paragraph:

The adjective "quantum" is frequently used in common parlance to mean the opposite of its scientific definition.  A "quantum leap" has been used colloquially since the 1950s to imply a large change, as opposed to the smallest possible change.  It is also used in a range of pseudoscientific beliefs (quantum mysticism), where the adjective is used to imply that a paranormal event is a consequence of quantum physics.

So complete misunderstanding and misuse of scientific terms is nothing more than laziness.  Which is why I read an article over at Qultura called "Energy and the Brain" while making increasingly agitated noises of barely-stifled rage.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What this article claims is that your brain exists to "process energy."  And I'm not talking about the conventional, physics definition of energy (which once again, a quick trip to Wikipedia would clear up completely); they're talking about some woo-woo bullshit idea about Cosmic Connections To The Universe.  But let me give it to you in their own words:

All information is actually energy in different forms and thinking is the process of reducing energy frequency by processing that information.  Senses are designed to detect, perceive energy in different forms and evaluate the energy frequency.  Sight for example, perceives light energy, working with the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain much in the same way as your hearing perceives audio or sound energy within a certain frequency range.  Senses also differentiate between different energetic states, for example touch differentiates between energy and physical mass and matter (which is actually energy but in a much more inert state).  Even taste and smell can differentiate between different energy states.  Your sense of smell, for example, can tell when the energy within a piece of meat or in milk is of a higher frequency, and either the meat or milk is off, and you should not consume it.  Your senses provide you with sensory input, which all goes to the brain as energy or information to be processed.

Which might win some kind of world record for packing the most scientific inaccuracy into a single paragraph.  Let's look at a concise list of stupid claims in this passage:

• Thinking does not "reduce energy frequency."  Whatever the fuck that means.
• Sight does not "work with the right cerebral hemisphere."  The visual cortex is in the occipital lobe of both hemispheres.
• Touch does not "differentiate between energy and physical mass."  Once again, I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean.
• Matter is not "energy in an inert state."  Energy and matter are not the same thing at all -- although Einstein's famous equation shows that you can convert one into the other.
• Taste and smell are both chemoreceptors -- they work by having receptor proteins that are capable of binding to compounds dissolved in the saliva or floating around in the air (respectively).  They do not "differentiate between different energy states."
• Spoiled meat does not have a lower frequency than fresh meat.  I'm a bit baffled as to how you could calculate the frequency of meat to start with, as most meat I've seen just tends to lie there.  (On the other hand, if your meat is vibrating, it probably is a bad sign.  And yes, I am aware that this is a double entendre.  And no, I don't care.)
• High frequencies are not somehow better than low frequencies.  Anyone who thinks so should be required to listen for twenty minutes first to a high note on a piccolo and then to a low note on a cello, and see which they prefer. 

Then they end by stating that your sensory organs provide your brain with input to be processed, which is more or less correct.  So I guess the whole thing about monkeys typing randomly and eventually coming up with the script for Hamlet might have some validity after all.

But even this passage reads like a doctoral dissertation in physics as compared to the last bit.  Here's how the article ends:

[The brain's hemispheres are] what serve to take in energy in different frequencies from the atmosphere around you and process it in a way so as to change or reduce the frequency of the energy and project it back out into the atmosphere.  This is done constantly in different ways and collectively human beings throughout the world are a major influence on energetic frequencies in atmospheric energy.

Right!  Sure!  What?

I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but what this sounds like is that they're claiming that you can change the weather by thinking about it.  Now, no one would be gladder than me if this were true; heaven knows I'd like to be able to conjure up a warm sunny day in the middle of an upstate New York January snowstorm.  But somehow, atmospheric energy frequencies notwithstanding, I don't think that'd work.

Or maybe I'm just not vibrating at a high enough frequency myself.  I dunno.

You might be thinking that all of this bullshit falls into the "stupid but harmless" category.  And in one sense, you'd be correct.  But as I've said more than once here at Skeptophilia, laziness becomes a habit.  If you simply assume that you know what you're talking about, and blather on without bothering to find out if you're using terms correctly or (in fact) have any idea how science in general works, you are much more likely to fall for pseudoscientific nonsense of more toxic sorts.

Much better to find out what the scientists themselves have to say.  Because, you know, they generally have a pretty good understanding of stuff.  Including "atmospheric energy frequencies."

Algae aura

Can I just say that I am sick unto death of people misrepresenting science?

Some scientist somewhere makes a discovery, and it seems to take only milliseconds before every woo-woo with a favorite loony idea about how the world works is using it to support their claims.  These people have taken confirmation bias and raised it to an art form.

I saw a particularly good (or bad, as the case may be) example of this yesterday in an article by Michael Forrester called "People Can Draw Energy From Other People The Same Way Plants Do," that is getting passed all over social media.  So let me illustrate my point by telling you what some of Forrester's conclusions from this scientific research are, and afterwards I'll tell you about the actual research itself.

See if you can connect the two.

Forrester says that we absorb "energies" from our surroundings.  He never defines what he means by "energy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the standard physics definition, because he includes stuff about being around "negative people."  He cites "psychologist and energy healer" Olivia Bader-Lee, who says:

This is exactly why there are certain people who feel uncomfortable in specific group settings where there is a mix of energy and emotions...  The human organism is very much like a plant, it draws needed energy to feed emotional states and this can essentially energize cells or cause increases in cortisol and catabolize cells depending on the emotional trigger...  Humans can absorb and heal through other humans, animals, and any part of nature.  That's why being around nature is often uplifting and energizing for so many people.

We're then given specific recommendations for how to "absorb and heal" efficiently.  These include:

• Stay centered and grounded
• Be in a state of non-resistance
• Own your personal aura space
• Give yourself an energy cleanse
• Call back your energy

I was especially interested in the "energy cleanse" thing, and fortunately, Forrester tells us exactly how to accomplish this:

The color gold has a high vibration which is useful for clearing away foreign energy.  Imagine a gold shower nozzle at the top of your aura (a few feet above your head) and turn it on, allowing clear gold energy to flow through your aura and body space and release down your grounding.  You will immediately feel cleansed and refreshed.

So all I have to do is imagine it, eh?  Given that I work with teenagers, I wish the "owning your personal aura space" was something that would happen if I imagined it.  Teaching a room full of tenth graders is like trying to herd puppies.  Since yelling "BACK OFF" is seldom effective, it'd be nice if all I had to do was to picture my "aura space" (gold-colored, of course) and the teenagers would be repelled backwards in a comical fashion, sort of like Yoda did to Count Dooku at the end of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay.  So you're probably wondering what scientific research led Forrester and Bader-Lee to come to this conclusion.

Ready?

The discovery by a team of scientists in the Biotechnology Department of Bielefeld University (Germany) that a species of algae can digest cellulose.

If you're going, "Um, but wait... but... how... what?" you should realize that I had exactly the same response.  I spent several minutes thinking that I had clicked on the wrong link.  But no.  In fact, Forrester even mentions the gist of the research himself:

Members of Professor Dr. Olaf Kruse’s biological research team have confirmed for the first time that a plant, the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, not only engages in photosynthesis, but also has an alternative source of energy: it can draw it from other plants.

And from this he deduces that all you have to do to be happy is to picture yourself underneath a gold shower nozzle.

I've seen some misrepresentations and far-fetched deductions before, but this one has to take the prize.

I get that people are always casting about looking for support for their favorite theories.  So as wacky as Forrester's pronouncements are, at least I see why he made them.  But what baffles me is how other people can look at what he wrote, and say, "Yes!  That makes complete sense!  Algae that can digest cellulose!  Therefore aura spaces and energetic vibrations of happiness!

Okay, I admit that I can be a hardass rationalist at times.  But seriously, what are these people thinking?

Not much, is my guess.

So anyhow, watch out for those negative energies.  Those can be a bummer.  But if you're feeling like your vibrations are low, don't despair.  I hear that getting into psychic communication with algae can help.

Crystals, children, and exploitation

In the latest from the You Don't Even Know What Those Terms Mean, Do You? department, we have a video on the site Spirit Science called "This 8 Year Old Kid Uses Crystal Grids to Transmute Negative Energy."

I know that taking anything from Spirit Science is kind of a cheap way to get a Skeptophilia post at this point.  This site first gained attention from a video that was narrated by an animated character whose voice sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk on quaaludes, and that basically told us that Everything Is Connected and Energy Flows Through Us and other vapid New Age platitudes, every once in a while throwing in a nice science-y word to keep us thinking that what they were saying actually meant something.

But so far, all we have is a flashy woo-woo take on Science, The Universe, and Everything, very much in the tradition of What the Bleep Do We Know? (the latter produced by none other than the infamous J. Z. Knight, of Ramtha fame).  Spirit Science, therefore, is kind of low-hanging fruit, and I've never felt all that inclined to address their claims.  If you can even call them "claims."  (For a funny response to the video link I posted, take a look at this one.)

Of course, the fact that Spirit Science is 100% USDA Grade A Bullshit hasn't dissuaded people from watching the Spirit Science channel on YouTube in huge numbers, and as a result, there are now 26 (or more) videos narrated by Alvin.  All of which seemed more depressing than interesting, until the article about the eight-year-old started showing up all over Facebook and other social media sites.

What bothers me about this one is not, strictly speaking, the woo-woo aspect of it.  The idea of "crystal energies" has been around for a long time.  I remember a woman coming over to my house in response to For-Sale ad I'd placed in the newspaper, and her picking up one of the quartz crystals that had been collected years earlier by my dad on one of his rockhounding trips.  "Ooh," the woman said, caressing the crystal.  "This one is lovely!  I can feel it focusing my energy in such a positive way!"

It was an effort not to guffaw directly into her face.

So what bothers me about this story isn't the bullshit aspect of it, but the exploitation aspect -- given that it must be the kid's parents who (1) taught him all of this nonsense, and (2) set up this "interview."  At the end, too, the kid says that he'll be happy to set up a "crystal grid appointment" for anyone interested, hinting at a monetary side of the whole thing that I'm sure will come as no great shock to anyone reading this.

And yet the people interviewing him never mention anything about exploitation.  They treat his fancies as if they were entirely real, starting with the guy who introduces the segment saying, "What you're about to see is a perfect example of the consciousness of today's children."  Then we're shown the kid and his crystal arrangement, and the interviewer treats him with great seriousness, asking him how it works.

"It captures the dark energy in these three webs," the kid tells her, "and then disposes of it using this (crystal) turning it into my energy... it goes all the way around the world.  And the universe."

Mmm-hmm.  Sounds completely plausible.  We hear a lot more about crystals focusing energy (never, of course, defining the terms "focus" or "energy"), and light and dark energies shooting around, and so on.  Eventually, the interviewer gets to what really was the only germane question she asked:  "How did you know how to make this web design?"

The kid's response:  "I knew... because the rocks know exactly how to dispose of dark energy...  they told me.  I go up to one rock, and find the key, put my finger on it, and then I put it up to my ear and hear what it's saying...  a key is a part of the rock, every rock has it, that is the energy key point of it."

Now, I raised two boys, who were both imaginative and creative youngsters, always making up games and let's-pretend worlds.  My older son, especially, always has had a wildly creative mind, and we still have stories he wrote and board games he dreamed up, the latter of which had rules so abstruse that they make Magic: The Gathering look like a tic-tac-toe game.

Here, though, we have parents (never seen on the interview, but you know they're there) who are feeding this young person with the impression that his fantasy world is real -- as if I had told Lucas when he was little that the plastic dinosaurs he loved to play with actually were alive and aware, because he had somehow made them so.  This is, put simply, exploiting a child's imagination for fame and (probably) money, all the while leading him to believe that his naturally blurred boundary between reality and fantasy isn't just hard to delineate, it doesn't exist.

And they're doing so with the complicity of the people who interviewed him, and with the encouragement of thousands of people who commented and have now passed this story all over the place.  While it's heartening that the first comment was appropriately snide...  "a kid arranges his parent's mineral collection and repeats a bunch of nonsense and now he is a guru.  namaste" -- note that this commenter was immediately shot down with responses like "Get a brain."  And most of the other comments were wildly positive:

We are in the Age of Aquarius now....for those of you that don't get this...why are you even watching it if it isn't your "thing"? ...this kid is truly gifted...and if you don't understand it....you might wanna wake up to the New Age....Just saying! 

Too bad for all of those brothers and sisters who speak ill of what they do not know. It is understandable though. Not every being on this earth is connected to the great planet. 

Children like this that can see through the illusions of what we believe to be true give me hope that we just might not end up destroying the Earth.

This kid is, on the surface, doing what kids do; playing with stuff and making up stories.  But the adults who are currently turning him into a mini-celebrity amongst the woo-woo crowd are doing him no favors.  It's to be hoped that he'll eventually figure out that what he's saying is nonsense.  I just hope that by that time, he hasn't been so suckered in by the lucrative side of woo-woo that he becomes the next J. Z. Knight, channeling 20,000-year-old guru spirits from Atlantis in front of adoring crowds, and becoming filthy rich in the process.