Astrological interior design

It's always interesting when woo-woos meld together different traditions, apparently not recognizing that if you have a ridiculous idea, it's not going to become more accurate if you combine it with several other ridiculous ideas.

And that even holds true if you somehow get your nutty claim into a major media outlet.

Someone should have explained all of this to Suzy Strutner, who wrote an article for Huffington Post called "Your Birthday Could Say a LOT About What Happens In Your Home."  And we're not just talking about timing of birthday parties, here.  Strutner claims that we should all pay close attention to something called "local space astrology," which seems to combine regular old astrology with ley lines and feng shui to come up with an all-new amalgam that may rival the idea that the shape of your ass can predict your future for sheer idiocy.

Apparently, what you're supposed to do is to get a "local space chart" which identifies the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of your birth.  You then lay this chart over the floor plan of your house, and see which planets are where.

Or something like that.

Because I don't see how this could work, okay?  Even if you buy the whole astrology thing, which I don't, why would my "local space chart" have anything to do with my current house?  I was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and I now live in upstate New York.  So at the moment of my birth, a completely different set of people lived here, who all were born in different places yet, and so on.

Plus, why should it be my "local space chart" at all?  Why not my wife's?  Or our sons'?  Or our dogs'? Maybe Mars being in Sagittarius is why my one dog woke me up barking like hell at three in the morning today.  You know, all of the business about the God of War and muscly centaur dudes with bows and arrows made him feel like he needed to defend our house.  I'm not sure from whom.  Knowing him, it was probably an unusually vicious chipmunk, or something.

But Strutner, and Kita Marie Williams, the "astrological interior designer" she consulted for this exposé, apparently don't see anything at all illogical about all this.  Strutner writes that there's a way to get around having bunches of different people in the house:

Ideally, you'd center your entire floor plan around the planets.  But that's almost always impossible...  Plus, if many people live in your home, then their ideal room setup is going to be different than yours, since they have a different local space chart.  Instead, learn how the planets make each room for each person.

She gives the example of the "Mars line" being the line of "combative energy," so if your "Mars line" runs through your living room, you should watch exercise videos there, or "meditate there if you need a powerful boost."  So maybe my dog was just doing barking meditation, or something.

But sometimes the lines don't, um, line up so well.  Strutner tells us one example:

Of course, some planet lines may not sync well with the rooms that they intersect.  This might debunk household crises like a broken computer, according to astrology expert Gloria Roca.  Roca once consulted a client whose broken computer sat near her home's Neptune line.  The machine likely broke down because Neptune represents slowness and blur, Roca says.  Once her client added a photo of a serene mountain -- associated with the earthy and wise planet Saturn -- to the room, the computer started to work just fine.

Righty-o.  Someone should tell that to the people on the Geek Squad over at Best Buy.  Don't bother taking the customer's computer apart. Just tape a photograph of a "serene mountain" to it and it'll repair itself.  That should "debunk" the problem, all right.

Roca, Williams, and Strutner tell us that we should head off this sort of problem by decorating according to our "local space chart" right from the get-go.  A room that has a "Mars line" should have bright red walls, they tell us, to "bring forth its best energy."  Which sounds like exactly the décor I'd choose, if I was the interior designer for the Marquis de Sade.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But the rest of us might choose something a little more subdued, regardless of what planet's lines run through the room.  Bookshelves are "Jupiterian," we're told, and flower bouquets are associated with Venus.  Which raises a problem; what if a room is multi-purpose?  Many of us read, sleep, watch TV, and have sex in our bedrooms.  Do we have to change the décor every time we want to switch gears?  Yeah, that'd work.  "I'm sorry, dear, we can make love as soon as I finish repainting the walls."

So anyway.  The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous on a number of different levels.  The astrologers really should go back to telling their clients that because the Moon is in Scorpio, they're going to meet a tall, handsome stranger some time in the next two weeks, and let the ley lines and feng shui nuts do their own thing as well.  Combining them all just leads to a messy conflict of interests, and nobody wants that.

But I probably only said that because the Mercury line under my office intersects with the fifth house of Capricorn, or something.  And also because I'm a little grumpy about being woken up at three AM.

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

Follow the compass needle

I have to resist the temptation of scoffing too quickly, but sometimes it turns out to be justified.

This comes up because of an article from Body Ecology called "Could the Direction You Sleep In Improve Your Health and Well-Being?" that a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me yesterday.  The contention of the article is that should never sleep with your head pointing north or west; east or south is best.  Fail to follow this advice, and you're seriously risking getting some horrible disease.  It then goes into some "Eastern medicine" goofiness and stuff about "feng shui" that has no scientific validity whatsoever.

The article states, cheerfully, "[S]cience and eastern medicine both agree" that sleep direction makes a difference, a claim that made me snort derisively.

But one thing caught my eye, which is that the article said there's been a study -- a real study, not some hand-waving mystical nonsense -- that showed people who sleep oriented north/south have shorter periods of REM (rapid-eye movement) sleep than people oriented east/west.  There was no link provided, nor even a mention of where or by whom the study had been conducted, but I thought I'd give the author the benefit of the doubt and try to track it down.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evgeniy Isaev from Moscow, Russia, Sleeping man. (7174597014), CC BY 2.0]

After some digging, I found the paper they were referencing.  It was from way back in 1987, and was written by three scientists in Germany, one at the Max Planck Institute, and the other two at the University of Munich.  Entitled, "Dependence of a Sleeping Parameter from the N-S or E-W Sleeping Direction," wherein eight male subjects were subjected to EEGs for eight nights each, alternating nights while sleeping oriented north/south with nights oriented east/west.  The authors write:

The only significant difference occurred in REM latency which was 5.5 min shorter in E-W direction (p< 0.02).  Other sleep parameters which could be interpreted as stress parameters (sleep latency, intermittent awakenings, percentage of stage 1, stageshifts, movement times) were not different between the two positions.  The same goes for the other parameters.

So the Body Ecology got the facts wrong; the north/south sleepers didn't REM less, they had longer REM latency -- the time from the onset of sleep to the first episode of REM.  And that was only by five and a half minutes.  In fact, there was a great deal more difference between the REM latency of all the subjects for the first four versus the second four nights, regardless of what direction they were oriented -- a difference of 22 minutes.

Nevertheless, the authors conclude hopefully:

The adaption effects are balanced out by the fact that two paired subjects slept always in different directions. The fact that among the sleep parameters REM latency is affected by the position of the bed... seems to support our interpretation because mainly REM latency reacts to external influences. Therefore the most probable interpretation of our observation is the assumption that the geomagnetic field influences humans differently depending on their positions relative to the field direction.

I'm no statistician, but it seems to me that eight subjects studied for eight nights, resulting in a difference in REM latency of five and a half minutes and no other significant changes, is pretty weak evidence that there's anything to see here.  It's also significant that the article was published in 1987 -- and I couldn't find a single other study of the claim since that time.

The piece in Body Ecology also mentions a second study (once again, no link) claiming that other mammal species respond to the Earth's magnetic field.  That's not so far-fetched; it's known that many bird species exhibit magnetotaxis, which is orientation based on an internal compass.  (This was discovered by a study way back in 1971 done right here at Cornell University.)  But the mammals claim was new to me, and appears to come from a 2008 study at the University of Duisberg-Essen (Germany) claiming that satellite images of herds of deer and cattle showed that they preferentially oriented their bodies north/south.  The authors don't bother to speculate as to why they would do this, and claim to have controlled for such factors as prevailing wind direction and the angle of the sun.  But a 2011 study tried to replicate the results and failed -- there was no preferred orientation.  Cattle and deer did pretty much what you'd expect they'd do, which is stand around eating stuff facing any way that happens to be convenient.

Of course, weirder things have been claimed.  A 2013 paper in Frontiers of Zoology said that a two-year study of dogs showed that they preferred to poop while aligned north/south.  Which raises a question: who even thought of looking into this idea?  I mean, thinking outside the box is one thing, but this is a bizarre question to ask.  Maybe the scientists, like me, tire of having their dogs turn in circles 832 times before relieving themselves, and wanted to know why they were doing it.

Unsurprisingly, this study was questioned, too, most rigorously by Duncan Forgan over at Research the Headlines, who had the following to say:

On the other hand, the dog’s magnetoception (if it possesses it) does not appear to be particularly effective in general.  When the researchers pooled all the data (calm and not-calm magnetic fields), they saw no evidence of alignment at all, meaning that dogs can only rely on this sense if the magnetic field behaves itself, which only happened during around a third of the researcher’s observations. 

It also means that if you own a dog, you are probably unlikely to notice any alignment, unless you’re willing to only note your pup’s pooping practices when you’ve previously measured a stable magnetic field.

An experiment which, frankly, I am not nearly interested enough to carry out.

Anyhow.  It looks like my scornful reaction to the original article is more or less warranted, and any evidence that humans respond behaviorally (or any other way) to the Earth's magnetic field is questionable at best.  If it floats your boat to turn your bed so your head is facing east, knock yourself out, but I'm guessing any difference you notice will be because you expected there to be a change -- i.e., the placebo effect.

For what it's worth, though, I sleep with my head pointing north, and I'm a notorious insomniac.  It's only one data point, but make of it what you will.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.

Astrological interior design

It's always interesting when woo-woos meld together different traditions, apparently not recognizing that if you have a ridiculous idea, it's not going to become more accurate if you combine it with several other ridiculous ideas.

And that even holds true if you somehow get your nutty claim into a major media outlet.

Someone should have explained all of this to Suzy Strutner, who wrote an article a few days ago for Huffington Post called "Your Birthday Could Say a LOT About What Happens In Your Home."  And we're not just talking about timing of birthday parties, here.  Strutner claims that we should all pay close attention to something called "local space astrology," which seems to combine regular old astrology with ley lines and feng shui to come up with an all-new amalgam that may rival the idea that the shape of your ass can predict your future for sheer idiocy.

Apparently, what you're supposed to do is to get a "local space chart" which identifies the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets at the moment of your birth.  You then lay this chart over the floor plan of your house, and see which planets are where.

Or something like that.

Because I don't see how this could work, okay?  Even if you buy the whole astrology thing, why would my "local space chart" have anything to do with my house?  I was born on a military base in Quantico, Virginia, and I currently live in upstate New York.  So at the moment of my birth, a completely different set of people lived here, who all were born in different places yet, and so on.

Plus, why should it be my "local space chart" at all?  Why not my wife's?  Or our sons'?  Or our dogs'?  Maybe Neptune being in Aquarius is why my one dog woke me up at three in the morning today.  You know, all of the business about the God of the Sea and guys pouring water out of jars made him need to pee.

But Strutner, and Kita Marie Williams, the "astrological interior designer" she consulted for this exposé, apparently don't see anything at all illogical about all this.  Strutner writes that there's a way to get around having bunches of different people in the house:

Ideally, you'd center your entire floor plan around the planets. But that's almost always impossible...  Plus, if many people live in your home, then their ideal room setup is going to be different than yours, since they have a different local space chart.  Instead, learn how the planets make each room for each person.

She gives the example of the "Mars line" being the line of "combative energy," so if your "Mars line" runs through your living room, you should watch exercise videos there, or "meditate there if you need a powerful boost."

But of course, sometimes the lines don't, um, line up so well.  Strutner tells us one example:

Of course, some planet lines may not sync well with the rooms that they intersect. This might debunk household crises like a broken computer, according to astrology expert Gloria Roca.  Roca once consulted a client whose broken computer sat near her home's Neptune line.  The machine likely broke down because Neptune represents slowness and blur, Roca says. Once her client added a photo of a serene mountain -- associated with the earthy and wise planet Saturn -- to the room, the computer started to work just fine.

Righty-o.  Someone should tell that to the people on the Geek Squad over at Best Buy.  Don't bother taking the customer's computer apart.  Just tape a photograph of a "serene mountain" to it and it'll repair itself.

Roca, Williams, and Strutner tell us that we should head off this sort of problem by decorating according to our "local space chart" right from the get-go.  A room that has a "Mars line" should have bright red walls, they tell us, to "bring forth its best energy."  Which sounds like exactly the décor I'd choose, if I was the interior designer for the Marquis de Sade.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But the rest of us might choose something a little more subdued, regardless of what planet's lines run through the room.  Bookshelves are "Jupiterian," we're told, and flower bouquets are associated with Venus.  Which raises a problem; what if a room is multi-purpose?  Many of us read, sleep, watch TV, and have sex in our bedrooms.  Do we have to change the décor every time we want to switch gears?  "I'm sorry, dear, we can make love as soon as I finish repainting the walls."

So anyway.  The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous on a number of different levels.  The astrologers really should go back to telling their clients that because the Moon is in Scorpio, they're going to meet a tall, handsome stranger some time in the next two weeks, and let the ley lines and feng shui nuts do their own thing as well.  Combining them all just leads to a messy conflict of interests, and nobody wants that.

But I probably only said that because the Mercury line under my office intersects with the fifth house of Capricorn, or something.  And also because I'm a little grumpy about being up since three AM.

The ley of the land

(One of a series of reposts, for your enjoyment while I'm on vacation.  First posted in September 2011.)

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

I ran into the idea of ley lines fifteen years ago on a trip to the UK.  I spent a month in the summer of 1995 hiking in the north of England, visiting old cathedrals and monastery ruins, and while I was at Rievaulx Abbey, I had a chance meeting with an English woman who said that if you connected the positions of holy sites on a map with straight lines, it made a pattern.

"They sited monasteries, cloisters, and cathedrals where they did because they were places of power," she said.  "The ley lines are channels of psychic energy, and where they intersect, it creates a kind of vortex.  The ancients felt this, and that's why they built monuments there, and later churches and abbeys."

Couldn't it, I asked her, also have to do with building in places where there was good access to water, and perhaps pre-existing roads?

"I suppose that also might have had something to do with it," she said, sounding doubtful.

For all her claims of the antiquity of this idea, the concept of ley lines is less than a hundred years old, and at first, it had nothing to do with anything psychic.  Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist, noted in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track how often multiple sites of archaeological or historical relevance lay upon the same straight lines, and he coined the term "ley lines" to describe this phenomenon.  He suggested that the reason was for ease of road-building -- especially in the southern half of England, where the terrain is mostly gentle, a straight line connecting several population centers is the smartest way site roads and settlements.  It wasn't until 48 years later that noted woo-woo John Michell, author of The View Over Atlantis, took Watkins' ley lines and connected them to the Chinese idea of feng shui and came up with the theory that ley lines were rivers of psychic energy, and the intersections ("nodes") were places of power.

The interesting thing is that Watkins himself wasn't even right, appealing though the idea is.  Mathematician David George Kendall and others have used a technique called shape analysis to demonstrate that the occurrence of straight-line connections between archaeological sites in England is no greater than you would expect from chance.  Put simply, a densely-settled place like England has so many sites of historical relevance that if you are allowed to pick and choose, you can find any number of lines that intersect, or at least clip, interesting places.

Take a look, for example, at the following diagram (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons):

This image shows 137 randomly-placed points.  A computer program was employed to find all of the straight-line connections of four or more points -- and it found eighty of them!

So, even if you eliminate all of the woo-woo trappings from the idea, it seems like the whole concept of "sacred sites" falling along straight lines is attributable to coincidence.  A pity, really.  I have always wondered if our house was at the intersection of two ley lines.  I was all prepared to use Intersections of Psychic Energy Channels and Nodes of Power Vortexes to explain why my digital alarm clock runs fast and why the dryer keeps eating my socks.