Repulsive

Back in 2006, some people in Hong Kong noticed that despite its facing out over the warm waters of the South China Sea, it seldom gets hit by typhoons.  In fact, sometimes the typhoons seem to go out of their way to avoid hitting Hong Kong.  For example, here's the path of Typhoon Lionrock in 2010:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

If you don't know your Asian geography, Hong Kong is basically right in the middle of the loop of the question mark.

There's at least a tentative scientific explanation for this; cyclones of all sorts are moved by upper atmosphere steering currents, which are created -- like all winds -- by air pressure gradients.  There is a stable-ish high pressure zone near Hong Kong, and that causes an outflow of air that acts like a repulsive force on any storms heading that way.  It's not permanent; like all air masses, it moves.  Hong Kong has experienced typhoons, just fewer than you might expect based on its location.

But when the pattern was noticed, a business tycoon named Li Ka-Sheng started telling everyone that he had created a repellent force field, and that was keeping Hong Kong safe.  Because, after all, if there's a major typhoon it would cause businesses to close, and we can't have that.  Everyone still talks about "Li's field," and it comes up every year during typhoon season.  "Well, it's typhoon season again," people in Hong Kong will say.  "At least we have Li's field protecting us."

Here's the thing, though.  Li, and just about everyone who talks about Li's field, are joking.  It's satire, and everyone knew it right from the get-go.

Over here in the United States, though, we're hearing something similar, and the sad thing is I don't think the people making the claim are trying to be funny.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, taking a break from her usual jobs of killing dogs and doing Border Patrol cosplay, attended a cabinet meeting in which the topic of this year's hurricane season came up.  Despite there being thirteen named storms, four of which reached category 4, none of them hit the continental United States.  (The last time this happened was 2015.)  And guess who got praised for this?

Why, Donald Trump, of course.

"Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane," Noem gushed.  "Even you kept the hurricanes away.  We appreciate that."

What is astonishing about this is that no one laughed.  I still maintain that the Trump presidency will end the moment an entire room bursts out laughing at something one of his sycophantic toadies -- or better yet, the Head Toad himself -- says.  Trump has no problem with arguing; he loves a fight.  But he can't handle being humiliated.  (Which is why the constant trolling from Gavin Newsom gets under his skin.)

But amazingly, a piece of flattery so fulsome it would have embarrassed Kim Jong-Un was delivered without so much as a chuckle from anyone.  And Trump?  He eats that stuff up.  There is no compliment so ridiculous, so over-the-top, that he won't give one of his smarmy smiles and say, "Yes, that's meeeeee."

It's why nearly everyone was cringing -- except for Trump -- when he was awarded the "FIFA Peace Prize" by FIFA president Gianni Infantino last week.  Infantino burbled on about how Trump had "taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and by doing so have united people across the world," so he was being awarded a "beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go."  Most people realized immediately that the whole thing happened so that Trump will continue to support the United States's (partial) hosting of the 2026 World Cup -- and to soothe his hurt feelings over the Nobel Committee passing over him for this year's Peace Prize, which went instead to a Venezuelan activist.  

And just about everybody -- again, except for Trump -- found the whole spectacle about as cringey as anything in recent memory.  Isn't it the Republicans who are always screeching about the "everyone gets a trophy" approach in education?  And here we have what amounts to, "I know, you have the big sads that you didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize.  Look, here's a special Peace Prize we made up just for you."

Word is, Saturday Night Live didn't spoof this because there was nothing they could do that was more wince-inducing than the video footage of the real event.

Me, I can't wait to hear who wins the FIFA Prize in Physics.

Oh, and not to be outdone, Fox "News" commentator Jesse Watters thinks Trump's FIFA Prize is just ducky.  "It's almost like God gave us COVID to kick Trump out so he could emerge again, and oversee this wonderful four years of birthday parties, international sporting events, and octagon," Watters said, the last-mentioned being an apparent reference to a suggestion to build a UFC octagon on the White House lawn.  "If you doubted there is a God -- this is evidence there is a God."

No, he wasn't joking, either.

I mean, I can laugh about this, but it's honestly frightening that we have what amounts to a coddled, spoiled toddler at the helm of the entire country.  And like many spoiled toddlers, he has a broad vindictive streak; cross him, and he will do everything in his power to destroy you.  And so far, there aren't enough people in either Congress or the Supreme Court who have the backbone to put him in Time Out.

This last bit is why I am absolutely sick unto death of the taglines you see on many left-leaning social media posts.  (Occupy Democrats is a good example, and one of the worst offenders.)  You know the trope:  "This new shocking revelation will destroy Trump" or "MAGA in disarray because..." or "GOP crumbling after announcement that..."  While these probably serve their dual purpose of (1) bolstering the spirits of beleaguered liberals and (2) getting people to click the link, they're profoundly misleading.  Thus far, nothing has taken away the carte blanche given to Trump by the ruling party.  All the chaos, the spiking prices and slowing economy and disastrous foreign policy and human rights violations, and even the credible claims of rape and pedophilia, have really caused very little damage.  Sure, his poll numbers have dropped, but by and large the party is still loyal to him.  Scarier still, the Supreme Court steadfastly refuses to put the brakes on.  The media, too, is for the most part still kissing his ass at every opportunity.  The small fractures -- court cases not going his way, and the loss of people like Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and (bafflingly) Marjorie Taylor Greene -- have been just that: small.  Some people are saying these represent the first signs of an impending revolt, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Hopefully, though -- at least for those of us on the left -- history has shown that when these kinds of collapses happen, they can happen suddenly.  Both the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero got away with excesses of the most bizarre and brutal kind, until finally the branch snapped and they were overthrown.  (Caligula was murdered and Nero committed suicide to avoid his cousin's fate.)  It may seem like a poor comparison -- and admittedly, I'm not a historian -- but to my eye, the lavish flattery of his followers, up to and including attributions that are somewhere in the realm of magic, and the awarding of meaningless prizes just to keep Dear Leader in a good mood, have their precedents.

Which should worry not only Trump himself, but the people who are enabling him.

In any case, that's the latest from the political circus here in the United States.  The head of FIFA awards a man who is turning his American Gestapo against our own citizens, is threatening war in Venezuela, and wants to annex Greenland and Canada a "Peace Prize," and a member of the Cabinet apparently believes that this same man can create a repulsive force to ward off hurricanes.

Well, I'll agree with her this far: he's repulsive.  But I don't think that's what she meant.

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Werewolf box

Because apparently some ill-advised person uttered the dreaded words, "Well, things can't possibly get any weirder than they already are," I've been seeing a resurgence of interest in an "invention" from 1990 called the "Feraliminal Lycanthropizer."

I put "invention" in quotation marks because mostly what it seems to do is "nothing," which is hardly remarkable.  Hell, I've got three dogs who do that all day long, unless their dreaded enemy the UPS Guy shows up, at which point they sound Full Red Alert until the Guy retreats to his truck in disarray, which always happens.  This leaves them with a nice cheerful feeling of having Accomplished Something Important, at which point they resume doing nothing until the next non-crisis arises.

Anyhow, the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer, such as it is, is the brainchild of one David Woodard, who sounds like one seriously strange dude.  He is an accomplished musician who specializes in writing requiems (he once wrote one for a dead pelican he found on the beach) and "prequiems" for people who aren't technically deceased but who, in the words of Monty Python, will be stone dead in a moment.  Woodard wrote about his mystery machine in a pamphlet in 1990, describing it as a "psychotechnographic" device he'd found out about somewhere and then recreated:

The first part of the contraption's odd moniker comes from the Latin ferus (wild animal) and limen (threshold); if you think the second part sounds like it must mean "... that turns you into a werewolf," you're exactly right.  (However, it must be mentioned that after Gary Larson's immortal coinage of thagomizer for the spiky end of a stegosaurus's tail -- named, you'll probably recall, after "the late Thag Simmons" -- it's hard for me to take anything ending in -izer seriously.)

In any case, the thing supposedly creates three simultaneous infrasonic sine waves, at 0.56, 3.0, and 9.0 Hertz, respectively, which combine to create "thanato-auric waves."  After that, someone inside the box is... well, let me quote the pamphlet Woodard wrote about it:

This combination of drastically contrasting emotional trigger mechanisms results in an often profound behavioral enhancement which occurs strikingly soon (within moments) after the user enters and remains in the auricular field of the machine...   [This acts] to trigger states of urgency and fearlessness and to disarmor the intimate charms of the violent child within.  The Trithemean incantations richly pervading the machine’s aural output produce feelings of aboveness and unbridled openness.

Right!  Sure!  I mean, my only question would be, "What?"

I was disappointed to find out that even Woodard doesn't believe the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer actually turns you into a werewolf, which is a shame, because that'd be kind of cool.  I've always thought that of the horror movie bad guys, werewolves are objectively the best.  I mean, consider the advantages: (1) you only have to work one day a month; (2) there's hardly any danger because no one much carries guns with silver bullets, including in places like Texas where even the dairy cattle are packing heat; (3) you get to romp around howling at the Moon; (4) werewolves always have super ripped muscles, despite seldom being seen at the gym; and (5) no one thinks it's weird if you show up to work naked, a principle exemplified by the character Jacob Black in the movie Twilight, wherein audience members lost track of the number of times Taylor Lautner took all his clothes off.

Not that I'm complaining about that, mind you.

But all the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer allegedly does is to increase your violence and sexual desire, which seems like a bad idea to do at the same time.  Fortunately, in reality it doesn't even do that much; no less a source than  the Fortean Times said "There is no evidence the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer exists or could have such effects."  Somewhat more crudely, paranormal researcher Michael Esposito commented that the sexual effects of the Lycanthropizer could be duplicated by "leaning up against the spin cycle of a Maytag."

So an oddball made a strange claim a 35 years ago, which isn't anything out of the ordinary, because that's what oddballs do.  What's remarkable, though, is that this thing has now resurfaced, and is making the rounds of conspiracy websites (wherein it's suggested that it's somehow going to be used covertly to, I dunno, convert people into extremely horny super-soldiers or something) and even sketchier sites owned by people who are trying to figure out how to make one, because for some reason they want to feel more violent.

Since the Lycanthropizer doesn't actually do anything (Cf. paragraph 2), I suppose there are worse things the fringe element could spend their time on.  After all, the more time they waste trying to generate an "auricular field of thanato-auric waves" the less time they'll have to amass actual weapons.

So the upshot is: knock yourself out.

Anyhow, that's our News From The Outer Limits for today.  And I guess that, in fact, the world has not yet gotten as weird as it could possibly get.  But y'all'll have to excuse me, because my washing machine just went on spin, and I've got to... um... go attend to it.

 

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Message in a bottle

Ever heard of a witch bottle?

Witch bottles are magical items that are a type of apotropaic magic -- spells meant to ward off evil (the word comes from the Greek αποτρέπειν, meaning "to turn away from").  The idea has been around for a long time; if someone tries to use an evil enchantment on you, you can respond with a defensive spell of your own, and it might even rebound on the person who was trying to hex you.  One of the first written accounts of a witch bottle is in seventeenth century English clergyman Joseph Glanvill's book Saducismus Triumphatus, or Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, wherein we hear about a man whose wife was sick and who kept getting visited by the apparition of a bird that would flutter in her face, because apparently that was a thing in seventeenth-century England.  The man was given advice by an "old man who traveled up and down the country," who said the cure was to have the sick woman pee in a bottle, then add some pins and needles, then cork it up tight and put it in the fire.

Which, I have to admit, is at least a creative solution.

The first time it didn't work because the heat made the air in the bottle expand and blew out the cork, which must resulted in a situation that was unpleasant to clean up.  But they tried a second time, and it worked -- and had an interesting result:

Not long after, the Old Man came to the house again, and inquired of the Man of the house how his Wife did.  Who answered, as ill as ever, if not worse, and still plagu'd by birds.  He askt him if he had followed his direction.  Yes, says he, and told him the event as is above said.  Ha, quoth he, it seems it [the spirit which was troubling them] was too nimble for you.  But now I will put you in a way that will make the business sure.  Take your Wive’s Urine as before, and Cork, it in a Bottle with Nails, Pins and Needles, and bury it in the Earth; and that will do the feat.  The Man did accordingly.  And his Wife began to mend sensibly and in a competent time was finely well recovered; But there came a Woman from a Town some miles off to their house, with a lamentable Out-cry, that they had killed her Husband.  They askt her what she meant and thought her distracted, telling her they knew neither her nor her Husband.  Yes, saith she, you have killed my Husband, he told me so on his Death-bed.  But at last they understood by her, that her Husband was a Wizard, and had bewitched this Mans Wife and that this Counter-practice prescribed by the Old Man, which saved the Mans Wife from languishment, was the death of that Wizard that had bewitched her.

Apparently other things that people sometimes put in witch bottles were hair, blood, fingernail clippings, red thread, written charms, feathers, dried herbs and flowers, and money.

The reason this comes up is that apparently there are still people who believe in this, because there's a beach in southern Texas where a guy keeps finding what appear to be modern witch bottles.  He's found eight of them thus far, all filled with odd items -- sticks and leaves seem to be the most common.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Malcolm Lidbury (aka Pinkpasty) , Witch Bottles Curse Protection, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Jace Tunnell, Director of Community Engagement at the Harte Research Institute, has spent years scouring the beaches of South Padre Island for anything odd that's washed up, and starting about six years ago, he began finding sealed bottles that evidently had been out there adrift for a long time, given the fact that some of them had barnacles on them.  After studying the currents, he believes they may have come from as far away as the islands of the Caribbean, or perhaps even West Africa.

"I don't open the bottles," Tunnell said.  "In fact, my wife won't even let me bring them into the house.  The theory is that if you open it you can let the spell out, whatever the reason the person had put the spell in there.  They're counter-magical devices, created to draw in and trap harmful intentions directed at their owners, so it's best to leave them sealed."

The fact that some of them could contain piss and rusty needles is another good reason to leave the tops on.

Predictably, I don't think there's any other particularly good reason to be concerned about them.  You have to wonder, though, how these superstitions get started, and (especially) how they persist despite the fact that they don't work (notwithstanding accounts like the one from the estimable Mr. Glanvill).  I wonder if it's because sometimes the "cursed" person does get better after the counter-curse, and to the credulous this is sufficient proof, even though it is an established scientific principle that the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data."

Although you have to wonder about the sanity of the first person who came up with the idea of peeing in a bottle full of pins.

In any case, if you find a sealed bottle washed up on the beach, it's probably best just to deposit it in the nearest trash can and not worry about it.  Unless it contains money, in which case open that sucker right up.  Call me greedy, but I'd risk being plagu'd by birds if the price was right.

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Different kinds of impossible

Many of us engage in magical thinking -- attributing causal relationships between actions and events that are simply (often accidentally) correlated.  Superstitions are magical thinking; as nice as it would be if you could influence the win/loss ratio of your favorite team by wearing a particular shirt, the universe just isn't put together that way.

Where it gets interesting is that there are different degrees of magical thinking. A clever piece of research from the online journal PLoS-One, carried out by psychologists John McCoy of the University of Pennsylvania and Tomer Ullman of Harvard, illustrates that even those of us who engage in magical thinking seem to be intuitively aware of how impossible different false causations are.

So we can, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, believe in six impossible things before breakfast.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The paper, entitled "Judgments of Effort for Magical Violations of Intuitive Physics," asks test subjects to perform a simple task.  First, imagine a world where magic is real, where conjuring a spell could make things happen that are impossible in our world.  Then, they were asked to judge how difficult those spells would be.  What the researchers found is that the bigger the violation of physics required for the spell to work, the greater the effort by the conjurer must be.  The authors write:

People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them.  Such beliefs are likely affected by people’s intuitive theories of the real world.  In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations.  People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics.  For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground.  A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants.  A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2. These results suggest that people’s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.

After all, to levitate a frog using ordinary physics has already been achieved.  Frogs, like humans, are mostly water, and water is diamagnetic -- when exposed to a strong magnetic field, the constituent atoms align, inducing a magnetic field of the opposite polarity and triggering a repulsive force.  So it doesn't take any particular violation of physics to levitate a frog, although imagining a situation where it could be done without a powerful electromagnet is more of a reach.

Conjuring a frog out of nothing, though?  This is a major violation of a great many laws of physics.  First, if you imagine that the frog is coming from the air molecules in the space that it displaces when it appears, you have to believe that somehow oxygen, nitrogen, and the trace gases in the air have been converted to the organic molecules that make up living tissue.  Just getting from lightweight gaseous elements to the iron in the frog's hemoglobin isn't possible in the lab -- iron, in fact, is formed in the cores of supergiant stars, and only dispersed into space during supernova explosions.  (Pretty cool that the molecules that make up you were once in the ultra-hot cores of giant stars, isn't it?  Carl Sagan was spot-on when he said "We are made of star stuff.")

So there are different sorts of impossible.  You'd think that once you've accepted that the regular laws of physics don't apply -- that you're in a world where magic really happens -- you'd decide that all bets are off and anything can happen.  But our intuitive understanding of the laws of physics doesn't go away.  We still are, on some level, aware of what's difficult, what's impossible, and what's ridiculously impossible.  The authors write:

[P]eople’s ranking of the spells in all our studies were not affected by exposure to fantasy and magic in the media.  We suggest that the media does not primarily affect what spells are seen as more difficult, but rather that people bring their intuitive physics to bear when they engage with fiction.  That is, in line with previous research on myths and transformation, systems of magic are perceived as coherent to the extent to which they match people’s intuitive theories.  People perceive levitating a frog as easy not because they know it’s one of the first charms that any young wizard learns at Hogwarts, rather young wizards learn that spell first because readers expect that spell should be easy.

 
In his 1893 essay The Fantastic Imagination, the novelist George Macdonald wrote, “The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them …but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own.”  It seems people’s little worlds do not stray far from home.

What's especially interesting to me about this study is that being an author of speculative fiction, tweaking the laws of physics is kind of my stock in trade.  I've messed around with time travel (Lock & Key), alternate/parallel worlds (Sephirot), machines that act as psychic amplifiers (Gears), and ordinary people gaining knowledge of the future (In the Midst of Lions), to name a few.  It's fascinating to think about my own writing -- and figure out which of the crazy plot points I've invented were impossible, and which were really impossible.

At least it's reassuring that the evil superpowerful shapeshifters in Signal to Noise fall into the latter category.

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Potions 101

One of the coolest things about writing Skeptophilia has been the connections I've made with other skeptics.  The friendly comments, and (even better) the suggestions for topics, have been a continual source of cheer for me, far outweighing the outraged rantings of various woo-woos I've offended, not to mention the occasional death threat.

I've recently (and more or less by accident) achieved quite a following amongst some of my former students.  I certainly never believed in proselytizing during class; not only is this unprofessional and ethically questionable, given that they are a captive audience, I always preferred keeping my own views about most things out of the scope of my lectures.  It was far better, I found, to present the facts of the matter, and give students the tools to think critically, and allow them to make up their own minds.  But it was inevitable that a few of them would discover Skeptophilia, and once that happened, the news spread, leading to the formation of what I think of as a sort of junior branch of Worldwide Wacko Watch.

One particularly enthusiastic young man that I taught the year before I retired has taken it upon himself to become something of a research assistant, ferreting out crazy stories and loopy websites in his spare time, and sending them to me.  And just yesterday, he found a real winner, that has all of the hallmarks of a truly inspired woo-woo website: (1) a bizarre worldview, (2) no evidence whatsoever, and despite (1) and (2), (3) complete certainty.

So allow me to present for your consideration the Lucky Mojo Free Spells Archive.

The first fun bit about this site is that it's run and maintained by someone named "Cat Yronwode."  Having a background in linguistics, I have deduced that the latter combination of letters is an attempt to spell "Ironwood" in a vaguely medieval fashion, but who the hell knows for sure?  In any case, Ms. Yronwode has requested that the spells contained therein not be copied, because some of them are copyrighted material, and I have honored this, so if you want more details about exactly how to concoct the magic potions described below, you'll have to take a look at the site yourself.  (Who knew that pagans could be so legalistic?  I didn't.  But better to play along with her request than to find myself hexed with, for example, "Confusion Oil #3."  Heaven knows I'm confused enough, most days.)

In any case, what the "Lucky Mojo Free Spells Archive" turns out to be is a set of recipes for magic potions, and instructions in their use.  Thus we have the following:

• "Seven Holy Waters" -- allegedly invented by Marie Laveau, the "Witch Queen of New Orleans."  Contains whiskey, which I've never found to be especially water-like, but given that the word "whiskey" comes from the Irish uisge beatha, meaning "water of life," we'll just let it slide, because arguing with both the Witch Queen of New Orleans and the entire nation of Ireland seems like a losing proposition.  In any case, it's supposed to bring you peace, and is "very old-fashioned and Catholic."
• Three different recipes for "Money-drawing Oil."
• Two recipes for "Love Bath," one of which is called "Courtesan's Pleasure," and about which I will not say anything further in the interest of keeping this blog PG-13 rated.
• Something called "John the Conqueror Oil."  Made, predictably enough, with "John the Conqueror root."  We are warned to "beware commercial John the Conqueror and High Conquering Oil" because they "rarely have the root in them," especially if it was made in a factory.  This made me ask, in some astonishment, "There are factories for making this stuff?"  Notwithstanding that I'm supportive of anything it takes to keep Detroit solvent, you have to wonder how you could mechanize making magic spells.  Don't you have to be all pagan and ritualistic and druidic and so forth while you're making up potions?  I can't imagine that you'd get the same results from cooking up your potions in a cauldron in the woods as you would if you made them using electric blenders, pressure cookers, conveyor belts, and so on.  At least one has to hope that the machinery is operated by certified witches.
• "Haitian Lover Oil," "for men only," about which we are told that it is "not to be used as a genital dressing oil."  Okay, we consider ourselves duly warned.
• "Damnation Powder."  Used to hex someone you don't like.  "To be used with extreme caution."  Don't damn anyone lightly, is the general advice, which seems prudent to me.
• And the best one: "Harvey's Necromantic Floorwash #1."  Just the name of this one almost made me spit coffee all over my computer.  But hey, I guess even necromancers need to scrub the linoleum in their kitchens every once in a while, right?

So anyway, there you have it, a concise formulary for concocting magic spells and potions.  All of which puts me in mind of one of my heroes, depicted below:

If you are, like me, a Looney Tunes fan, you might remember that he got out of this particular fix by chanting such powerful spells as "Abraca-pocus" and "Hocus-cadabra."  It worked, but I bet he'd have defeated his vampire captor even more quickly had he had access to some "Damnation Oil," or even better, "John the Conqueror Root."

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Hardwired superstition

Despite my frequent railing against superstition and magical thinking, it's not that I don't see its attractions.  As a teenager and twenty-something I was fascinated with such things as Tarot cards (I actually own no fewer than seven decks, and I haven't been willing to part them with because of how beautiful the designs are), numerology, astrology, and a host of other kinds of woo.  That I eventually threw it all aside (well, figuratively, in the case of the Tarot cards) I attribute to my commitment to a rationalistic view of the world.  I decided in my mid-twenties that I had to establish some criterion for finding what I considered to be the truth, and that logic and evidence seemed a lot more solid than "I fervently wish this was so."

Since my conversion to skepticism, I've found myself looking at True Believers and wondering how they never made the same transition.  We apply the rules of the scientific method in scores of other ways -- "show me how you know this" isn't some kind of odd, esoteric rule only known to Ph.D. candidates (not that I've ever been one of those, but you get my drift).  So how can a person look at the extremely slim evidence for (say) astrology, and not say, "Okay, this makes no sense whatsoever?"

A study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology has given us at least a hint of why some people never leave behind their unsupported beliefs in the paranormal.  Its title -- which breaks the general rule that articles whose titles are questions always should be answered "No" -- is, "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?"  The researchers who conducted the study, Marjaana Lindeman and Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen of the Institute of Behavioral Studies at the University of Helsinki, looked at a group of 258 people and examined how real-world knowledge of science correlated with belief in the supernatural.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found a series of strong correlations:

The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were included, namely, with low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena, intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning mentality to non-mental phenomena.  Regression analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of the beliefs were overall physical capability (a factor representing most physical skills, interests, and knowledge) and intuitive thinking style.

Note, of course, that correlation does not imply causation; it is by no means certain that the lack of scientific knowledge caused the belief in the supernatural.  In fact, if that were true, one of the other findings of the study would be less likely:

Nonscientific ways of thinking are resistant to formal instruction… which can affect individuals’ ability to act as informed citizens to make reasoned judgments in a world that is increasingly governed by technology and scientific knowledge.

If superstitious beliefs stemmed from something as simple as a lack of knowledge of the world around us, you'd think that you could eradicate magical thinking simply by enrolling people in a college-level physics course.  The fact that this isn't so makes me wonder if there is something else underlying a tendency toward belief in the supernatural -- perhaps something in the brain wiring -- that both makes a person likely to have less aptitude at science and technical subjects, and also results in a stronger likelihood of belief in the supernatural.  A previous study by Lindeman et al. suggests that this may be so:

We examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging the brain activity of 12 supernatural believers and 11 skeptics who first imagined themselves in critical life situations (e.g. problems in intimate relationships) and then watched emotionally charged pictures of lifeless objects and scenery (e.g. two red cherries bound together).  Supernatural believers reported seeing signs of how the situations were going to turn out in the pictures more often than skeptics did.  Viewing the pictures activated the same brain regions among all participants (e.g. the left inferior frontal gyrus, IFG).  However, the right IFG, previously associated with cognitive inhibition, was activated more strongly in skeptics than in supernatural believers, and its activation was negatively correlated to sign seeing in both participant groups.

So once again, we have some evidence that what we think and believe might not entirely be a choice -- it might be hardwired into our brains.  If so, despite my toying with paranormal woo as a young person, I might have been destined all along to become the hard-headed skeptic you all know and (I hope) love.

But I'm still not throwing away the Tarot cards.  They're kinda pretty, even if they're almost certainly useless for predicting the future.

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As someone who is both a scientist and a musician, I've been fascinated for many years with how our brains make sense of sounds.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the point that our ears (and other sense organs) are like peripherals, with the brain as the central processing unit; all our brain has access to are the changes in voltage distribution in the neurons that plug into it, and those changes happen because of stimulating some sensory organ.  If that voltage change is blocked, or amplified, or goes to the wrong place, then that is what we experience.  In a very real way, your brain creates your world.

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week looks specifically at how we generate a sonic landscape, from vibrations passing through the sound collecting devices in the ear that stimulate the hair cells in the cochlea, which then produce electrical impulses that are sent to the brain.  From that, we make sense of our acoustic world -- whether it's a symphony orchestra, a distant thunderstorm, a cat meowing, an explosion, or an airplane flying overhead.

In Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, neuroscientist Nina Kraus considers how this system works, how it produces the soundscape we live in... and what happens when it malfunctions.  This is a must-read for anyone who is a musician or who has a fascination with how our own bodies work -- or both.  Put it on your to-read list; you won't be disappointed.

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Wishing wells and chicken curses

Combatting magical thinking can be an uphill battle, sometimes.

Even as a diehard skeptic, I get where it comes from.  It can sometimes be an amazingly short trip from "I wish the world worked this way" to believing the world does work that way.  Besides wishful thinking, superstitions can sometimes arise from correlation/causation errors; the classic example is going to watch your favorite sports team while wearing a particular shirt, and your team wins, so you decide the shirt's a lucky charm and proceed to wear it to subsequent games.

This reminds me of one of my college philosophy teachers, who recounted to us something that happened the previous evening.  There'd been a big thunderstorm, and the power went out, and his three-year-old daughter got scared and said, "Daddy, make the lights come back on!"

So he stood up and said, in a thunderous voice, "LET THERE BE... LIGHT."

And the power came back on.

His daughter really respected him after that.  But I bet she started getting suspicious the next time there was a power outage, and his magical ability suddenly didn't work so well any more.

Once a superstitious belief is in place, it can be remarkably hard to eradicate.  You'd think that, like my professor's daughter, once you had some experience disconfirming your belief, you'd go, "Oh, okay, I guess my lucky shirt doesn't work after all."  But we've got a number of things going against us.  Confirmation bias -- we tend to give more weight to evidence that supports what we already believed to be true.  The sunk-cost fallacy -- when we've already put a lot of energy and time into supporting a claim, we're very reluctant to admit we were wrong and it was all a waste.

Another, and weirder, reason superstitions can get cemented into place is the peculiar (but substantiated) nocebo effect.  As you might guess, the nocebo effect is kind of an anti-placebo effect; nocebo is Latin for "I will harm" (placebo means "I will please").  When somebody believes that some magical action will cause them injury, they can sometimes sustain real harm -- apparently the expectation of harm manifests as actual, measurable symptoms.  (This has sometimes been used to explain cases where "voodoo curses" have resulted in the targets becoming ill.)

The reason this comes up is because of two recent discoveries of artifacts for delivering curses in ancient Greece.  The ancient Greeks were a fascinating mix of science and superstition -- but, as I mentioned above, that seems to be part of the human condition.  When we think of them, it's usually either in the context of all the scientific inquiries and deep thought by people like Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Aristotle, or because they had gods and sub-gods and sub-sub-gods in charge of damn near everything.  

This latter tendency probably explains the 2,500 year old tablets that were recovered from a well in Athens, each one containing a detailed curse targeting a specific person.  The people who wrote each one didn't sign them; apparently, cursing someone and then signing it, "cordially yours, Kenokephalos" was considered a stupid move that was just asking for retribution.

The tablets, which were made of lead, were found by a team led by Jutta Stroszeck, director of the Kerameikos excavation on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute in Athens.  They were found in a well supplying a bath-house near the Dipylon -- the city gate near the classical Athenian Academy.

One of the curse tablets discovered by Stroszeck et al.

Apparently throwing the curses into the well started happening because the previous technique was to put them in the coffins of recently-deceased persons, with the intent that the dead guy's spirit would bring the curse-tablet down to the Underworld and say to Hades, "Hey, bro, get a load of this," and Hades would obligingly smite the recipient.  But around that time Athens tried to put the kibosh on people practicing the Black Arts, and made it illegal to put curses in coffins, so the would-be hexers started to throw them into wells instead.

You have to wonder if any ill effects their targets suffered upon drinking the well water came not from the curse, but from lead poisoning.

The second discovery, which was described in the journal Hesperia last week, is even more gruesome; the remains of a dead chicken that had been chopped up, its beak tied shut, then put in a clay vessel pierced with a nail.  It also contained a coin, presumably to pay whatever evil spirit found the cursed Chicken-o-Gram for carrying out the intent of the spell, which was probably to render the target unable to talk.  The paper describes a similar spell launched against one Libanos, a fourth-century C. E. Greek orator:

To his despair, Libanos had lost the ability to speak before an audience.  He could neither read nor write; he was plagued by severe headaches, bodily pain, and gout.  Libanos's condition improved upon the discovery and removal of a mutilated, dismembered chameleon, which had been hidden in his classroom -- a place where he spent much time.  The animal's head was bent between its hind legs, one of its front limbs cut off, and the other was stuffed into its mouth.

The weird mutilations and twisted pose had an obvious aim; to visit upon Libanos painful symptoms and an inability to speak.  What I suspect, though, is that the problems he had were purely natural in origin, and the discovery and removal of the curse acted as a placebo -- he thought, "Okay, now I should get better!", and did.

Why exactly the nocebo and placebo effects work isn't known; it may have to do with the production or inhibition (respectively) of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which are known to have long-term bad effects if levels stay high.  But honestly, that's just a guess.

Although I still think it's more likely than damage delivered directly by cursed chickens.

In any case, the discoveries are fascinating, and illustrate that the magical thinking we're still fighting today has a long genealogy.  Wouldn't it be nice if logical and science came as readily?

You have to wonder what the human race would have accomplished by now if we had an inborn tendency toward evidence-based thinking rather than believing in evil curses and wishing wells.

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

Astronomer Michio Kaku has a new book out, and he's tackled a doozy of a topic.

One of the thorniest problems in physics over the last hundred years, one which has stymied some of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, is the quest for finding a Grand Unified Theory.  There are four fundamental forces in nature that we know about; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity.  The first three can now be modeled by a single set of equations -- called the electroweak theory -- but gravity has staunchly resisted incorporation.

The problem is, the other three forces can be explained by quantum effects, while gravity seems to have little to no effect on the realm of the very small -- and likewise, quantum effects have virtually no impact on the large scales where gravity rules.  Trying to combine the two results in self-contradictions and impossibilities, and even models that seem to eliminate some of the problems -- such as the highly-publicized string theory -- face their own sent of deep issues, such as generating so many possible solutions that an experimental test is practically impossible.

Kaku's new book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything describes the history and current status of this seemingly intractable problem, and does so with his characteristic flair and humor.  If you're interesting in finding out about the cutting edge of physic lies, in terms that an intelligent layperson can understand, you'll really enjoy Kaku's book -- and come away with a deeper appreciation for how weird the universe actually is.

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

Symbols, sigils, and reality

When I was little, I had a near-obsession with figuring out whether things were real.

I remember pestering my mom over and over, because I felt sure there was some essential piece of understanding I was missing.  After much questioning, I was able to abstract a few general rules:

• People like Mom, Dad, Grandma, and our next-door neighbor were 100% real.
• Some books were called non-fiction and were about people like Abraham Lincoln, who was real even though he wasn't alive any more.
• For people in live-action shows, like Lost in Space,  the actors were real people, but the characters they were depicting were not real.
• Cartoons were one step further away.  Neither Bugs Bunny's adventures, nor his appearance, were real, but his voice was produced by a real person who, unfortunately, looked nothing like Bugs Bunny.
• Characters in fictional stories were even further removed.  The kids in The Adventures of Encyclopedia Brown weren't real, and didn't exist out there somewhere even though they seemed like they could be real humans.  
• Winnie-the-Pooh and the Cat in the Hat were the lowest tier; they weren't even possibly real.

So that was at least marginally satisfying.  At least until the next time I went to church and started asking some uncomfortable questions about God, Jesus, the angels, et al.  At this point my mom decided I'd had about as much philosophy as was good for a five-year-old and suggested I spend more time playing outdoors.

The question of how we know something has external reality never really went away, though.  It's kind of the crypto-theme behind nearly all of my novels; a perfectly ordinary person is suddenly confronted with something entirely outside of his/her worldview, and has to decide if it's real, a hoax, or a product of the imagination -- i.e., a hallucination.  Whether it's time travel (Lock & Key), a massive and murderous conspiracy (Kill Switch), an alien invasion (Signal to Noise), a mystical, magic-imbued alternate reality (Sephirot), or the creatures of the world's mythologies come to life (The Fifth Day), it all boils down to how we can figure out if our perceptions are trustworthy.

The upshot of it all was that I landed in science largely because I realized I couldn't trust my own brain.  It gave me a rigorous protocol for avoiding the pitfalls of wishful thinking and an inherently faulty sensory-integrative system.  My stance solidified as, "I am not certain if _____ exists..." (fill in the blank: ghosts, an afterlife, psychic abilities, aliens, Bigfoot, divination, magic, God) "... but until I see some hard evidence, I'm going to be in the 'No' column."

This whole issue was brought to mind by an article in Vice sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.  In "Internet Occultists are Trying to Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm," by Tamlin Magee, we find out that today's leading magical (or magickal, if you prefer) thinkers have moved past the ash wands and crystal balls and sacred fires of the previous generation, and are harnessing the power of technology in the service of the occult.

A group of practitioners of magic(k) have developed something called the Sigil Engine, which uses a secret algorithm to generate a sigil -- a magical symbol -- representing an intention that you type in.  The result is a geometrical design inside a circle based upon the words of your intention, which you can then use to manifest whatever that intention is.

So naturally, I had to try it.  I figured "love and compassion" was a pretty good intention, so that's what I typed in.  Here's the sigil it generated:

Afterward, what you're supposed to do is "charge" it to give it the energy to accomplish whatever it was you wanted it to do.  Here's what Magee has to say, which I'm quoting verbatim so you won't think I'm making this up:

Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation.  Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most commonly, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and awaiting the results.

Needless to say, I didn't do any of that with the sigil I got.  Especially the last-mentioned.  It's not that I have anything against what my dad called "shaking hands with the unemployed," but doing it while staring at a strange symbol seemed a little sketchy, especially since my intention was to write about it afterward.

Prudish I'm not, but I do have my limits.

Later on in the article, though, we learn that apparently this is a very popular method with practitioners, and in fact there is a large group of them who have what amounts to regular virtual Masturbate-o-Thons.  The idea is that if one person having an orgasm is powerful, a bunch of people all having orgasms simultaneously is even more so.  "Nobody else has synchronized literally thousand of orgasms to a single purpose, just to see what happens!" said one of the event organizers.

One has to wonder what actually did happen, other than a sudden spike in the sales of Kleenex.

In any case, what's supposed to happen is that whatever you do imbues the sigil with power.  The link Magee provided gives you a lot of options if meditating, singing, or masturbating don't work for you.  (A couple of my favorites were "draw the sigil on a balloon, blow it up, then pop it" and "draw it on your skin then take a shower and wash it away.")  

Magee interviewed a number of people who were knowledgeable about magic(k)al practices, and I won't steal her thunder by quoting them further -- her entire article is well worth reading.  But what strikes me is two things: (1) they're all extremely serious, and (2) they're completely convinced that it works.  Which brings me back to my original topic:

How would you know if any of this was real?

In my own case, for example, the intention I inputted was "love and compassion."  Suppose I had followed the guidelines and charged it up.  What confirmatory evidence would show me it'd worked?  If I acted more compassionately toward others, or them toward me?  If I started seeing more stories in the news about people being loving and kind to each other?

More to the point, how could I tell if what had happened was because of my sigil -- or if it was simply dart-thrower's bias again, that I was noticing such things more because my attempt at magic(k) had put it in the forefront of my mind?

It might be a little more telling if my intention had been something concrete and unmistakable -- if, for example, I'd typed in "I want one of my books to go to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List."  If I did that, and three weeks later it happened, even I'd have to raise an eyebrow in perplexity.  But there's still the Post Hoc fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this" -- you can't conclude that because one thing followed another in time sequence, the first caused the second.

That said, it would certainly give me pause.

Honestly, though, I'm not inclined to test it.  However convinced the occultists are, I don't see any mechanism by which this could possibly work, and spending a lot of time running experiments would almost certainly generate negative, or at least ambiguous, results.  (I'm reminded of the answer from the Magic 8-Ball, "Reply Hazy, Try Again.")

So the whole thing seems to me to fall into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  I'm pretty doubtful about sigil-charging, but there are definitely worse things you could be spending your time doing than concentrating on love and compassion.

Or, for that matter, pondering the existence of Bugs Bunny.  Okay, he's fictional, but he's also one of my personal heroes, and if that doesn't give him a certain depth of reality, I don't see what would.

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

The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

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

Different kinds of impossible

Many of us engage in magical thinking -- attributing causal relationships between actions and events that are simply (often accidentally) correlated.  Superstitions are magical thinking; as nice as it would be if you could influence the win/loss ratio of your favorite team by wearing a particular shirt, the universe just isn't put together that way.

Where it gets interesting is that there are different degrees of magical thinking.  A clever piece of research appeared in the online journal PLoS-One last week, carried out by psychologists John McCoy of the University of Pennsylvania and Tomer Ullman of Harvard, which illustrates that even those of us who engage in magical thinking seem to be intuitively aware of how impossible different false causations are.

So we can, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, believe in six impossible things before breakfast.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The paper, entitled "Judgments of Effort for Magical Violations of Intuitive Physics," asks test subjects to perform a simple task.  First, imagine a world where magic is real, where conjuring a spell could make things happen that are impossible in our world.  Then, they were asked to judge how difficult those spells would be.  What the researchers found is that the bigger the violation of physics required for the spell to work, the greater the effort by the conjurer must be.  The authors write:

People spend much of their time in imaginary worlds, and have beliefs about the events that are likely in those worlds, and the laws that govern them.  Such beliefs are likely affected by people’s intuitive theories of the real world.  In three studies, people judged the effort required to cast spells that cause physical violations.  People ranked the actions of spells congruently with intuitive physics.  For example, people judge that it requires more effort to conjure up a frog than to levitate it one foot off the ground.  A second study manipulated the target and extent of the spells, and demonstrated with a continuous measure that people are sensitive to this manipulation even between participants. A pre-registered third study replicated the results of Study 2.  These results suggest that people’s intuitive theories partly account for how they think about imaginary worlds.

After all, to levitate a frog using ordinary physics has already been achieved.  Frogs, like humans, are mostly water, and water is diamagnetic -- when exposed to a strong magnetic field, the constituent atoms align, inducing a magnetic field of the opposite polarity and triggering a repulsive force.  So it doesn't take any particular violation of physics to levitate a frog, although imagining a situation where it could be done without a powerful electromagnet is more of a reach.

Conjuring a frog out of nothing, though?  This is a major violation of a great many laws of physics.  First, if you imagine that the frog is coming from the air molecules in the space that it displaces when it appears, you have to believe that somehow oxygen, nitrogen, and the trace gases in the air have been converted to the organic molecules that make up living tissue.  Just getting from lightweight gaseous elements to the iron in the frog's hemoglobin isn't possible in the lab -- iron, in fact, is formed in the cores of supergiant stars, and only dispersed into space during supernova explosions.  (Pretty cool that the molecules that make up you were once in the ultra-hot cores of giant stars, isn't it?  Carl Sagan was spot-on when he said "We are made of star stuff.")

So there are different sorts of impossible.  You'd think that once you've accepted that the regular laws of physics don't apply -- that you're in a world where magic really happens -- you'd decide that all bets are off and anything can happen.  But our intuitive understanding of the laws of physics doesn't go away.  We still are, on some level, aware of what's difficult, what's impossible, and what's ridiculously impossible.  The authors write:

[P]eople’s ranking of the spells in all our studies were not affected by exposure to fantasy and magic in the media.  We suggest that the media does not primarily affect what spells are seen as more difficult, but rather that people bring their intuitive physics to bear when they engage with fiction.  That is, in line with previous research on myths and transformation, systems of magic are perceived as coherent to the extent to which they match people’s intuitive theories.  People perceive levitating a frog as easy not because they know it’s one of the first charms that any young wizard learns at Hogwarts, rather young wizards learn that spell first because readers expect that spell should be easy. 

In his 1893 essay The Fantastic Imagination, the novelist George Macdonald wrote, “The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them …but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own”. It seems people’s little worlds do not stray far from home.

What's especially interesting to me about this study is that being an author of speculative fiction, tweaking the laws of physics is kind of my stock in trade.  I've messed around with time travel (Lock & Key), alternate/parallel worlds (Sephirot), telepathic, energy-stealing aliens (Lines of Sight), and mythological creatures becoming real (The Fifth Day), to name a few.  It's fascinating to think about my own writing -- and figure out which of the crazy plot points I've invented were impossible, and which were really impossible.

At least it's reassuring that the evil superpowerful shapeshifters in Signal to Noise fall into the latter category.

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

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

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