Sea changes

As a science teacher, I am frequently asked about the evidence for climate change.  It's a more difficult question than it seems at first.  Teasing apart anomalous weather events from overall trends in the climate, determining if any changes we see are natural fluctuations or human-induced, and (if the latter) determining what could be done to ameliorate the situation -- none are trivial matters.  Add in the political spin, bias, and wishful thinking, and what you have is a recipe for fuzzy thinking and specious conclusions.

Nevertheless, the vast bulk of the data supports the contention that anthropogenic climate change is, in fact, occurring.  The best analysis of this position is from science writer James Lawrence Powell, who was an appointee to the National Science Board by both President Reagan and the first President Bush, and is available here.  Powell's angle was that if climate change denial is actually a scientifically supportable position, then it should be reflected in the peer-reviewed papers on the subject -- there should be approximately equal numbers of papers that show that the Earth is warming as ones that show that it is not.  In fact, here's what he found:

Which, as astronomer Phil Plait (of the wonderful blog Bad Astronomy) said, is a "slam dunk."

That hasn't stopped the controversy.  Peer review, deniers say, is skewed toward buying the party line.  The data is flawed, or outright fabricated.  Scientists have an agenda that they, in their surreptitious and evil manner, are foisting upon the unwitting public, as if somehow scientists want an environmental catastrophe to occur.  (I wonder if the ease with which some people accept this hearkens back to the "mad scientist" trope from 1950s-era horror movies.)

Of course, as the data keeps pouring in, deniers have to work harder to explain it away, and the explanations become more and more convoluted.  The best one I've seen yet I ran across just yesterday, in the accurately (and ironically) named website Aircrap.  Aircrap derives its moniker from its focus on the government's role in deliberate manipulation of the Earth's systems -- they just love chemtrails, HAARP, and DARPA, and blame everything from Hurricane Katrina to the Japanese tsunami on the American government.

Well, now that the evidence for climate change is becoming incontrovertible, they can't just accept that it's anything as routine as anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane to blame.  So they took one piece of the climate change puzzle -- sea level rise -- and came up with a novel way to explain it.  (And by "novel" I mean "so crazy that even Rush Limbaugh wouldn't believe it.")

In an article you can read here, they inform us that the sea level isn't rising; the land is sinking.

Yes, you read that right.  The oceans aren't getting any higher; that would be ridiculous.  What's really happening is that humans are extracting ground water, causing the ground to subside in the fashion of a sponge drying up.  The solution:  get the government to stop spraying cloud-seeding agents into the air, so that more rain falls, so that the water being pumped out of the ground gets replaced.

I find it interesting that the chemtrails crowd is anti-climate-change.  You'd think they'd love this idea, as it gives fertile ground for conspiracy theories involving the US government and Big Oil covering up evidence.  But in a scan through chemtrails websites, at the cost of millions of innocent cells in my prefrontal cortex who died in agony, I didn't find a single one that accepted climate change.  The whole thing is a conspiracy of a different sort -- a conspiracy by the evil scientists who want to deflect your attention from what the government is actually up to.  In their skewed worldview, the scientists are complicit in the coverup and are fabricating data on Antarctic ice melt in order to keep you from finding out that the government is putting secret weather-altering chemicals into jet fuel.

Now, don't get me wrong; I know enough geology to realize that extraction of groundwater can cause subsidence.  It's called "sinkhole formation."  But the idea that the continental landmasses everywhere are somehow settling downward as water is pumped out is, to put not too fine a point on it, moronic.  It reminds me of the amazingly wonderful science textbook spoof Science Made Stupid (available online, for free, here!  WARNING: Once you start reading it, you will read the whole thing in one sitting), wherein we find the following explanation of tides:

We sometimes speak of the tides causing the oceans to rise or fall. Of course, this is a fallacy. Actually, it is the land that rises and falls.

As the Earth rotates, the moon's gravitational attraction is greatest first on one side, then the other. Land masses, being rigid, are pulled up or down accordingly. Oceans, being liquid, are free to flow back to their normal level.

You have to wonder if the folks over at Aircrap stumbled on a copy of Science Made Stupid at a used book sale, and thought it was serious.

It would explain a lot.

Anyhow, it's interesting to see how people approach the whole thing, and as more evidence for climate change amasses (which it will) how long it will take for the last few deniers finally to cave.  Well, not the last few; as we've seen over and over in this blog, you can never convince everyone, not with mountains of evidence.  But at least, enough people that we finally have the global will to try to do something about it.

I can only hope that that sea change doesn't come too late.

For sale: one wine cabinet. Comes with an evil spirit.

Coming on the heels of yesterday's post about a study that showed that once our brains are primed to notice paranormal occurrences, we will, and in fact, will proceed to notice more and more as time goes on -- today we have the story of the haunted wine cabinet.

This one is courtesy of a friend, who asked me if I'd ever heard of the "Dybbuk Box," and said she had a co-worker who found the story terrifying.  I told her I hadn't.  But anything that scares someone is bound to be interesting to me, so I looked into it, and lo and behold, it has its own Wikipedia page and a website devoted to the legend.

The basic story goes something like this.

In 2003, a writer named Kevin Mannis bought a wooden wine cabinet at an estate sale.  The box had belonged to a Holocaust survivor named Havela, and Mannis found out from Havela's granddaughter that the box was a family heirloom.  At that point Mannis offered to sell, or even give, the box back to the family, feeling that given the family's history they should probably have it.  The granddaughter didn't want it; she said, in fact, that no one ever used it, because a dybbuk lived inside it.  "Actually," she told Mannis, "I don't advise you to open it."

*cue scary music*

A dybbuk is, according to Jewish folklore, the disembodied spirit of a dead person -- usually not a nice dead person, but someone who made people miserable while (s)he was alive and whom you can well imagine wanting to continue to do the same after kicking the bucket.  The difference is that the dybbuk, now that it is freed from its mortal body, can latch on to another one (the Jewish answer to demonic possession) or -- as in this case -- attach itself to an object.

So, of course, Mannis did exactly what you would do, if you were the stupid character in a horror movie who is the bold one and (not coincidentally) the first one to die: he opened the box.  And inside, he found an odd collection of items.  There were two pennies from the 1920s, a lock of blond hair bound with cord, a lock of dark hair bound with cord, a small statue engraved with the Hebrew word "shalom," a small wine goblet made of solid gold, one dried rose bud, and a candle holder with legs shaped like octopus tentacles.

Pretty atmospheric stuff, isn't it?  Suggestive.  And suggesting something is apparently exactly what it did.  Mannis proceeded to have a series of horrific nightmares of a terrifying old hag, and started getting terrible headaches.  The box, obviously, was to blame.  He realized that he had to somehow get rid of it, that the story of its being haunted was real and was clearly responsible for his experiences.  So he thought, "Here I have this box which is infested with a horrifying spirit of the damned, and which is making me miserable.  Hmm, what should I do with it?"  And he found the perfect solution.

He gave it to his mother as a birthday present.

And mom proceeded immediately to have a stroke.

After that, Mannis had second thoughts.  So he sold it on eBay.  Once you've given True Evil to your mother, and nearly killed her in the process, the next step is to sell it to an unwitting victim for profit, right?   The box was bought by Iosef Neitzke, a student at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, who reported that the box smelled either like "cat urine or jasmine flowers" (which is kind of an odd pairing), and that after he bought the box the light bulbs in his house started to burn out, and he started losing his hair.  So he sold it to Jason Haxton, who had been following Neitzke's experiences on a blog, and when Neitzke wrote that he had enough of cat piss, dead light bulbs, and hair loss, and was ready to get rid of the box, Haxton jumped at it.

Haxton proceeded to start coughing up blood, developed "head-to-toe welts," and had strange dreams.  So he thought that it was time to get the experts involved.  He got a hold of a couple of rabbis, who successfully locked the dybbuk back in the box, and then he hid the box in a secret location.

And no, he won't tell anyone where it is.

It's an interesting story; and significant, I think, that the first person who brought the box to light was a writer.  I'm speaking purely from personal experience, here, but fiction writers are pretty good at making weird shit up.  (See the sidebar for examples.)  And, as we saw yesterday, once you're looking for strange occurrences, you will find them -- or take perfectly normal things (like hair loss and bad dreams) and attribute them to the paranormal explanation you had already decided was true.  As far as the welts -- hives are known to be a common psychosomatic symptom, triggered not only by allergens but by emotional stress.  As skeptic Chris French of Goldsmiths College said of the dybbuk box, "(all of the owners were) already primed to be looking out for bad stuff.  If you believe you have been cursed, then inevitably you explain the bad stuff that happens in terms of what you perceive to be the cause.  Put it like this: I would be happy to own this object."

Still, that hasn't stopped the woo-woo crowd from capitalizing on the whole thing.  The dybbuk box story has been featured on Paranormal Witness, Mysterious Universe, and Paranormal State, and was the basis of the movie The Possession...

... which, of course, used the tag line "Based on a true story."

Interesting, given my fascination with weird claims, and all of the coverage it's gotten, that the whole thing was completely new to me.  So I give my friend some props for throwing it my way.  It's a fun story, even if I don't buy the supernatural explanation, which you pretty much knew I wouldn't in any case.  And like French, I'd love to own the box, not that that's likely.  I think I would be pretty resistant to its ill effects.  I'm firmly in possession of all of my hair, am not prone to welts, and given the fact that I own two aging cats there's already enough of a pervasive cat-piss smell in my den that it probably wouldn't make much difference if I stored it there.  And I'm already prone to insomnia and bad dreams.

Of course, there's the whole coughing-up-blood thing.  That would kind of suck, and I am sort of susceptible to bronchitis, especially in the winter.  So maybe I'm better off without it, after all.

Priming the paranormal

There's a familiar cliché, that "you see what you are looking for."  It's something that I think we can all relate to; our perception is often limited by what we already thought was there.  That our perceptual/integrative systems are inaccurate we've known for years; experiments have supported the conjecture that when our attention is focused, we can miss major features of what we're seeing.  (If you don't believe it, check out this amazing video -- it's less than two minutes long and will blow your mind.)  Further, when we already have preconceived notions about what we are going to see, we tend to find it whether it actually exists or not (this is the basis of the logical fallacy confirmation bias).

This latter point was the subject of a brilliant little study by Chris Jensen Romer, funded by the Society for Psychical Research, and which was just published this week.  It bounces off (and improves upon) a 1996 study by Houran and Lange, which looked at how individuals who are primed to notice "paranormal occurrences" in their houses mostly... do.

Romer's study, which is outlined in more detail here, involved five couples keeping a diary of "unusual or unexplainable experiences" that occurred in their homes over a one-month period (between October 17 and November 17, 2012).  Here were the instructions that were given to the couples who volunteered:

For the next month, until November 17th, please pay particular attention to any unusual occurrences in your residence. These occurrences may be emotional feelings, physical sensations, or environmental events in your residence. Please keep detailed and accurate notes, even if you know or believe to know what caused the occurrences to happen. I will need the gender and age of adult occupants, and who had each experience noting. If you have children please do not discuss this with them. I have no desire to upset children! The types of unusual experiences I am interested include but are not limited to

* Visual – seeing things not there

* Audio – hearing stuff with no known cause

*Tactile – the feeling of being touched with no obvious reason

* Olfactory – strange smells

* Sensed “presences”

* Intense emotion for no apparent cause beyond that you might normally experience

* Object movements with no apparent cause

* erratic function of equipment.

Of the five couples involved in the experiment, only one of them reported no experiences of any kind that fell into the categories listed.  The other four couples all reported varying numbers of odd observations; one couple said that these had occurred in the family car, but not in the home, a finding that Romer's analysis excluded as it did not fit the methodology, but which still supports Romer's conclusion quite nicely.  The other three couples all reported a great many goings-on, with one recording 22 overall "unusual experiences" -- just shy of one a day.

What's most interesting about this study is that consistently, the test subjects reported higher and higher frequencies of "unusual experiences" as the month progressed.  Although in my opinion it's still a small data set to draw any kind of rock-solid conclusion upon, the relationship looks linear -- the number of weird things you notice seems to be directly proportional to the amount of time you've spent looking for them.  This, Romer concludes, "... may simply show the priming effect of participating in the experiment.  There is no reason to think the participants would have thought very much if at all about what occurred, let alone ascribed it to spooks, if they had not been participating in the diary study."  It's evident that these peculiar little events happen all the time, and most of them (rightly) escape our notice; but when we're forced to notice them, we do, and then the ones we notice increase our certainty that "something strange is going on," and the whole thing snowballs.  Romer writes, "... I have no doubt that life is full of tiny anomalies: during the day it has taken me to write up this replication my partner has texted to say she had her sat nav come on while lying on her bedroom floor and make her jump by telling her to “turn right”; I myself thought I saw Cuddles my black cat sitting on top of a cupboard, but on looking again he was not there, and was still sleeping in my bedroom when I returned to the computer."  We only ascribe meaning to them when we're primed to -- when enough of them occur in rapid succession that we're forced to pay them more attention, when we already thought our house was haunted... or when we're asked to notice them and write them down.  After that, positive feedback takes over.

It's the psychological component of our perception that always makes me suspicious of eyewitness accounts.  People act as if we're highly accurate recorders of what we experience, when in reality our attention is selective and our memories highly unreliable.  Odd, then, that eyewitness testimony is considered one of the highest forms of evidence in courts of law, isn't it?  What Romer's study does is to cast further doubt on our ability to discern what constitutes out-of-the-ordinary occurrences -- which makes me even more suspicious of most of the alleged evidence of hauntings.

On the other hand, the whole thing has made me wonder a little about the scraping noise I keep hearing up in the attic.  Wonder if I should investigate?

Nah.  I'm sure it's nothing.

Breaking news: UC scientist finds that the universe really isn't all that much like a brain

Sometimes I get really mad at the way popular media reports science.

Science does what it does by being precise.  Precise measurements of data; precise analyses of these data; precise use of words to describe assumptions, methodologies, conclusions.  Not, of course, that it is always free from error.  Like any human endeavor, its practitioners can make mistakes or draw erroneous inferences.  But this brings up the other critical aspect of science -- it self-corrects.  Bad science seldom lasts long, because peer review acts as a first-line defense, and even after publication, others in the field replicate, question, and test the conclusions that the researchers came to.

But then, of course, popular media get involved, and the first thing they often do is to muddy the waters.  They can't just report the damn story; they have to make it sound flashy and appealing, and as a result, they do a pretty good job of vaguing things up in the minds of non-scientists.

A particularly egregious example of this was published in Huffington Post yesterday.  The title of the piece immediately put my skepti-senses on red alert: "Physicists Find Evidence That the Universe is a 'Giant Brain.'"  The author, Michael Rundle, goes on to tell the reader that Dmitri Krioukov, of the University of California - San Diego, has shown that the universe has a lot in common with the brain.  The article starts out thusly:  "The idea of the universe as a 'giant brain' has been proposed by scientists -- and science fiction writers -- for decades.  But now physicists say there may be some evidence that it's true.  In a sense."

So, right off the bat, you're led to a woo-woo conclusion -- that the universe is some great big sentient intelligence, and the stars and nebulae and galaxies and all are the neurons.  Isn't that all just... cosmic?

The problem is, that isn't what Krioukov et al. are saying.  At all.  And Rundle himself hints at it, later in the article, although he sounds like he's kind of hesitant to bring it up:

The team's simulation modeled the very early life of the universe, shortly after the big bang, by looking at how quantum units of space-time smaller than subatomic particles 'networked' with each other as the universe grew.

They found that the simulation mirrored that of other networks. Some links between similar nodes resulted in limited growth, while others acted as junctions for many different connections.

For instance, some connections are limited and similar - like a person who likes sports visiting many other sports websites - and some are major and connect to many other parts of the network, like Google and Yahoo.

No, it doesn't quite mean that the universe is 'thinking' - but as has been previously pointed out online, it might just mean there's more similarity between the very small and the very large than first appearances suggest.

It doesn't quite mean that the universe is thinking?  How about it doesn't mean that AT ALL?  Let's take a look at the actual press release from the University of California about the research.  Oh, hey!  Look!  All we have to do is read the first two paragraphs:

The structure of the universe and the laws that govern its growth may be more similar than previously thought to the structure and growth of the human brain and other complex networks, such as the Internet or a social network of trust relationships between people, according to a new paper published in the science journal Nature’s Scientific Reports.

"By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer," said Dmitri Krioukov, co-author of the paper, published by the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego. "But the discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems."

Did you catch that?  It ain't subtle.  By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain.  Right from one of the co-authors of the study.  So what's the HuffPost headline?  Let's take another look, shall we?  "Physicists Find Evidence That the Universe is a 'Giant Brain.'"

Krioukov et al. did a very intriguing piece of research; to show how the model of a networked system -- like the brain, or a social network, or the internet -- could have the same basic pattern, or map, as a model of the interactions between particles in the early universe.  Nowhere, nowhere does he say that the universe is brain-like in any other fashion.  But that's exactly the conclusion that Rundle would lead you to believe, isn't it?  If you don't think that this is how your average reader would interpret Rundle's article -- and especially any readers who already had woo-woo tendencies -- take a look at one of the posts from the comment section (you'll have to trust me that I copied this verbatim; there's only so many times you can write [sic] in one paragraph):

You need know the theoretical model of primordial galaxies made by Matrix/DNA Theory, where cells systems are exactly copies of those galaxies models. If neuronal cells are exactly like galaxies, the human brain must be a exactly copy of the Universe. But... we need remember that logics demands that there are living beings with brains and consciousnesses everywhere. My idea is that we are a kind of genes building some region or part of an embryo. Since our brain is shared by regions of functions, maybe the whole earth's consciousnesses is responsible by some region of Universes' embryo brain. Andromeda is responsible by other region, and so on. Finally: all humans will be one cosmic planetary mind, and all planetary minds will be one universal mind. Beautiful. You mist love and help any human being and any other lifeform conscious of this universe, because they are you and you are they, into one.

Wow.  I would feel so beautiful and universal and planetary, if I hadn't just finished slamming my forehead against the desk repeatedly.

Okay, I know people are gonna believe weird stuff.  It's kind of inevitable.  No matter what, there are going to be some uncritical thinkers out there.  But fer cryin' in the sink, we don't need the purveyors of popular media out there making things worse.  If they're going to report on science, the least they can do is not to interject their own crappy understanding of scientific principles into the freakin' headline.

All right, all right, I'll calm down, now.  I realize I shouldn't get so wound up about this stuff.  Isn't good for the blood pressure.  Maybe I should just relax and concentrate on soothing thoughts.  Maybe they'll be sent in from the "Andromeda region" of my brain.  Wouldn't that just be cosmic?

Remembrance of things past

I'm going to begin today's post with a bit of shameless self-promotion.  The wonderful site The Skeptic is sponsoring a contest to select (amongst other things) the best skeptical blog of 2012, and if you have read and enjoyed Skeptophilia, I'd like to toss aside my usual charming modesty and ask for your vote.  It takes only a moment -- click on the site link I posted above, and go down to the heading "Best Blog of 2012," and put in my website address (skeptophilia.blogspot.com).  I'd appreciate it immensely!

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I've been interested in memory as long as I can remember.  Part of the reason is that my own personal brain seems to be made up of a rather peculiar assemblage of things I can remember with apparent ease and things that I don't seem to be able to remember at all.  I recall music with no effort whatsoever; I once put a nifty little Serbian dance tune into long-term storage for over twenty years after hearing it twice (and not practicing it or writing it down in the interim).  Names, likewise, stick with me; I know more scientific names of obscure species than is useful or even reasonable, and it's not from engaging in any sort of surreptitious memorization of taxonomic lists late at night when no one's looking.  That sort of stuff simply sticks.

On the other hand, numbers.  I know people who can remember what their phone number was in houses they haven't lived in for thirty years.  I'm lucky when I can remember what my phone number is now.  In this day of passwords, PINs, and so on, there are a variety of number/letter combinations I'm expected to remember, and the maximum amount of these I seem to be able to recall is: one.  For all of the passwords where this is possible, I use the same one.  If anyone ever discovers it, I'm royally screwed.  Fortunately, it's pretty obscure, so I don't think it's likely (meaning you shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it out).

It does, however, point up something odd about memory, which is how compartmentalized it is.  People can be exceptionally good at certain types of memory, and rather bad at others.  A few things, however, seem common to all sorts of memory; repetition improves retention, memory consolidation increases after sleep, and we all get worse at it (all types) as we age.

This last one is the subject of a recent bit of research published in Nature (available here), by Zhenzhong Cui, Ruiben Feng, Stephanie Jacobs, Yanhong Duan, Huimin Wang, Xiaohua Cao, and Joe Z. Tsien, as a collaborative project between Georgia Health Sciences University and East China Normal University.  The experiments involved using transgenic mice that overproduced a neurotransmitter receptor called NR2A, and found that they were significantly poorer than normal at forming new long-term memories than ordinary mice were.  The reason, the researchers speculate, is that this receptor is involved in weakening the synaptic firing patterns from old memories.

Put another way, it seems like one of the reasons we become more forgetful as we age is that we aren't as good at getting rid of things we already have stored in there.  In an interview with The New York Times, study lead author Joe Z. Tsien compares our brains when young to a blank page, and older brains to a page from a newspaper.  "The difference is not how dark the pen is," he said, "but that the newspaper already has writing on it."

"What our study suggests," Tsien added, "is that it’s not just the strengthening of connections, but the weakening of the other sets of connections that creates a holistic pattern of synaptic connectivity that is important for long-term memory formation."

In other words, our brains really do fill up and (in some sense) run out of space.

It's a funny thought, isn't it?  One of the reasons I can't remember where I left my keys is because my brain still is determined to hang onto the name of my 7th grade English teacher (Mrs. Trowbridge).

I find this a fascinating result, partly because it contradicts my long-held belief (admittedly based on no evidence whatsoever) that no one ever gets close to the actual memory storage capacity of the brain.  Also, it brings up the questionably prudent possibility of developing technology to selectively erase memories, à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Not, in this case, to eliminate traumatic or unpleasant memories, as it was for Jim Carrey's character -- but to free up hard drive space.

In any case, this is only the beginning.  A dear friend of mine, the brilliant (now retired) Cornell human genetics professor Dr. Rita Calvo, once made the prediction that "if the 20th century was the century of the gene, the 21st will be the century of the brain."  We are, she said, right now with respect to our understanding of the brain approximately where we were in 1913 with respect to our understanding of genetics -- we know a little bit of the "what" and the "how much," but almost nothing about the "how" and the "why."

If so, we should be looking forward to some amazing advances over the next few years, and I'm sure I'll have to do a lot of reading to keep up with the research even well enough to teach competently my Introductory Neurology class.  It's exciting, however, to think that we may finally be elucidating the inner workings of our most intricate organ, and finding out how it does one of the most mysterious things of all -- storing, and retrieving, information.

Oh, and one more thing; did you vote for my blog?  I hope you hadn't forgotten.

What your clothing says about you

There's no woo-woo belief that is so silly that someone can't make it a whole lot sillier.

So, let's start with psychometry, the idea that people leave "psychic traces" on objects that they handle.  Supposedly, these traces are especially strong if the object was handled by someone in an elevated emotional state.  And the idea is that for psychically-sensitive people (whatever that means), those traces can be detected.

Okay, so not so different than the other kinds of psychic woo-woo -- clairvoyance, telepathy, precognitive dreams, and so forth.  But thanks to one of my sharp Critical Thinking students, we have the story of a woman named Roxanne Usleman, whose hobby is going to thrift stores so she can handle clothing and find out about the people who owned them.

Usleman is featured in a video (here), wherein she goes to Marmalade Vintage Clothing Store and leads the shop owner around making commentary.  Here is how she describes what she does:

[Clothes] communicate completely different than we do on the Earth, kind of a different language.  I work, like, as a translator, basically, as the information comes through I translate it into an Earth form, a three dimension form, where mortal beings can understand it...  When I was woke up in the middle of the night, the clothes are, like, speaking, and they have a history about them, a need to communicate something that happened.

 My own clothes don't seem to communicate anything much to me, except for occasionally the important messages "WASH ME" and "Don't you know how to use an iron?"  But maybe I just don't speak the "language."  Be that as it may, Usleman then goes on to feel up various pieces of clothing, and finds a dress about which she says the following:

Whoever had owned this before, when she had passed away this dress was near her when she had passed away.  So there's something she needs to talk about, it's as if the end of her life did not end in a positive way.  It was very sudden.  Whoever had gotten the dress after, and wore it, immediately gave it away because they didn't want the energy in it.

The shopkeeper then chimes in:

That is true.  I don't know who is the owner, but somebody bought this as a gift for my sister.  And she didn't ever wear it, she didn't want it, so she gave it to me.

And Usleman is just tickled pink about this, and squeaks, and says, "Ooh, so we have a verification!"

Because of course it couldn't be that the sister didn't like it because it's a butt-ugly dress.  No, it has to be the "energies."

Then Usleman says that last night she got a communiqué from a "Laura" and she wanders around the shop to find something that "Laura" owned.  And she finds yet another butt-ugly item, this time a bracelet shaped like a snake with red eyes, and says that this was once owned by "Laura."  Metal, Usleman explains, holds the "energy" of the first person who owned it even better than cloth does.  "Whoever buys this bracelet," Usleman says, "it will be unimaginable, the power.  It will bring them a lot of luck."

Fur, on the other hand, is more difficult, because "the animal is so strong in the fur that it's difficult to connect to the human."  Because of this, you don't pick a fur, the fur picks you.  If it's the wrong person for the fur, "the fur repels them, they'll pass right by it, they may not even see it."

What gets me about this, more than Usleman's dog-and-pony show (because that is pretty clearly all about publicity, and ultimately, money) is why anyone with an IQ that exceeds today's high temperature in Labrador would fall for it.  It's not, as the student who found it pointed out, like the clothing is going to speak up and say, "Um, excuse me.  Actually the woman who owned me was named Muriel, and she's still alive, and donated me to this shop because I am truly hideous."  Psychometry, especially of this sort, falls outside of the realm of the even potentially verifiable, given that clothing in second-hand shops doesn't usually come with a printed ownership history attached.

You really should, however, watch the video, which is under three minutes long.  Usleman's delivery is somewhere between hilarious and grating; she has a Valley-Girl-style flip upwards at the end of each sentence, as if she was asking a question when she's not?  You know?  And she also uses the word "like" a lot, which definitely adds to the overall effect.  Nevertheless, after doing a little research, I found out that she's apparently a hugely popular psychic, with a thriving business doing psychic readings (check out her website here).  On the flip side, however, she was one of the psychics whose predictions were analyzed by Stuart Robbins (see his report here), and he found, unsurprisingly, that "these 'professionals' are NOT capable of telling the future any better than you or I, and some of them are in fact far worse."

And yet, people still give her money for her "psychic abilities."  Which, frankly, baffles me.

So, that's today's contribution from the world of woo-woo.  I'd like to give a shout-out to the student who sent me Usleman's video; this young lady has a truly fine skeptical mind, of the kind that is a pleasure to teach.  As for me, it's time to go get ready for work.  My clothes are communicating with me.  Right now they're saying, "Hey!  You!  You can't just sit around in your bathrobe all day, messing about on the computer!  Get your lazy ass in gear!  But please take a shower before you put us on, okay?  Yeah.  Thanks."

Damn snarky clothes.  Maybe I'll switch to wearing fur, if I can find one that wants me.

The straight scoop

As part of our ongoing inquiry into why people believe in irrational, counterfactual nonsense, last week we looked at a study that showed that if people read nasty comments in an online opinion piece, it caused them to hold onto their preexisting opinion more strongly.  Today, we'll consider a study that shows that not only does an obnoxious screed not change someone's mind, facts don't, either.

R. Kelly Garrett, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, recently released the results of an investigation into how people react when they are told that something they'd just read was wrong.  He and his team gave test subjects a story about who has access to private health records, but the story had several false statements inserted into it -- for example, that hospital administrators, health insurers, and government officials had unrestricted access to your medical information.

The group was then split in three.  One-third was given, immediately after reading the article, a second article from FactCheck.org that showed that the inserted statements were wrong.  A second group was given the correction after spending three minutes doing an unrelated task.  The third group was not given the correction at all.

Unsurprisingly, the three-minute waiting period had little effect on whether or not the reader ended up believing the false information, and the people who did not receive correction showed the strongest residual belief in the incorrect statements.  What was interesting, though, was how the data shifted when you looked at the individuals who received correction, and split those into two groups -- ones who at the beginning of the study identified themselves as supportive of electronic health records, and ones that were against them.  The ones who thought that electronic health records were a good idea were very quick to accept correction, and to learn that the scary statements about unrestricted access were false; those who already believed that electronic medical recordkeeping was a bad idea did not budge, even when shown evidence that what they'd been told was false.  Instead, Garrett said, the test subjects doubted the source of the correction itself.

 "Real-time corrections do have some positive effect, but it is mostly with people who were predisposed to reject the false claim anyway," Garrett said.  "The problem with trying to correct false information is that some people want to believe it, and simply telling them it is false won’t convince them."

That doesn't mean we should give up, Garrett said.  "Correcting misperceptions is really a persuasion task.  You have to convince people that, while there are competing claims, one claim is clearly more accurate."  He also said that it provides a cautionary note about rumors in the political arena.  "We would anticipate that systems like Dispute Finder would do little to change the beliefs of the roughly one in six Americans who, despite exhaustive news coverage and fact checking, continue to question whether President Obama was born in the U.S."

He summed up his study as showing that "Humans aren’t vessels into which you can just pour accurate information."

While this is a purely natural result -- it's understandable that it would take a lot of convincing to change someone's mind on an issue (s)he felt strongly about -- it's a little disheartening.  It's no wonder, then, that the conspiracy-theorists seem so deaf to reason, that the anti-vaxers and anti-GMO crowd don't budge even in the face of scientific study after scientific study, and that the woo-woos respond to rational argument with the equivalent of "la-la-la-la-la, not listening."  It makes the job of the people at sites like FactCheck and Snopes that much harder.

Not to mention mine.  And it also explains a good bit of the hate mail I get.