Send in the clowns

According to an article last week in the Boston Globe, Loren Coleman, the founder and director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, has been called into investigate the recent rash of clown sightings in the United States.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commona]

I'm not entirely sure what to think about this.  First, despite the fact that the museum has been in operation since 2003, in that time they have demonstrated conclusive evidence of the existence of almost one Sasquatch.  The same goes for all of the other cryptids they study, such as the Loch Ness Monster, the latest sighting of which turned out to be a bunch of seals.

So their track record isn't that great.  Also, I question that scary clowns actually qualify as cryptids, given that no one is really doubting they exist.  Most of us think they're pranksters (or possibly loonies) dressed up in clown suits to scare the piss out of the unsuspecting, and as such are more a concern for local law enforcement than they are for the crew of Finding Bigfoot.

That hasn't stopped people from seeking out Coleman's help. "Everybody [has] jumped on the phantom clown bandwagon," he said in an interview with the Globe.  "I’m always prepared for the next new thing.  It’s a very crisis-oriented field that I [work] in — it could be a new animal discovery, a new Bigfoot report, a new giant snake report... That’s just the way life is."

So I guess he's saying if it wasn't clowns, it would be something else.  Which I can't really argue with.

Me, I'm tired of the whole clown thing already, but unfortunately Coleman says he expects the number of sightings to "increase until Halloween and diminish thereafter."  Part of my annoyance with the phenomenon stems from the fact that our school got put on lockout last week because of a threatening clown-related Instagram page.  The whole thing was completely exasperating, mostly because I spent the day answering clown-related questions instead of talking about aerobic cellular respiration, which (trust me on this) is way more interesting.  So far, there have been no actual clown sightings in our village, at least that I've heard of, but as Coleman correctly points out we still have almost three weeks till Halloween, so there's lots of time for them to make an appearance.

So it's all generated quite a stir.  The Twitter hashtag #IfISeeAClown has been trending for days, and the account @ClownSightingsOnTwitter has gained 335,000 followers in three weeks.  (Which made me say, and I quote, "What the fuck?", as I have struggled for three years to get 2,600 followers over @TalesOfWhoa.  Maybe I need to dress in a funny costume or put on enormous shoes or something.)

The police are taking the phenomenon seriously, in spite of the fact that there hasn't been a verified case of a clown actually attacking anyone.  Mostly they seem to just stand around looking sketchy.  (The clowns, not the police.)  That's enough, though, for Wayne County (New Jersey) Police Chief Laurence Martin.  "If anything is suspicious," Martin told Reuters, "anything, be it somebody verbally or physically acting menacing in any type of costume, notify the police right away."

Which, I suppose, makes sense.  Better safe than sorry.  So perhaps enlisting Loren Coleman is the right idea.  If in 13 years he's yet to find one Bigfoot, maybe he'll be equally adept at making sure no one sees any clowns.

Bee all, end all

That a lot of people would prefer it if the world was simple is hardly an earthshattering claim.  You see it all over, especially in political debates -- the single-cause fallacy, attributing complex phenomena to one ultimate origin.  The mess in the Middle East?  George W. Bush, of course.  The loss of jobs to outsourcing?  Thanks, Obama.  Yesterday's unusually hot afternoon?  Has to be climate change.

Oh, but wait.  Climate change doesn't actually exist.  Almost forgot there for a moment.

I suppose it's understandable enough.  Figuring out complicated cause-and-effect relationships is hard work.  Sometimes even with lots of data, the answers are unclear.  We humans don't tend to like uncertainty, especially when we hear that the experts themselves are uncertain.  Much easier to fall back on the simple explanation and stop thinking about it.

Which, I think, explains the reactions I saw to the Washington Post article entitled "Bees Were Just Added to the U.S. Endangered Species List for the First Time."  Most of the comments I saw fell into one of the following categories:

• We're ruining the Earth and we're all gonna die.
• Farms are going to fold for lack of pollinators and we're going to run out of food.
• It's what we deserve for spraying pesticides all over the place.
• Monsanto sucks.

Never mind that when you actually read the article, it turns out that the additions to the ESL were seven rare species of endemic yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii, and the probable reason for their decline is habitat loss and destruction of native wildflowers, not pesticides or the rest of it.  There are actually an estimated 20,000 species of bees worldwide, so assuming that all bees are going extinct because seven uncommon island endemics are endangered is a little like using the near-extinction of the California condor to conclude that pigeons and starlings are about to go the way of the dinosaurs.  (Actually, it's worse; according to the most recent tallies, there are a few more than 10,000 species of birds in the world, so there's actually twice the biodiversity in bee species than in bird species.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's not to say that there haven't been problems with declining numbers of more common bee species recently, but as I alluded to in the first paragraphs, it's not as simple as it sounds.  The still-unexplained colony collapse disorder has reduced the populations of western honeybees, the most common bee species in North America -- particularly among captive hives.  But the truth of the matter is, CCD seems to be declining itself, and honeybee numbers are on the rise in most places.

As far as wild bee species, the situation is even less clear.  A study by Insu Koh et al. last year suggested that in some places, wild bee populations had declined by 23%, but if you look at the study itself, you find that there is a huge amount of uncertainty in the data, mostly due to the difficulty of estimating bee populations in the wild.  The numbers Koh et al. used were developed from spatial-habitat models, using subjective information such as the "quality of nesting sites," and generated numbers that sounded alarming.  A review of the study in Science 2.0 was scathing:

How did they count wild bees when no one else has been able to do so? They didn't, which means it adds to the list of PNAS papers that can't possibly have been peer-reviewed.  The team instead identified forty-five land-use types from two federal land databases and asked fourteen hand-picked experts about each type of land and how suitable it was for providing wild bees with nesting and food resources.  They then averaged the experts' input and levels of certainty (no, really) and built a computer model that they think predicts the relative abundance of wild bees for every area of the contiguous United States, based on their quality for nesting and feeding from flowers.  Lastly, they validated their model against bee collections and field observations they also hand-picked.

In other words, they created an academic model that would get them fired from every single company in existence for being wildly suspect and based on too many assumptions. 

The authors then claim the decline they don't know is happening must be due to pesticides, global warming and farmers.

In fact, a study (this one peer-reviewed) in Nature last year suggested that populations of the dominant (and therefore most agriculturally relevant) species of wild bees are actually doing okay:

Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees.

So the bottom line is: colony collapse disorder still exists, but seems to be declining in frequency, and we're still not entirely sure what causes it (neonicotinoid pesticides are one possibility, but there are others).  The western honeybee, the most common and important pollinator species in North America, is actually increasing in numbers.  There are a few species (out of the 20,000) of bees that are threatened or endangered, some because of human activities, but the same is true for any taxon you pick.

In short: the situation is complicated, whether you like it or not.  It'd be convenient to have a clearly-outlined problem with a certain culprit and an obvious solution, but the world seldom works that way.  And as far as "Beemageddon" goes; there are a lot of other ways we could self-destruct that are far more likely than the loss of honeybees.

Maybe it's not justified to be an optimist, but at least be a pessimist about the right things.

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 still own three decks, actually, that I haven't been willing to part with), 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 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 were as simple as stemming from 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.

Voting for values

By now, everyone with any kind of access to news has heard about the latest horrid thing to come to light about Donald Trump -- that he condones, that he actually bragged about, sexual assault.  That he was entitled to that kind of behavior "because he's a star."

What you may not be aware of is that despite this, many (not all, as you'll see later) of Trump's supporters on the Religious Right have continued in their support of Donald Trump's candidacy.  Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council, said:

My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values, it is based upon shared concerns about issues such as: justices on the Supreme Court that ignore the constitution, America’s continued vulnerability to Islamic terrorists and the systematic attack on religious liberty that we’ve seen in the last 7 1/2 years.

Ralph Reed, of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, agreed:

Voters of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, create jobs, and oppose the Iran nuclear deal. Ten-year-old tapes of private conversation with a television talk show host rank very low on their hierarchy of concerns.

Let me make this plain.  These are men who are adamant in their protection of human embryos, but who would have as their commander-in-chief a man who would without batting an eyelash participate in sexual assault against our daughters, our sisters, our mothers.  These are men who are virulent in their condemnation of loving expression between two people of the same sex in a committed long-term relationship, but think that a man "grabbing a woman by the pussy" is no big deal.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some of Trump's supporters, not to mention Trump himself, have dismissed this as "lewd locker room talk," and state that "all men talk this way."  The second half is horseshit -- I know plenty of men who speak about women in the terms of the highest respect, and always treat them the same way.  And make no mistake about it; this is not lewd.  "Lewd" is talking to your guy friends about how your girlfriend performs in bed.  It's not nice, it's very likely a breach of privacy, and it's one more example of the objectification of women in our culture.

But that is not what this is.  This is condoning, and in fact suggesting that he has participated in, rape.  This is using your social dominance to commit assault upon a person in a weaker power position simply because you can.

Then there are the people who say, "Well, Bill Clinton did the same thing!"  Perhaps he did, but that is entirely irrelevant, for two reasons.  (1)  Did you condone Bill Clinton's behavior when he was accused of sexual impropriety?  As I recall, he was impeached because of it, to the raucous applause of nearly every Republican in the country.  (2)  Bill Clinton is not currently running for president.

And if you needed a deeper layer of bullshit, just today I've seen more than once posts that said, "If what Donald Trump said was so bad, why did Fifty Shades of Grey sell millions of copies?"  Which is a level of "I don't get it" that is truly mind-boggling.  So as before, let me explain this nice and slowly:

This is not about sex.  This about consent.  Fifty Shades of Grey, from all I've heard -- I haven't read it, and have no intention to -- was a poorly-written hash of a book.  But it was about sexual exploration between two consenting adults.  If you don't see the difference between the subject of this book and what Donald Trump is saying, you are either hopelessly stupid or willfully blind.

As I said earlier, however, there are people on the right who have refused to sell their souls to see this man in the Oval Office, and I find this tremendously heartening.  Just yesterday, an evangelical friend of mine posted an article in The Washington Post by Collin Hansen, editorial director for the Gospel Coalition, who had the following to say:

Trump can maintain nearly all his evangelical support in the voting booth despite unrepentant lying and cheating.  But these same leaders still insist on a traditional, biblical ethic when it comes to views on same-sex marriage in evangelical ministries... 

To the older evangelicals planning to vote for Trump:.. You can say we’re electing a commander in chief and not a Sunday school teacher.  You can say that God often raises up pagan leaders to deliver his people from their enemies.  But no one is fooled by your arguments. 

They can see you will apparently excuse anything in a Republican nominee...  And they will conclude that they don’t really need to listen to you when it comes to "traditional, biblical ethics."

Which is exactly correct.  Hansen and I may not agree on a lot, philosophically, but he at least is clear about what values and ethics are.  And he sees Trump for what he is -- a narcissistic compulsive liar who will do anything, say anything, to achieve whatever position of power he currently wants.

A lot of people don't like Hillary Clinton.  I'm fine with that.  She was far from my first choice, too.  But it is appalling that because of that you would cast your vote for a man who talks about sexual assault upon a stranger as blithely as most of us talk about what to have for dinner.  And this makes one thing crystal clear:

If you vote for Trump, you have no right to claim that you are a "values voter."

Skeptic's curriculum

Thanks to a forward-thinking principal about ten years ago, my high school developed an electives program based on the philosophy that there needs to be more than one path to graduation.  He said to the teachers, "If there's a topic you're passionate about and have always wanted to teach, now's your chance.  Put together a proposal for the school board.  If it flies, go for it!"

This was the genesis of the Critical Thinking class that it is my privilege to teach.  I was given the green light to develop the curriculum, and (if I can indulge in a moment of self-congratulation here) it has become one of the most popular electives in the school.

Critical thinking is a skill, and like every skill, it (1) doesn't necessarily come naturally, but (2) becomes easier the more you do it.  As humans, we come pre-programmed with a whole host of cognitive biases we have to learn to work around -- dart-thrower's bias (the tendency of people to pay more attention to outliers), a natural bent for magical thinking, the unfortunate likelihood of our memories being malleable, inaccurate, or outright false.  But with time and effort, you can learn some strategies for sifting fact from fiction, for detecting it if you're being hoodwinked or misled.

In other words, a skeptical approach can be taught.

I'm delighted to say that great strides are being taken in this area outside of my little rural school district.  Right now, a pilot program in Uganda, led by Sir Iain Chalmers of the Cochrane Foundation, has tested a new curriculum for critical thinking with respect to health and medicine with 15,000 grade-school children.  Chalmers is unequivocal about the program's intent; what he wants, he says, is for kids to be able to "detect bullshit when bullshit is being presented to them."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's an essential skill.  Here in the west we have such purveyors of health woo as Dr. Oz, Joel Wallach,  Joseph Michael Mercola, and Vani "The Food Babe" Hari persuading people that their food is contaminated by "chemicals," their prescription medications are poisoning them, and that diseases are caused by everything from not having enough "natural minerals" to disturbances in quantum vibrations.  Modern medical practitioners, they tell us, are being held hostage by "Big Pharma" to fool us all and make money hand over fist, and all the while we get sicker and sicker.

Yes, I know that in the industrialized world we have the highest human life expectancy the world has ever seen, and we've virtually eradicated dozens of infectious diseases using exactly the sort of "allopathic" medicine that Oz and his cronies rail against.  This isn't about fact; it's about being swung around by your fears and emotions.

But we're not the only place in the world that has this problem.  Central Africa, where Chalmers's trial is being run, is a hotbed of superstition, with people rejecting vaccines and antibiotics in favor of "herbal remedies" based on fear.  Quack cures are common -- for example, putting cow dung on burns.  Allen Nsangi, a researcher in Uganda who is working with Chalmers on the project, said that this practice is "almost the best-known treatment."

The Uganda project was the brainchild of Andy Oxman, research director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. "Working with policymakers made it clear most adults don’t have time to learn, and they have to unlearn a lot of stuff," Oxman said.  "I’m looking to the future. I think it’s too late for my generation... My hope is that these resources get used in curricula in schools around the world, and that we end up with the children ... who become science-literate citizens and who can participate in sensible discussion about policy and our health."

All of which I find tremendously encouraging.  (Not the part about my generation being a lost cause, because I don't really think that's true, honestly.)  If we can equip children with a good skeptical toolkit, they'll be much less likely to get taken advantage of -- not only in the realm of health, but in every other way.  These skills aren't limited to one discipline.  Once you've adopted a skeptical outlook, you'll find that you apply it to everything.

At least that's my hope.  It's certainly what I've seen in my own classes.  As one of my students told me not long ago, "I thought at first that it was impossible to do what you were asking us to do -- to read and listen to evaluate, not just to memorize and regurgitate.  But now I can't help myself.  When I read something, I think, 'Okay, how do I know this is true?  What's the evidence?  Could there be another explanation?'"

Which is it exactly.  Skepticism isn't cynicism; disbelieving everything out of hand is as lazy as gullibility.  But it's essential that we learn to consider what we're hearing rather than simply trusting that we're being told the truth.  As Satoshi Kanazawa put it: "There are only two legitimate criteria by which you may evaluate scientific ideas: logic and evidence."

Storm warning

I swear, the conspiracy theorists are getting faster these days.

In the past, it seemed like they'd at least wait until the dust settled from the latest catastrophe before claiming that it was (1) a hoax, (2) set up by the government as a "false flag," (3) engineered by the Illuminati, or (4) all of the above.  But now, thanks to the internet, we can conclusively state that light is the fastest thing in nature, but bullshit comes in at a close second.

This all comes up because we're already beginning to hear loony theories about Hurricane Matthew, which pummeled Haiti and Cuba, slammed the Bahamas, and is currently ripping its way up the Florida coast (with a potential afterwards for making a weird loop out in the Atlantic and hitting Florida for a second time).  Certainly its track has been odd -- I can't remember ever seeing a hurricane in the southern Caribbean make a ninety-degree right-hand turn the way this one did.

But there's a lot we don't know about steering currents, the prevailing winds that move storms around.  We're getting far better at predicting them -- which is why our ability to forecast storm tracks has improved dramatically in the past thirty years -- but it's still far from an exact science.

Hurricane Matthew on October 4, 2016 [image courtesy of NASA]

All of which leaves open a gap for the nutjobs to crawl through.

First, we have online media commentator Matt Drudge, who never misses an opportunity to use human suffering to hammer home his ultra-right-wing views, claiming that the people at NOAA are overplaying the severity of the hurricane to "make an exaggerated point on climate."  The ironic thing about this is that given the fact that we just had our umpteenth-in-a-row month of record-setting heat, I'd say the climate is making the point for itself.  But silly things like facts don't discourage Drudge, who is already saying Matthew is "a fizzle" and is not going to live up to the forecasters' dire predictions.

Then Rush Limbaugh jumped into the fray, claiming that not only is Matthew not going to live up to the expectations, but that hurricanes in general are a liberal conspiracy.  "It’s in the interest of the left to have destructive hurricanes because then they can blame it on climate change, which they can desperately continue trying to sell," he said on his radio show this week.

So apparently all the left has to do is to make up stuff, and it becomes real.  I bet the Democrats are going to be tickled that they have this much magical power.  All they have to do is wave a wand and say "Hurricanus manifestum!" and lo and behold, we have a storm.

Maybe they should try "Anncoulteria shutthefuckuppibus" and see what happens.  I know I'm willing to try it.

But I digress.

Anyhow, just because Drudge is an asshole and Limbaugh is a moron is not to say that Matthew hasn't been an odd storm.  Not only has it taken a weird path, as I mentioned earlier, but it strengthened really quickly, blowing up to category 4 only a day after it took its northward turn.  So it will come as no surprise that we're already hearing about how the odd features of Matthew are because it's...

*cue scary music*

... not an ordinary hurricane.

This alarming news comes from one Dr. Ethan Trowbridge, who is called a "leading climatologist" over at the website Someone's Bones despite his pronouncements making me wonder if he's been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  Trowbridge, who appears to be unclear on the process of hurricane formation, attributes Matthew's ferocity to the close approach of the planet Nibiru (I bet you thought we were done with the Nibiru horseshit.  Ha, fooled you, didn't I?).  According to Trowbridge, some bizarre and hitherto-unknown physics is allowing the mysterious tenth planet to stir up hurricanes:

Nibiru is producing latent heat on our planet.  And this has a positive correlation on weather patterns currently being experienced on Earth.  There are a lot of things the public is not being told, that can influence this storm’s trajectory. Many things factor into this... 

Nibiru is annihilating Arctic sea ice, and its proximity to our inner solar system is pulverizing and altering atmospheric conditions across the globe.  Greenland, for example, has lost much of its polar ice, causing the region to darken; the consequences allow solar radiation—from both the sun and Nibiru—to permeate the atmosphere, warm the Earth’s oceans, and destabilize the planet’s crust. 

These are dangerous times.  What happens in the Arctic impacts the world.  This is known as the ‘carbolic effect,’ a concept the USGS and its affiliates keep hidden from the public.  Greenland has reached its carbolic point, and now Nibiru’s presence is influencing weather all over the planet. Hurricane Matthew is the latest example, and Nibiru is the cause.

The author of the article tells us that Dr. Trowbridge is "now in exile," which I suppose is nicer than saying "was laughed out of the scientific establishment."

As if this wasn't bad enough, we then find out from an entirely different wackmobile that Hurricane Matthew is a "weaponized storm" meant to blast America for "rejecting globalist, totalitarian rule." The proponent of this theory (if I can dignify it with that term) is one Steven Quayle, who goes on to tell us that HAARP is involved (of course), the whole idea was dreamed up by the Illuminati (of course), and the fact of its being named "Matthew" is significant because of the "Biblical associations... and obvious prophetic implications."

Which makes perfect sense, given the well-known biblical books the "Gospel of Katrina" and the "Letter of St. Wilma to the Louisianians."

And this isn't even taking into account the fact that HAARP closed two years ago, and even if it was still operational and could do what Quayle claims it can do, it only seems to be able to generate hurricanes in areas that always get hit by hurricanes anyway.

Now if HAARP could generate a category-5 hurricane in, say, North Dakota, I'd be impressed.  But south Florida?  Not so much.

So the damn thing is still out there churning, and already the loonies are trying to tie it into their warped worldview.  Which, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising.  In any case, enough about the lunatic fringe; I'll just end with a wish for all of those in harm's way from this storm to remain safe -- whatever its ultimate cause was.

Gaming the brain

I think all of us can relate to the desire to have our brains work better.

We forget things.  We get distracted.  We let worry keep us from enjoying our days and from sleeping at night.  And that's not even counting the more serious problems that some of us have to deal with -- depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia... the list goes on and on.

So it's only to be expected that we're attracted to anything that promises to help us out in the Mental Faculties Department.  This has given rise to companies like Lumosity, which use a variety of brain-stimulating games to activate your neural circuitry -- and, the claim goes, trigger an overall improvement in your mental acuity.

The problem is, they don't work as advertised.  Playing a brain game improves one thing and one thing only -- your ability to play that game.  This was the finding of a study that was published last week in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, and describes work by seven researchers headed by Daniel J. Simons, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Disturbingly, not only did Simons's team find little in the way of positive results, they found poor experimental design in previous studies that had found such results.  Simons et al. write:

Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.  We also find that many of the published intervention studies had major shortcomings in design or analysis that preclude definitive conclusions about the efficacy of training, and that none of the cited studies conformed to all of the best practices we identify as essential to drawing clear conclusions about the benefits of brain training for everyday activities.

Simons agrees that it's a discouraging result.  "It’s disappointing that the evidence isn’t stronger," Simons said in an interview in Science Around Michigan.  "It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities, but the studies don’t show that on objectively measured real-world outcomes."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If that weren't bad enough, a couple of weeks ago there was an announcement from a researcher that another brain-improvement strategy -- "power poses" -- also shows little effect.  This one achieved wide acclaim when one of its chief proponents, social psychologist Amy Cuddy, spoke about it on one of the most watched TED talks -- at present, it's been viewed over 36 million times.  The idea is that adopting a body pose of strength and courage affects your hormone levels (especially testosterone and cortisol), which then feeds back and positively affects your mood and anxiety levels; likewise, adopting a submissive or weak pose generates the opposite effects. 

The problem is, attempts in January to replicate Cuddy's experiments failed to generate results, and (most damning of all) one of the co-authors of the original study, Dana Carney, has stated outright that "I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real."  She said the original study made use of the statistical fudging technique called "p-hacking," which (to oversimplify, but give you the general gist) amounts to running a variety of tests and only reporting on the ones that generated positive results.

All of which is not intended to stop you from playing brain games or doing power poses.  I still think there's something to be said for thinking positively, and if you approach life playfully and optimistically you're much more likely to enjoy it and (therefore) be successful at what you do.  (As my dad used to say, I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right.)

But as far as actual measurable results in cognition, memory, or hormone levels?  Apparently not.  Which is disappointing, but perhaps not surprising.  Our brains are tremendously complex organs, and it's always struck me as a little unlikely that powerful neural firing patterns could be so readily malleable.  As usual, the simplistic approach seems to be appealing... but wrong.