Letters from the home world

In choosing topics for this blog, I try not to have it simply devolve into taking random pot shots at crazies.  Loony ideas are a dime a dozen, and given the widespread access to computers that is now available, just about anyone who wants one can have a website.  Given these two facts, it's inevitable that wacky webpages have sprouted up like wildflowers on the fields of the internet.

When an alert student brought this one to my attention, however, I just couldn't help myself.  Entitled "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?", it represents one of the best examples I've ever seen of adding up a bunch of facts and obtaining the wrong answer.  The only ones who, in my experience, do this even better are the people who write for the Institute for Creation Research, and to be fair, they've had a lot longer to practice being completely batshit crazy, so it's only to be expected.

Anyhow, the contention of the "Did Humans Come From Another Planet?" people can be summed up by, "Yes.  Duh."  We are clearly aliens, and I'm not just talking about such dubiously human individuals as "Snooki."  All of us, the article claims, descend from an extraterrestrial race.  But how can we prove it?

Well, here's the argument, if I can dignify it with that term.

1)  Human babies are born completely unable to take care of themselves, and remain that way for a long time.  By comparison, other primate babies, despite similar gestation periods, develop much more rapidly.

2)  In a lower gravitational pull, humans could fall down without hurting themselves, "just like a cat or a dog."

3)  Humans have biological clocks, and in the absence of exposure to the external day/night cycle, they come unlocked from "real time" and become free-running.  So, clearly we came from a planet that had a different rotational period.

4)  Humans don't have much body hair.  At least most of us don't, although I do recall once going swimming and seeing a guy who had so much back hair that he could have singlehandedly given rise to 80% of the Bigfoot sightings in the eastern United States.

5)  Geneticists have found that all of humanity descends from a common ancestor approximately 350,000 years ago; but the first modern humans didn't exist until 100,000 years ago.  So... and this is a direct quote, that I swear I am not making up: "In what part of the universe was he [Homo sapiens] wandering for the remaining 250 thousand years?"

Now, take all of this, and add:

1)  Some nonsense about Sirius B and the Dogon tribe, including a bizarre contention that the Sun and Sirius once formed a double-star system, because this "doesn't contradict the laws of celestial mechanics;"

2)  The tired old "we only use 3% of our brains" contention;

3)  Adam and Eve;

and 4) the ancient Egyptians.

Mix well, and bake for one hour at 350 degrees.

The result, of course, is a lovely hash that contends that we must come from a planet with a mild climate where we could run around naked all the time, not to mention a lower gravitational pull so we could just sort of bounce when we fall down, plenty of natural food to eat, and "no geomagnetic storms."  I'm not sure why the last one is important, but it did remind me of all of the "cosmic storms" that the folks in Lost in Space used to run into.  And they also came across lots of weird, quasi-human aliens, while they were out there wandering around.  So there you are.

In any case, that's today's example of adding 2 + 2 and getting 439.  All of this just goes to show that even if you have access to a lot of factual information, not to mention the internet, you still need to know how to put that factual information together in order to get the right answer.  For that, you need science, not just a bunch of nutty beliefs, assumptions, and guesses.  So, as usual, science FTW.

Which, of course, applies to a good many more situations than just this one, but as I've already given a nod to the Institute for Creation Research, I'll just end here.

The power of prayer vs. the power of litigation

Today we have a rather ironic story out of Brazil.

Cabaret owner Tarcilia Bezerra, in the city of Fortaleza, wanted to expand his business.  He had experienced great success with his liquor-and-dancing-girls enterprise, and thought it was time to make the place bigger.  So he applied for, and got, a building permit, and construction began.

The local church, however, didn't think that was such a hot idea.  All of that skin showing and alcohol flowing was just sinful; the idea that the godly folks of Fortaleza had to put up with Bezerra crowing about how well he was doing, and making the place bigger and better, was just naughty in god's sight.  So the pastor (who was unnamed in the story) encouraged his flock to pray that god would intervene and smite Bezerra and his unholy Temple of Tawdriness.  Prayer sessions were organized morning, noon, and night for weeks, as the construction went on.

And then, only a week before the grand reopening, lightning struck the cabaret, destroying most of the roof and almost all of the new construction.

The pastor was overjoyed, as were the members of his congregation.  The pastor spoke in a sermon the following Sunday about this demonstration of "the great power of prayer."  The church members bragged all over town that their petitions to god had been heard, and that the lightning had been sent by god himself to strike down the wicked cabaret.

So Bezerra sued the church.

His lawsuit read, in part, that the church and its members "were responsible for the end of my building and my business, using divine intervention, direct or indirect, as the actions or means."

The pastor, of course, was appalled, but was forced to respond to the lawsuit.  His response, predictably, was to deny "all responsibility or any connection with the end of the building."

Now, wait a minute: isn't this backwards?  The cabaret owner is the one who believes that praying works, and the church pastor doesn't?

The judge in the case, which has yet to be decided in court, evidently agrees.  In his opening statement, he said, "I do not know how I'm going to decide this case, but one thing is evident in the records. Here we have an owner of a cabaret who firmly believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church declaring that prayers are worthless."

It all, somehow, makes me wonder how much folks really believe what they're saying.  I remember, during the Cold War, Americans praying for the destruction of the Soviet Union.  How would they have reacted if Moscow had been struck by a giant meteorite, causing millions of deaths?  People pray for political candidates, and sometimes sports teams, to win.  What if it actually happened, as per biblical miracles, with the losing candidate (or sports team) being eaten by a lion, contracting leprosy, or being "swallowed up by the earth?"  Each Sunday, there are thousands of prayers given asking for Jesus' return.  What if he just showed up, and said, "You rang, here I am!  Okay, leave behind your comfy house and all of your stuff.  Give everything away to the poor, like I told you to.  What, weren't you listening?"

Oh, I'm sure that there are some people who would be thrilled if this happened.  The members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example.  But I'll bet that most ordinary churchgoing folks would freak out so badly that they might never freak back in.

I suppose the take-home message, here, is "be careful what you pray for, because due to random chance, it might actually happen, and then you'll have to admit that you honestly didn't think anyone was listening."

Sleepless in upstate New York

Any regular reader of Skeptophilia who pays attention to the timestamp on my posts knows that I'm a bit of an insomniac.

I have suffered from chronic insomnia since I was a teenager.  It started with bizarre, vivid dreams, which often would wake me up (sometimes because I'd thrashed around so much I'd fallen out of bed).  Once awakened in the wee hours, it takes me long enough to fall back to sleep that I frequently just give up and get up.  Most of the conventional sleep aids haven't helped; the mild ones (like valerian and melatonin) are ineffective, and the stronger ones worry me because of their capacity to become addictive.  So mostly, I've just put up with it, living and working on a chronic sleep deficit, and trying to catch time to take catnaps whenever I can.

So, naturally, I was pretty intrigued when I ran across an article called "Life Without Sleep," by Jessa Gamble.  Her piece begins with a bit of a history of sleep deprivation, and includes the efforts by the military to come up with a way to combat fatigue in soldiers (most of which, by the way, were either ineffective in the long term or had dreadful side effects).  But my attention really perked up when she started talking about two potential therapies for chronic insomnia -- transcranial direct-current stimulation (TCDS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) -- which work not by getting you to sleep, but by reducing the amount of sleep you need.

TCDS and TMS both work on the same principle; using an external energy source to trigger neuronal firing in the brain.  Both of these treatment modalities are, pretty much, what they sound like.  TCDS involves placing electrodes on the scalp, and introducing a electric current into the brain; TMS places the head in a powerful magnetic field.  Both of them have been used, with results that I'd file in the "interesting" column, to treat depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia.  Both have no known long-term side effects, although TMS apparently has a low risk of causing seizure or fainting.  (For me, the main risk of TCDS is that I would spend the entire time worrying that I was participating in a reenactment of the climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.)

According to Gamble, both of these treatments show great promise in helping with insomnia.  About TCDS, she says:

After a half-hour session of the real treatment, subjects are energised, focused and keenly awake. They learn visual search skills at double the speed, and their subsequent sleep — as long as it does not fall directly after the stimulation session — is more consolidated, with briefer waking periods and longer deep-sleep sessions.

TMS apparently has shown similar results:

Using a slightly different technique — transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which directly causes neurons to fire — neuroscientists at Duke University have been able to induce slow-wave oscillations, the once-per-second ripples of brain activity that we see in deep sleep. Targeting a central region at the top of the scalp, slow-frequency pulses reach the neural area where slow-wave sleep is generated, after which it propagates to the rest of the brain...  TMS devices might be able to launch us straight into deep sleep at the flip of a switch. Full control of our sleep cycles could maximise time spent in slow-wave sleep and REM, ensuring full physical and mental benefits while cutting sleep time in half. Your four hours of sleep could feel like someone else’s eight. Imagine being able to read an extra book every week — the time adds up quickly.

What I'm imagining, at the moment, is not feeling chronically exhausted, and not having to worry about falling asleep at the wheel during my ten-minute drive home from work (a fear I deal with on more days than I'd like to admit).  I imagine not constantly wondering when I'm going to have time to take a nap so I can actually be wide awake after eight o'clock at night.

It's a happy picture.

Of course, the worrywart side of me wonders what the long-term effects of this might be.  We still understand very little about why animals need sleep, and less still about why they dream.  Messing about with a physiological system we don't fully comprehend seems rather foolhardy.  On the other hand, the tests that have been done so far support the contention that TCDS and TMS are relatively safe, are non-invasive, and show great promise in dealing with chronic insomnia, a condition which according to the National Sleep Foundation plagues 10-15% of adults.

I'd volunteer to give it a try, even given the iffy status of the risks.

But right now, I think I'd better wrap this up, because the coffee's done brewing, and given how little sleep I got last night,  I could sure use a cup or two.  Or five.

Breaking news: scientists once again don't discover Atlantis

Geology buffs probably heard about the announcement last week of the discovery off the coast of Brazil of a large slab of granite.  It's a geological anomaly; granite doesn't form in the deep ocean.  It's associated with silica-rich magma that cooled slowly, underground.  Granite forms the most abundant "basement rock" of continents, and most of it is very, very old.  This piece seems to have been left behind as Africa and South America split when the Atlantic Ocean opened 160 million years ago, and was completely covered with water ten million years ago.

So far, a story that would be of interest only to those intrigued by oddities of plate tectonics.  So, of course, the media can't report it that way.  Let's see... block of rock off the coast of South America, once above water, now not...

I know!  Let's report that the scientists have discovered Atlantis!

Don't believe me?  Check out how HuffPost's Meredith Bennett-Smith trashed this story, opening with the following highly scientific paragraph:

Nearly 2,600 years after Greek philosopher Plato wrote about the fabled metropolis of Atlantis, vanished forever beneath the sea, a Japanese-manned submersible has discovered rock structures that may be evidence of a continent that similarly disappeared beneath the Atlantic Ocean many, many years ago.

Yes, Ms. Bennett-Smith, 2,600 years and ten million years are both many, many years.  How very astute of you.  But let me clarify something for you: this is not Atlantis.  I know this for sure, because Atlantis was fictional.

RT went even further, heading their article with the following image:

Two of the scientists, Shinichi Kawakami and Roberto Ventura Santos, put fuel on the fire by referring to the block of rock as "Atlantis" when they spoke to reporters.  Santos evidently felt some trepidation about this (which he should have), and added, "We speak of Atlantis more in terms of symbolism.  Obviously, we don’t expect to find a lost city in the middle of the Atlantic."

Really, Dr. Santos?  Then don't refer to the damn thing as Atlantis.

So, of course, now all of the woo-woos are having multiple orgasms over this "scientific proof" that Atlantis existed, as advertised, complete with cities and people and everything else described in Plato.  By this morning, we have ha-ha-we-told-you-so articles appearing in The Truthseeker,  The Controversial Files, Before It's News, The Hollow Earth Insider, and Godlike Productions, not to mention hundreds of theoretically more reliable news sources.  Although a handful of them mentioned Santos' wishy-washy disclaimer, most of them burbled on and on about Plato and the fabled island of the philosopher-kings, because that's clearly more valid than the actual science.

Let's get this straight.  Ten million years ago, when the last bit of this continent went beneath the Atlantic Ocean, our nearest ancestors were chimp-like anthropoid apes somewhere in Africa.  The earliest Australopithecenes didn't evolve until about four million years ago, and considering their brainpower, I'm doubtful that even they were "philosopher-kings."  And by that time, this block of continental granite had already been sunk for six million years.

This isn't Atlantis.  Atlantis never existed.  It's a folk tale, a myth, a legend with no basis whatsoever in fact.

Of course, I don't expect this to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  Especially because they have pictures.

Okay, I'll stop now, because my forehead hurts from all of the headdesks I did while researching this post.  I've got to chill out a little, because if I keep digging into this stuff I'll run across someone who claims that they found Shangri-La in Nepal and the remains of Minas Tirith in Bulgaria, and at that point I'll just take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

A shot in the arm

The website of the World Health Organization states it this way: "Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions and prevents between 2 and 3 million deaths every year."  UNICEF places the lives saved at closer to 9 million, and states that "vaccines have brought seven major human diseases under some degree of control - smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, whooping cough, polio, and measles."

The members of my family understand the impact vaccination has had all too well.  My grandfather's only full sister, and his eldest half-sister, died five days apart of measles at the ages of 22 and 17; and my mother had polio as a child, stunting the growth in one leg and leaving her with a permanent limp.  (Still, my mom was one of the lucky ones; less fortunate polio survivors ended up partially paralyzed and spent the rest of their lives in an iron lung.)

Vaccination, however, has been increasingly under attack, with spurious claims linking vaccines to everything from autism to allergies.  This, despite the fact that repeated controlled studies have found vaccines to be safe and effective, and despite the "studies" linking vaccines to negative health effects having been roundly discredited.

Even with all of this, there's still a scare campaign going on that "Big Pharma" is secretly trying to kill you every time you get a shot.  Just last year, we saw Stephanie Messenger's book Melanie's Marvelous Measles published, and it's still available on Amazon despite 147 (out of 200) one-star reviews:

In it, we get to read about little Melanie, who is just delighted to get measles so she can "heal naturally."  The book, Messenger says, "was written to educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully."  Even worse is The Mother magazine, which in its March/April issue had an article that stated that "Measles will only develop in a body that is low on vitamin A," and suggests eating more carrots as a preventative.  We are also told that "people don't die of measles -- they die of medical mismanagement of the fever."

Too bad my Aunt Anne and Aunt Emelie didn't know about all this, isn't it?

Unfortunately, though, the anti-vaxxer nonsense has caught on, based in equal parts on fear, a poor understanding of science, a sneaking sense of suspicion about the ethics of medical/pharmaceutical corporations, and a large dose of the naturalistic fallacy.  Most recently, the whole issue has hit Canada, where just yesterday the British Columbia Medical Journal released, in its May issue, an article stating that Health Canada has just granted license to "homeopathic vaccines" called "nosodes" -- and yes, they are the usual homeopathy bullshit, made from substances diluted past Avogadro's limit, which are therefore pure water.  Nevertheless, Health Canada saw fit to give their stamp of approval to "nosodes" for influenza, measles, pertussis, and polio, despite its stated mission to "(test) products for safety and efficacy before allowing them to enter the market."

So now, we don't just have people avoiding vaccines, we have them taking fake vaccines.

And we're beginning to see the effects of this foolishness.  Wales is still recovering from a measles outbreak that sickened 700 people last month, resulting in at least one death.  Two days ago, the BBC ran a story that states that "Levels of vaccination have been too low in some countries, particularly in rich western European nations...  Experts said it was not too late to hit the target, but 'extraordinary' effort was needed."  The WHO and other medical oversight groups are concerned that in many places, we have dropped below the levels needed for herd immunity, the number of immune individuals needed in a population to prevent the disease from catching hold.  Once that happens, epidemiologists warn, an epidemic is almost certain to occur.

It's hard to combat all of this.  Prominent voices like Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and money sowing suspicion and drawing false correlations, and once you've activated the fear module in people's minds it's almost impossible to repair the damage.  Doctors are said to be hand-in-glove with corporate interests; skeptics like me are seen as shills or dupes.  If the government itself forces its citizens' choices -- compulsory vaccination programs for school attendance, for example -- it is claimed to be infringing on rights.  When epidemics occur, as in Wales this year, it causes a brief flurry of activity, but once the survivors recover, most people forget about it.  The fear remains that the anti-vaxxers are right -- perhaps the epidemic would have occurred anyway, even if everyone had been vaccinated, and then maybe there would have been all of these cases of autism to contend with.

Here, have a carrot.

I wish I had a good suggestion regarding what to do about all of this.  While I'm all for personal freedom, I really wish governments would step in and say, "Look, I'm sorry you have fallen for pseudoscientific superstition.  That's unfortunate for you.  Roll up your sleeve, please."  If this happened in enough places, maybe we could eradicate measles and polio, the way we eradicated smallpox in 1980.  While getting rid of diseases like the flu, which affect other mammals as well as humans, is unlikely, we could certainly get further along in stopping or slowing down epidemics.

Think of the human suffering this would eliminate, and the lives it would save.

Maybe it's time to apply some science and rationality, here, and not succumb to fear tactics, fallacious thinking, specious claims, and the "research" of outright frauds.  Wouldn't that be marvelous?

Sylvia Browne and the house of cards

Now, first of all, let me state up front that I know that science isn't perfect.

Scientists, after all, are only human.  They sometimes make mistakes, misinterpret data, come to the wrong conclusions.  A (fortunately) small number of them, for a variety of reasons, are dishonest and falsify results.

But science, as a whole, is pretty damn good at self-correcting.  The whole edifice is set up to facilitate it.  Even after a paper has run the gauntlet of peer review and has been published, it's read and questioned by researchers in the same field.  This makes it really tough to get away with "bad science" -- the outright frauds seem mostly to get caught in short order, and the resulting hue and cry by their colleagues makes it nearly certain they'll never receive a grant again.  Consider Hisashi Moriguchi, the Japanese stem-cell researcher who was discredited last year because of irregularities in his research protocol and reporting of results.  Consider Anil Potti, medical researcher for Duke University, fired in 2010 for padding his resumé and falsifying data.  Most famous, consider Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, who destroyed their own careers in 1989 with false claims to have discovered "cold fusion."

Not pleasant stories, to be sure.  It's never fun to watch someone sow the seeds of his or her own downfall.   But in losing grant money, research and publication opportunities, and status, we have at least to admit that justice was served.

Now, let's turn to the case of Sylvia Browne.

Browne, as you probably know, is a self-professed psychic.  She's also filthy rich.  Browne charges $700 for a half-hour psychic reading on the phone, and has a waiting list that extends for years.  She does her dog-and-pony show for packed houses, selling tickets for over a hundred dollars each.  Along the way, she has told thousands of people details about their lives, and given them information about their dead relatives, giving some people hope... and destroying the hopes of others.

In the latter category was Louwanna Miller, who was told on a talk show in 2004 that her kidnapped daughter, Amanda Berry, was dead.  "I see her in water... She's not alive, honey," were Browne's exact words.  Miller was devastated, as you might expect -- and died, heartbroken, in 2006, never knowing that her daughter was still alive.  Most of you, I'm sure, have heard by now about the spectacular escape of Berry and two others, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, from the clutches of three brothers in Cleveland who had held the three girls captive for ten years.

Browne's only response?  She took down her Facebook page.

What's more interesting, however, is the response from other psychics.  So far it has been: silence.  This morning I checked websites and blogs that give publicity to these charlatans, and no one is even mentioning Browne's name.

• The latest story at Unexplained Mysteries: "New Bird Flu Strains Created In Lab."
• At Ghosts and Ghouls: "Spirits at Bobby Mackey's Music World."
• At Phantoms and Monsters: "Alien Agenda: Implants, Tumors, and Transmitted Diseases."
• At Paranormal Phenomena:  "Mysterious Orbs, Sasquatch Language, Humanoid Creature."
• At Unknown Country:  "Death Researcher Challenging Science on Resurrection and the Soul."
• At Paranormal News: "Mind Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA."
• At National Paranormal Association:  "400 People on 1 Ghost Hunt, and Credibility Goes Out the Window."
• At San Diego Paranormal Research:  "Former Senator Mike Gravel and a Panel of Experts Says White House Suppressing Evidence of ETs."

And so forth and so on.

C'mon, psychics, why no mention of Browne?  Could it be that you're afraid that stating outright that she's a fraud will call into question the whole filthy lucrative game you're all playing?

What Browne did is reprehensible.  She is a swindler, a con artist, a master cold reader who takes money from people so vulnerable from grief or loneliness that they do not have the wherewithal to see what she's up to.  But by their response -- or lack thereof -- the rest of the psychic world is equally culpable.  Even if you have no intention to retract your own claims of ESP, you should call out Sylvia Browne for having failed, spectacularly, and at least lay claim to a few square inches of honor and fair play.

But I'm not expecting it to happen.  It's highly unlikely that anyone living in this fragile house of cards will do anything that might lead to its collapse.  And because of this, I'll make a prediction of the future of my own.

After a quiet period in which she lays low, Sylvia Browne's career, unlike that of the fallen scientists, will be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes.  She will croak her phony prophecies to packed auditoriums once more.  The cash will start to flow in again.  And she and the other self-proclaimed psychics -- James van Praagh, Psychic Sally Morgan, Derek Acorah, Ingo Swann -- will continue to defraud people, world without end, amen.

The "honey trap," perception, and our sense of self

I think the human brain is fascinating.  Not a surprising statement, I suppose, coming from someone who teaches (amongst other things) an introductory neurology course.  What intrigues me most, though, is the way all of this rock-solid sense of self we all have -- the sum of our perceptions, attitudes, experiences, and memories -- is the result of a bunch of chemicals jittering around in 1.3 kilograms of skull-glop, and an electrical output that would only be sufficient to illuminate a twenty-watt light bulb.

And if that's not humbling enough, our personalities may not be as rock-solid as all that.  If something changes the chemistry or the pattern of electrical firings in your brain, who you are and what you experience changes.  As my long-ago physiology professor said, "In a very real way, your brain is the only sensory organ you have.  If your brain gets tricked, that is what you think you've seen, or heard, or felt."

It works all the way up to the level of our emotions and personality, too -- realms of the human experience that are supposed to be somehow "different."  Okay, we can accept it when a drug makes you hallucinate; that's just the brain's neural firings being altered.  But our attitudes, biases, preferences, emotional reactions -- no, that's something else entirely.  Those are all part of this "me" that is independent of the "meat machine" in my skull, this spiritual entity that is separate from mere biochemistry, a personal being that can well be imagined going on after the animal part dies.

Right?

Eight scientists in the Department of Human Environment Studies at Kyushu University in Japan have just punched another hole in this belief, with a paper that appeared in Nature last week entitled, "Minocycline, a microglial inhibitor, reduces 'honey trap' risk in human economic exchange."  In this study, Motoki Watabe et al. had observed that minocycline, a tetracycline-derivative antibiotic, had not only been useful for fighting infections but had led to improvement in psychological disorders in patients who were taking it.  In particular, taking minocycline seemed to improve patient's capacity for "sober decision-making."  So the group at Kyushu University decided to see if they could pinpoint what, exactly, was changing in the brain of a person on minocycline.

The results were, to say the least, eye-opening.

It's long been known that human males tend to trust physically attractive females, sometimes leading to their betrayal -- a tendency called the "honey trap" that has been used as a plot twist in hundreds of thrillers, all the way back to Milady Winter and d'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers.

Well, the "honey trap" response vanishes in men on minocycline.

The men in the experiment were split into two groups -- one group got the antibiotic, the others a placebo.  None knew which they'd gotten:

In this experiment, 98 healthy males played a trust game with 8 photographed young females after a 4-day oral treatment course of either minocycline or placebo. Looking at a picture showing a female's face, male players decided how much out of 1300 yen (approximately 13 USD) they would give to each female. Males then evaluated how trustworthy each female was and how physically attractive she was using a 11-point Likert Scale (0: Not at all – 10: Perfectly so). Of note, all of the photographed females had actually decided, in advance, to choose ‘betray’ against the male players. Therefore, male participants played with untrustworthy female partners, but were unaware of the deception.

Overwhelmingly, the men who were in the control group showed a strong correlation between rating a woman as highly attractive and being trustworthy; the group on minocycline showed no such correlation.  They recognized attractiveness, ranking some photographs as more attractive than others; but they ranked all of the women as about equal in trustworthiness.

A much more reasonable response, given that they all were strangers!

Watabe et al. suggested that this indicates a role in cognition for the microglia -- cells that heretofore were thought mostly to mediate the brain's immune defense system and blood/brain barrier, and which are inhibited by minocycline.  Me, I'm more intrigued by the larger issue, that who we are, the central core of our personalities, might be far more dependent on minor changes in brain chemistry than most of us are comfortable admitting.

It's also why I have a hard time accepting the idea that the visions experienced by people on dimethyltryptamine (DMT) actually mean anything, in the spiritual sense.  People on DMT report overwhelming hallucinations that were "spiritually transforming," in which they had the sense of being connected with "higher mind" -- i.e., with god.  Terrence McKenna, one of the primary exponents of the use of this drug for inducing spiritual experiences, describes one of his trips this way:

(Y)ou, when you're shown one of these things, a single one of them, you look at it an you know, without a shadow of a doubt, in the moment of looking at this thing, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad.  It's like something from another dimension.  It's like an artifact from a flying saucer. It's like something falling out of the mind of God - such objects DO not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it.  [Source]

My problem with all of this is not some kind of moralistic "don't do that stuff to your body," nor is it even a concern for the side effects; it's more that the whole thing strikes me as kind of... silly.  If you throw a monkey wrench into your neurotransmitters, of course you're going to see weird shit.  Acting as if what you're seeing has some sort of external reality seems to me to be a major stretch, landing us right into the weird world of such wingnuts as Carlos Castañeda with his datura root and magic mushrooms as a means of contacting the "ally."

I know, however, that we're also getting perilously close to a topic I touched briefly on a few weeks ago, namely, how we can prove that anything outside our experiences is real.  And I've no desire to skate out onto that philosophical thin ice once again.  But I do think that the scientists in Japan have given yet another blow to our sense of having some kind of permanent external "self" that is independent of our biology.  If all it takes is an antibiotic tablet to change who we trust, it seems that we are, on a fundamental level, what our brain chemistry is at the moment -- and not very much else.