There’s a very strong likelihood that if you’re reading this you’re either:

a) a rational skeptic

b) a trojan spiritualist

c) a fan of Derren Brown

Good news then that all three will find something to enjoy in The Debunking Handbook, an Ebook that is free to download courtesy of skepticalscience.com, a website that focuses primarily on explaining what peer-reviewed science has to say about global warming.

They describe it thus:

“Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there’s no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths.

The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation.”

Feel free to go grab your copy of The Debunking Handbook and then come back here to let us know what you think. It shouldn’t take you long, it’s only seven pages long.

Souce: Lifehacker

(Thanks to DG for the scoop)

“1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.

True, we have some brain reserves. Autopsy studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they’re highly motivated, suggesting that we don’t always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity.

2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do. People forget important details and add incorrect ones, with no awareness that they’re recreating a muddled scene in their minds rather than calling up a perfect, photographic reproduction.”

Read the rest at smithsonianmag (Thanks Annette)

I thought I would pen a few words about the high-profile test offered to Sally Morgan by Simon Singh, Chris French and the Merseyside Skeptics tomorrow Monday. It looks like Sally has declined to take part, but their offer is open to conduct a fair test or at least discuss the test with her to make sure both they and her are happy with it.

Simon Singh, along with other sceptics, has had concerns about Sally and published them here on his blog. I add, as does he, that I am not saying that Sally is a fake or a fraud. I’d really like to think that she’s not, but reserve all judgement. I don’t know her and have never seen her show, on TV or on stage. Even if I had, my opinion about her would mean very little, and I’m sure she could give a flying doughnut about what I had to say. Really the only worthwhile point is whether claims such as Sally’s stand up to testing, not what I or any other individual with our own inevitable prejudices happens to think.

Until recently, I thought I had never met her, but I have since heard rather excitingly that I may have filmed an unused sequence with Sally once at her home. If I did, it would have been for one of those old Mind Control specials ten or so years ago. I have my team looking into that to see if we ever did and if they can dig it out. Certainly we filmed with one lady psychic at her house, where we each gave each other a reading, so perhaps that was it.

Sally has recently received mixed media attention following a phone call to a radio station made by a lady who had attended her show in Dublin, who said she heard what sounded like verbal cues being given to the medium on stage. Apparently she heard phrases like ‘Dave – bad back’ being whispered from the lighting booth at the back of the auditorium a few seconds before Sally repeated those words on stage, raising the strong suspicion in this woman’s mind that Sally was using an earpiece. If this were true, it would follow that the assistant in the booth had most likely picked up information in the foyer where people were openly discussing what they were hoping to hear that night. The phone call can be heard here and is worth listening to in full. Sally has since denied the insinuations, saying that it was simply lighting technicians chatting, although to me this doesn’t seem to answer the question of why she was delivering lines moments after they were heard coming from the booth.

Frustratingly for Sally, her explanation may of course be fair. To be honest, if I were a fake psychic and wanted to use an earpiece to receive my cues, I wouldn’t put my assistant in the lighting booth where in-house staff would normally work. There would be the advantage of receiving visual cues, but my preference would be to tuck him away safely backstage somewhere. Unless, that is, I was supplying all the crew for the show, in which case it wouldn’t be an issue. Sally may well supply all her crew, I have no idea. (Note: Thanks ‘Chez’, I hear the theatre in question would have indeed required Sally to bring all her own crew) But I have heard from in-house theatre crews who have hosted big-name psychic shows that they were surprised to see the shows follow a fairly tight structure and an oddly similar script every night: therefore another possible explanation could be that the whispering was indeed cheekiness from the lighting technicians who were just pre-empting what they knew was coming next, having seen the show so many times. Who knows. Maybe both they and Sally are genuinely psychic and they should all have their own shows.

Point is, this could be a totally innocent incident which has gotten out of hand. Once you’re aware of the huge amount of fraudulence committed in the name of mediumship, it’s hard not to smirk when someone seems to have been caught out. If you watched ‘Miracles For Sale’, you may remember the ‘healer’ Peter Popoff getting caught out rather splendidly with an earpiece by James Randi: this is astonishing footage. Irrespective of whether to not Sally was using the earpiece, she has made a name for herself and made a lucrative business from the seemingly astonishing business of connecting people with their loved ones, so some scrutiny is important. If a psychic were simply a doctor – and arguably mediums and psychics involve themselves with their clients in a similarly personal and delicate way – then you’d want to know that he or she had passed her medical exams. We even like to check the credentials of a plumber. Surely the bigger and more amazing the claims being made, the more solid the evidence needs to be for them to hold up, and the more important that evidence is.

Sally may be a perfectly innocent victim of unfortunate tar-brushing. If she is a real stage psychic, she finds herself in bad company. Doris Stokes, her antecedent that most immediately springs to mind, has, since herself passing over to the Happy Summerland, been exposed on a number of counts. She would enter a town with her sell-out show to a flurry of mail from desperate people giving her all the information she’d need for a full evening show. She would, I heard, give readings during the day for people, and then invite them to the show in the evening and feed back, from the stage, the information she’d learnt from them during the day. A woman I once knew who had lost her son in a drowning accident was asked to come along to an event given by  Stokes and receive a message from the spirit of her child, and was furious to have her tragedy exploited and twisted when the the rosy-cheeked, grandmotherly medium simply trotted out the details of the death as reported in the local newspaper and used this woman as a sure-fire hit after a couple of dud readings. Other mediums, very much alive and well, are watched nightly by in-house stage crews who then delight in passing on their apparent modi operandi when I turn up with my show. One very big name psychic was caught ushering in a couple of stooges through a side entrance - self-evidently, I was told, his mother and a friend of hers – who then became his most enthusiastic audience members during the show.

Hence it would be a very good idea to test a psychic who claims to be real and to not be like all those nasty, manipulative frauds, who prey on the guaranteed paying audiences of vulnerable people who know no better. But who will call for such testing? Not the audiences. Ironically, they’re the last to insist that we check that the medium on stage before them is real, and not self-deluded or lying through her teeth. And why should they? Who would risk denying oneself profound comfort? Instead, to them, their psychic is the real one, those others are the fakes, and they know that because… because they just know it. Because they’ve seen the show and they think the show is the evidence. They most likely are unaware of the self-working technique of Cold Reading which can allow anyone with little sense of morality to get up on stage and carry off a perfectly convincing psychic show. Here’s a page where you can learn how to be a fake psychic yourself – its one of the oldest businesses in the world. Add some benign, trustworthy charisma, a bit of ‘hot’ reading (where you have some information on your punters) and some decent PR,  and you have got yourself a world class show. Many people might think you’re a fake, but you will be guaranteed to sell-out theatres across the country with people who will defend you to the grave and goodness me, it’s good business. In fact I sometimes wonder if the main reason why people would rather believe a psychic is genuine might be because the implications of it being a lie – of that person, for reasons of ego and renumeration, happily getting up on stage and trampling over the lives of people who know no better – is so ugly that it’s preferable to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So I hope Sally isn’t like those people. And there’s no way of knowing without a test. For those who say they’ve seen her and have all the proof they need, then that’s great for them, but her show is not the test, it’s the very thing we’d need to test. If the magician David Copperfield went mad and claimed to really be sawing a woman in half, and you wanted to see if he was just using trickery, it would make no sense to say ‘I know he’s real, I’ve seen the show and he really saws that woman in half’. Instead you’d have to take what he does out of a show environment and see if he can still do it when other explanations have been removed. For example, if on stage the woman has to be first placed in a special box or on a special table, can he do it without the box and on any table? If not then maybe it’s something to do with the box or the table. Can he do it with any woman? With any blades? You get the idea. We’d have to put aside our emotions (the ones that want us to believe he’s real or fake regardless of testing) and base our new beliefs on the outcome of the test. Of course in this imaginary scenario where he is claiming to have real magic powers, Copperfield would know he’d never stand up to this sort of examination and would most do anything to decline the test.

You’d think psychics would be very eager to prove they can really do it. There’s a million dollar prize fund to be won by any psychic who can show under reasonable and controlled conditions (which they can decide upon in conjunction with the scientists) that what they do is real. This is money that could be kept or given to charity of course, not to mention the likelihood of also receiving a Nobel prize and the ability to give the world vital new knowledge that would change us forever. Imagine that! If I woke up to find that I could really do it, I’d be a selfish and odd creature to offer it only to TV viewers and theatre audiences. I’d be out there, doing every test I could until the scientific establishment sat up and listened. You’d be forgiven for doubting my sincerity if I said I had better things to do.

Sally Morgan has said she does have better things to do, which may be true, but if she’s real it’s a shame to deny the world the first psychic to have been able to prove herself. Sadly no psychic or medium to this point has ever been able to do so. The test is based on asking her to reproduce the phenomena she produces in her show, but importantly the scientists have invited her to discuss the test if she feels any aspect of it should be changed. Some entertaining correspondence on the subject between her lawyer and Simon Singh can be read here.

I imagine Sally will decline the test, and people will draw their own conclusions. I can’t imagine this will make any difference to her fan base or indeed to her. She may be seen by that minority as somehow gloriously ‘rising above’ the test and the ‘haters’ and the ‘sceptics’. Usually when people say this they mean ‘cynics’ rather than ‘sceptics’ as the former is negative and the latter is neutral. A sceptic reserves judgement until the evidence is in. A sceptic or a scientist should never be a ‘hater’ – he or she just feels that a suitable test is a way of finding truth rather than unreliable anecdote or a stage show where any cheating could be going on. The pre-determined negative views of cynics and ‘haters’, meanwhile, are as blind and irrelevant to the discussion as those of ardent, true-believing fans.

Another term that gets abused is ‘open-minded’. There’s being open-minded and there’s being so open minded that your brain falls out. Ian Rowland, the author of ‘The Full Facts Book of Cold-Reading’ (an excellent guide on faking these skills) gives an example. Suppose you are a chef, cooking soup for two hundred diners. You say to yourself ‘Well, I know if I put arsenic in this soup it’ll kill everyone. But hey! Gotta be open-minded!’ And you go ahead and add the deadly metalloid to the goats’ cheese crostini and float it atop the watercress and mint broth. Are you being open-minded or… just ignoring important information? In life we can only work with the best information we have to go on. We know that poison kills people so we don’t add it to our soups. We know that gravity works so we don’t jump out of windows unless we want to kiss a cruel world goodbye. Likewise when we know that psychic ability can be very easily faked – particularly on stage where the size of the audience can help enormously – it is not ‘open-minded’ to ignore that fact and keep believing without real evidence. Sadly, however, the methods of the fraudsters are not so well-known, which is why I spend some of my time trying to bring them out into the open. It is not being ‘closed-minded’ to want to put these people to the test or be wary of a psychic’s claims. It’s the best use of available knowledge in a world where we know how it can be faked and where vulnerable people are being asked to pay for the promise of something supernatural, with no firm evidence to back it up.

Most of you, as readers of this blog, will know all of this of course. Others won’t, and will just feel annoyance towards the scientists offering the test (‘Who the hell are you to test our Sally? Leave her alone, it’s nothing to do with you’). So it’s always worth saying why it’s really important to check carefully when these sorts of claims are being made. Meanwhile, brace yourselves: Sally may decide to show the world tomorrow that she can really do it, and the course of human knowledge will take a sudden swerve to the left. We can look forward to her and other verified psychics working with governments and scientists and finally, perhaps, these proven individuals can engage with the forces of the departed in order to advance our race, help us find peace amongst ourselves and understand the nature of eternity, rather than merely pass on bland condolences or upsetting revelations from the Other Side.

Or maybe she’ll have better things to do.

D.

The article below was published on the Fiji Times:

The latest photo shoots of young TV and music stars reveal some sort of obsession with Mickey Mouse accessories. And there’s definitely no danger of running out of these pictures anytime soon. Tons of them appear in the media every week.

Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” video clip feature scenes where they’re wearing Mickey Mouse hats, sunglasses and minnie mouse trademark lips.

Selena Gomez’s “Kiss and Tell” album cover features her with Minnie Mouse lips.

It has been claimed that Mickey Mouse ears or designs often occultly refer to mind control.

According to Wikipedia encyclopedia, The Mickey Mouse Club is an American variety television show that began in 1955, produced by Walt Disney Productions and televised by the ABC, featuring a regular but ever-changing cast of teenage performers. The Mickey Mouse Club was created by Walt Disney. The series has been revived, reformatted and reimagined several times since its initial 1955-1959 run on ABC.

Walter “Walt” Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century.

Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and has annual revenues of approximately USD $35 billion.

Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world’s most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won twenty-two Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Walt Disney died in on December 15, 1966.

According to several researchers, Disney was part of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program: Its properties were used for mind-control experiments and many of its productions deliberately contained mind-control triggers and symbolism.

You can continue reading at the Fiji Times and, by all means, comment below!

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone.

Nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why. The only clues to its origin are on a nearby plaque on the ground—which gives the dimensions and explains a series of intricate notches and holes that correspond to the movements of the sun and stars—and the “guides”, written in many different languages on each side, instruct a future society on how to conduct itself.

The story of the stones is just as strange as the monument itself. It’s since been covered in mystery and controversy. Books have been written, TV and press have swarmed to it and conspiracy theorists have pulled a mass of ideas for it’s use, from UFO landing sites to satanic cults ready to take over the world.

Wired magazine’s fascinating article writes:

The astrological specifications for the Guidestones were so complex that Fendley had to retain the services of an astronomer from the University of Georgia to help implement the design. The four outer stones were to be oriented based on the limits of the sun’s yearly migration. The center column needed two precisely calibrated features: a hole through which the North Star would be visible at all times, and a slot that was to align with the position of the rising sun during the solstices and equinoxes. The principal component of the capstone was a 7\8-inch aperture through which a beam of sunlight would pass at noon each day, shining on the center stone to indicate the day of the year.

The main feature of the monument, though, would be the 10 dictates carved into both faces of the outer stones, in eight languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. A mission statement of sorts (LET THESE BE GUIDESTONES TO AN AGE OF REASON) was also to be engraved on the sides of the capstone in Egyptian hieroglyphics, classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Babylonian cuneiform. The United Nations provided some of the translations (including those for the dead languages), which were stenciled onto the stones and etched with a sandblaster.

Read the full article at Weird Wired

MAD ART LAB: “So you want to publish a fake science paper. Of course you do. Who doesn’t? But how do you go about it? Well, it’s a lot easier than you think. Just follow these simple steps…

Step 1: Pick a Subject
This is important. You’ll need to choose something that’s both popular and wrong. Things like “sticking needles in your skin cures disease” or “pets can telepathically detect when their owners are coming home” are pretty good. For this tutorial, though, we’ll use “common objects can bring you good luck” as an example.

Step 2: Prepare Your Experiment
Your experimental setup, of course, depends on the subject you’ve chosen. For this one, we’ll need a pair of dice and a bunch of objects to serve as good luck charms. The more the better. We want to run lots of trials, so gather up everything you can find: four leaf clovers, horse shoes, that pebble you found last week, Gerald your pet hamster, whatever happens to be lying around.”

“Step 3: Run Your Trials
Here’s where the magic starts. What you want to do is run lots and lots of trials, each with a small sample size. This will increase your chances of a false positive.

Step 4: Hunting The Wily Anomaly
Taken as a whole, your data will look pretty mundane. The chances of rolling, say, double sixes are 1 in 36, so you’re going to get about 2 or 3 per 100 rolls, give or take. Your results probably fit fairly well onto a bell curve, with most of the data points clustered in the middle and a few outliers on either side. But wait! If you rename some of those outliers “anomalies”, you’ve suddenly got a phenomenon!”

Continue reading the rest over at Mad Art Lab (Thanks Annette M)

The documents do provide further evidence for what I call the psychocultural hypothesis. UFO sightings and encounters are certainly an interesting group of phenomena – but are they evidence of anything alien. Many people I talk to (including a documentary producer just recently) are left with the sense that there must be something going on. No explanation seems satisfactory to explain all the accounts, and there is a residue of unexplained reports.

This is the “where there is smoke there is fire” argument. But I think it misses an important question – there may be fire (a phenomenon) but what kind of fire? I think the fire is a multifaceted psychocultural phenomenon.

What I find most fascinating is that we are living through the formation of a modern mythology. We can see the mythology evolve, and there is ample documentation of the process. The psychological aspects of the mythology are also well documented. Perception is flawed and lends itself to false positives – to seeing patterns that are not real, or to misinterpreting mundane stimuli as something bizarre. Disconnected lights may be mentally joined into a large ship, for example. Distance, size, and velocity can be grossly misinterpreted. Perception is contaminated by expectation. And then memory can be distorted through contamination, suggestion, and just morphing over time to embellish an event.

There are also specific neurological phenomena, like hypnagogic hallucinations – waking dreams that can be interpreted as alien abductions.

Into this mix are deliberate hoaxes, including faked videos and picture, models of spacecraft, and false reports of abductions.”

Read more at Neurologica (Thanks Annette M)

Britain’s most charming and lovely psychologist Richard Wiseman will not be a stranger to the people on this blog. He’s appeared on several of Derren’s shows and his last book is a constant reference for all of us.

For the past twenty years, he’s immersed himself in the weird world of supernatural science; testing telepaths, spending nights in haunted castles and attempting to talk with the dead.

In Paranormality he cuts through the hype and goes in search of the truth behind extraordinary stories of poltergeists, possession and second sight.  And along the way he shows us some really rather remarkable things about how our brains work, how it is possible to have an out-of-body experience or lucid dream of our own, and just why we feel the need to believe. .

Following up from his extremely successful 59 Seconds Wiseman has tapped in to the reasons why our minds dictate reality to us even when the message it’s giving us has no scientific basis.

As usual it’s written in standard bullshit-free Wiseman style but manages to tap in to fairly complex ideas and subjects with beautiful ease. Throughout the book are various QR codes linking to external content and untrusting exercises and the short sharp chapters make it very easy to pick up and delve in to, or just read from front to back. Learning psychology isn’t supposed to be this much fun, Mr Wiseman’s managed to make it so.

Covering subjects such as fortune telling, out-of-body experiences, talking to the dead and ghost hunting, it’s also the perfect skeptics guide with solid science to back it up. For me the obvious favourite is chapter 6 about the world’s second greatest mind reader – Washington Irving Bishop. There’s even a little guide in there on how to read minds and tips on how to play tricks on your friends and get in to some light-hearted but effective mind trickery.

95% of all pop-psychology books can easily be reduced down to a fraction of the content without losing any of the message, often there’s a lot of fluffing around these subjects to prepare you for the really meaty bits in the middle and you can find yourself switching off a little after 20 pages and 19 repeats of the same message. But like Quirkology and 59 Seconds, Wiseman has managed to visit multiple topics, look at them from several angles and make this an invaluable book with plenty of content.

59 seconds took me 2 reads. One to get through it and the second to go back and absorb the content in detail. I’ve only just finished my first read of Paranormality and will be going back through it again to try out some of the tests myself. It’s certainly one to leave on the coffee table and is a guaranteed conversation starter anywhere.

Available now from Amazon – Click Here

The section of the program that caused the fuss has been described in truly harrowing terms by ‘respected astrologer’ Angela Cornish, in an e-mail that was published by the SkyScript blog:

“If you didn’t happen to see it, there were two presenters, Professor Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. All was going well until they got to a part where they had models of the planets in our solar system on a table and Dara was explaining that all of the planets orbit at different speeds and distances away from the Sun. He said only the earth orbits the Sun in 365 days and returns to its own place, showing that horoscopes are nonsense. He then went on to add “Let’s get this straight once and for all, Astrology is rubbish” The other presenter, Brian Cox, then agreed and said “in the interests of balance on the BBC, yes astrology is nonsense.”

Shocking stuff, I think you’ll agree.

This is not the first time that Brian Cox has waded into the astrology controversy that has raged in science for literally almost none of the last couple of centuries. The hackles of Britain’s astrologers were raised last year, when Cox took a moment during his Wonders of the Solar System series to explain to the public that “astrology is a load of rubbish,” a statement which pretty much echoes the scientific consensus on the matter, which says that, “astrology is a load of rubbish.” It’s a position that was first reached by Islamic scholars at least 650 years ago, and has been studiously ignored by such great minds as Jonathan Cainer ever since.

Since then, TV’s most clean-shaven male Professor has become a bit of a lightning rod for astrologically-guided criticism, and the Astrological Association of Great Britain’s new petition names him personally:

The Association will be requesting that the BBC make a public apology and a statement that they do not support the personal views of Professor Brian Cox or Dara O’Briains on the subject of astrology. We also request that the BBC will commit to making a fair and balanced representation of astrology when aired in the future.

On the second sentence at least I think we can all agree. I’d love to see the BBC give a fair and balanced representation of astrology. In fact sod it, let’s extend that to all newspapers as well.

Such a representation would depict astrology as a pseudoscience with no real basis in evidence that was already being ridiculed in the Dark Ages, and note that after thousands of years astrologers still can’t produce statistically meaningful results.”

Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Annette M)