Psyconoclasm

"Evidence of the Afterlife": The Life Review

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:15:00 GMT

This is the sixth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part twoaddressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for whynear-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of theafterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part fouraddressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under generalanesthesia. Part five addressed enhanced sight for the blind during NDEs. This post reviews the concept of the "life review."

5. A life review during the NDE accurately reflects real events in the NDEr’s life, even if those events have been forgotten.

A "life review" is when someone sees parts of their past replaying, where they have a third-person point of view. Think of A Christmas Carol, when the ghost of Christmas Past is showing Ebenezer Scrooge scenes from his life.

A few interesting tidbits came up here. In the first incarnation of the NDERF survey, 660 experiences were collected, and only half were considered NDEs, and of that half, only a quarter reported a life review. In the second incarnation, it is unknown how many experiences were collected, but 617 NDEs were studied, of which only 14% reported the life review (Kindle 1609). Why did the percentage of NDErs reporting a life review drop by 50% between the two times of the survey?

Dr. Long also says that he didn't think any of the life reviews contained elements that were "unrealistic," which is a broad understanding of what should be included as evidence of the phenomenon. Something can be realistic without actually having happened.

One NDEr reports seeing "my whole life in a flash of an instant. I was shown all the details of my life" (Kindle 1623). Huh? On what basis does the NDEr assume that 1) the long-forgotten details are accurate and 2) there are not more details that remain forgotten? I find it difficult to accept these assertions as true. I don't doubt that the NDEr felt as though she saw all the details of her life, but that is different from accepting it as fact that she did see her entire life in a flash.

Dr. Long attempts to counter two skeptical points against the claim that the life review is evidence of the afterlife. The first is the idea that the life review is really due to fear of death: the NDEr suffers a life-threatening event and retreats to pleasant memories. This is impossible because it cannot explain instances where the NDE is unexpected (a sudden car crash, anesthesia error, etc.). Dr. Long lists as a reference a book by Dr. Susan Blackmore, but I haven't been able to find the claim made by her (or anyone else) in any of the articles she has written and have been posted on the Internet. It's a bad theory, highly speculative and probably untestable.

The second theory is that the brain, as it is dying, might trigger activation in the temporal lobe. In the lab, activation of that part of the brain by an implanted electrode is known to trigger the sudden flashes of recall memory. Dr. Long claims, and quotes other NDE-believer researchers as claiming, that the experiences of participants in lab studies bear little resemblance to reported NDEs, in that the memories induced in the lab were shorter and repetitive. Well of course. The electrodes aren't creating the same kind of activity as would occur under life-and-death situations, and the temporal lobe activity would be broader than one electrode implantation. The lab experiences provide a proof of concept for this alternative explanation.

One last note. As I mentioned, only 15% of NDErs reported experiencing a life review. This means it is even more likely that the reporting of this particular aspect of the NDE is caused by 1) cultural factors, 2) complex brain events (such as messing with the temporal lobe), and 3) sampling bias. If 100 people experience temporal lobe activation cascades during resuscitation, and only two experience something resembling an NDE, those are the ones who are going to reach the websites to report their NDEs. People who don't experience NDEs don't fill out surveys on NDE sites.

Next up: Why NDErs see their dead relatives.

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Blind sight

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:40:00 GMT

This is the fifth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part two addressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for why near-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of the afterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience. Part four addressed the special case of NDEs that occurred under general anesthesia. This post addresses another of the lines of evidence Dr. Long claims as proof of the afterlife:

4. NDEs take place among those who are blind, and these NDEs often include visual experiences.

It's important to note from the start that Dr. Long makes an appropriate distinction between those who are congenitally blind (blind from birth) and those who become blind later in life. If all of the NDEs from blind people occurred in those who became blind after the age of eight or so, it would be easy to explain. After all, people who are blind later in life are able to see in their dreams -- and in their LSD trips.

I was able to find a study showing that people born blind have activation in their visual cortex while they dream. I don't have access to the full study, so I can't give it a good critique, but taking it at face value it seems possible that people having NDEs are also experiencing activation of their visual cortices. The study also showed that blind people were able to draw their dream content. I have no idea what the content of those drawings were, however.

One critique of the study suggested that the congenitally blind aren't "seeing" so much as imagining spatial relationships, which it is already widely accepted they are able to do. In other words, the congenitally blind may have activation in their visual cortices, but they're not seeing the color blue.

But I'm not sure why I'm spending so much time on this. Dr. Long doesn't tell us how many NDE reports he received from people born blind. He provides an NDE narrative that someone else collected, and he provides two sentences from an NDE he collected from someone legally blind without his glasses. The rest of the chapter is about people with regular or slightly diminished sight having super-clear or 360-degree sight, which isn't nearly as breath-taking as blind people having visual NDEs. I assume this means that the NDERF has not received an NDE from someone born blind, and I'm not impressed with one or two anecdotes.

At the level of one or two anecdotes, "blind sight" is easily explained by a few factors. The first deals with the selection bias: only people who have accurate reports of NDEs will go on talking about them. So if 100 blind people report visual content during NDEs, we'll only hear about the one who had an accurate report. The second factor is lucky guessing. That may be why there are so few stories from congenitally blind NDErs. The third is prior knowledge. For example, it seems impressive that this woman in Dr. Long's book saw her wedding ring and knew that it had bits of orange on the sides (Kindle 1200), but I can't imagine her not knowing that there was orange on the ring. Wouldn't she have asked to have it described to her? The fourth is that, in the same way that a congenitally blind person's visual cortex is able to create imagined spatial relations through the information gathered from the other four senses, a person could create the visual aspects of the NDE from what is heard during the resuscitation.

That leaves the much less impressive issue of "super-sight" in the regularly-sighted NDErs. This seems consistent with the idea of NDErs taking in information from the outside world and constructing a narrative. Since they have no point of view from which to remember the experience, it makes sense that the brain would construct a third-person view.

Next: The "Life review," or "My life flashed before my eyes."

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Anesthesia and the Brain

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:54:00 GMT

This is the fourth in a series of posts reviewing Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part twoaddressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for whynear-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of theafterlife. Part three deconstructed the second line of evidence: the out-of-body experience.

I noticed an error in the book. In the introduction, it lists the third line of evidence as being about anesthesia. In the book structure and chapter titles, though, the third line of evidence is listed as "blind sight." I'll follow the numbering presented in the introduction, chapter 2.

3. NDEs occur during general anesthesia when no form of consciousness should be taking place.

Boom. The article describes a talk given by Dr. Jackie Andrade, describing her work which suggested that people under anesthesia are capable of forming memories based on what they hear. She is quoted by the BBC as saying: "What we think is happening is that surgery involves tissue damage which increases the release of adrenaline, and it's the adrenaline that enables people to learn even when they are unconscious."

I found one of her studies, published in Neurosciences and Neuroanaesthesia, available online. You can read the PDF here. The conclusion from the abstract: "Existing knowledge can be primed by information presented during [. . .] anaesthesia. The priming is evidence of unconscious information processing and not the result of moments of awareness."

The main problem with this research as regards my argument against Dr. Long is that the memories here are implicit. The researchers took people who were put under anesthesia, and played a recording of words into their ears. After waking up, none of them said "yeah, you said 'bunny,' 'Christmas,' and 'hot peppers." That would have been explicit memory. Instead, the memory was implicit: it helped them perform better on word completion tests, which meant that somewhere in the subconscious the brain recognized the words presented under anesthesia. The participants had the knowledge in their brain, but they couldn't just blurt it out.

It seems like a big leap from the implicit memories shown in the research to the explicit narratives people tell about their resuscitation while under anesthesia. However, it is evidence that sensory information can reach the brain, even under anesthesia.

How the sensory leakage under anesthesia turns from implicit to explicit memory? What Dr. Long doesn't seem to realize is that organized experiences CAN occur in the brain of people who have been anesthetized: it's called dreaming, and the medical literature is full of reports and studies of dreaming under anesthesia. The brain doesn't just stop working when anesthesia is present.

If you take the same argument I made in my previous post about sensory leakage when the brain is under duress and apply it to cases of anesthesia, it fits pretty well.

Dr. Long does something here that a lot of people with dubious claims love to do: they find a Nobel Prize winner who agrees with them. He quotes Sir John Eccles as "a Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist who studied consciousness" (Kindle 1444). Each of those words is true, but misleading. Eccles won his Nobel Prize for his work on the synapse, one of the basic parts of the brain's structure. He did some excellent foundational work in neuroscience. He was also a religious man, and one who philosophized about the possibility of consciousness outside the brain. It seems that whenever Nobel Prize winners go outside their area of expertise, they get it wrong.

Dr. Long cites this speculation in the book, where Eccles says that "the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism." Yeah, and evolution is demeaning to humanity because we came from apes, and doing any work at all in neuroscience demeans the mystery of that essential organ the brain. Why are we to care about this man's speculation? Sir Eccles is not bringing any research to the table here, he's just spouting his opinion. He has every right to do it, but there's no reason for Dr. Long to mention it in this book. Dr. Long just wants the readers to be impressed that a Nobel Prize winner spouts the same opinion as himself, and neither have evidence to prove the case.

There's one more thing I want to talk about here, and it's going to come up again later. Dr. Long makes the claim that there is only one statistically significant difference between the experience of NDErs who were anesthetized versus those who were not anesthetized. He says that his cut-off for reporting significance was p<.01 (Kindle 1422). That is, if the difference could have occurred randomly less than 1 time in every 100, then it was considered significant. That is a strict criterion. Typically, results in science are considered significant if there is a less than 5 in 100 chance of the results being random. Dr. Long tries to justify this strict criterion because of the large number of questions being analyzed -- so if we ask 20 questions, and there is a 1 in 20 chance of the answers being different do to chance, then we would expect 1 of the questions to show a difference. However, this strict threshold for significance probably masks the true variability in the individual components between the groups.

Next up will be a post about "blind sight."

"Evidence of the Afterlife": Out-of-Body Experiences

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:50:00 GMT

This is part three in my review of Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D. I originally intended this series to take two or three posts, but I think it's going to end up being closer to ten (god help me, there's just so much juicy discussion material here). Part one featured a discussion of the weakness of the survey that comprises the data for this book. Part two addressed the first of nine lines of evidence Dr. Long provides for why near-death experiences (NDEs) are proof of the existence of the afterlife.

2) NDErs may see and hear in the out-of-body (OBE) state, and what they perceive is nearly always real.

Scientists know how to cause out-of-body experiences (OBEs), and it doesn't involve getting someone close to death. OBEs are pretty clearly caused by disruption of a part of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction. Using electrodes, it is possible to disrupt the electrical activity in this specific region of the brain, and in doing so scientists have artificially induced out-of-body experiences.

There are other ways of inducing OBEs, but I like the TPJ method best because it narrows down the specific part of the brain that causes the sensation -- and it causes the sensation without altering any other part of consciousness. If OBEs can be triggered by disruption in the brain, and brain impairment is something to be expected when oxygen levels in the brain drop, then it's no surprise that NDErs report OBEs.

Now it's time for a story. I used to spend my summers working at a camp for mentally and physically disabled adults. One day, I was called into a room by one of the other counselors. When I walked in, one of the non-verbal campers was making threatening gestures toward another camper. He began to try to hit her, and I stepped in to prevent him from doing so. He picked up a chair and threw it at her, which meant at me. Eventually, another counselor was called in and we were able to calm the camper down. Throughout the event, and for about five minutes afterward, I felt like I was an outside observer watching my movements. I have no idea what caused the sensation. Perhaps it was stress, perhaps it was adrenaline, but it sure wasn't my soul leaving my body.

But what about accuracy? Any improvement in accuracy can be explained by what I discussed in my previous post about brain functioning during a near-death experience. The brain can still take in information from the outside world.

One of the most compelling cases Dr. Long presents involves a manmissing his dentures (which were removed during his resuscitation), herelied on his OBE to help the doctors locate the dentures. This may bea case where someone receiving heart massage actually became conscious (though still paralyzed).

Dr. Long makes an interesting sidestep in this section. In discussing one study, he says that NDErs had better recall of the events taking place during their medical emergency resuscitation than non-NDErs. However, he admits that some NDErs were wildly inaccurate, then makes excuses for them ("it must have been the meds the doctors gave them that made them forget"). So when NDErs guess correctly, it's evidence for the accuracy of OBEs, but when NDErs guess incorrectly, it's evidence for the memory loss effects of medication. Got it.

Of course, Dr. Long references back to his Internet survey, the basis of his book. He claims that 45% of NDErs had an OBE that contained earthly events that could be verified or disproven, and that 98% of these OBEs were 100% realistic -- as judged by the man who is trying to get this to be evidence for his argument. What if they reported seeing dragons eating their feet? That wouldn't count as "earthly events," otherwise the angel floating next to them would count as something unrealistic. Perhaps he's talking about depictions of the resuscitation, so that if the NDEr reports "someone was pounding my chest screaming at me to 'just breath damnit!'" then that would be inaccurate. Still, I'm not impressed with his assessment of claims of accuracy. I'm not going to trust a subjective evaluation of which claims are "earthly" and which claims are "100% accurate"; who knows how vague those 45% of NDErs who had OBEs were, for example.

Finally comes Dr. Long's "Skeptics say" segment. He doesn't cite any skeptics, but he says that skeptics claim OBEs are partial reconstructions of memories formed before or after the time of unconsciousness, and that NDErs are lucky guessers. He counters with his unconvincing "98% of OBEs are 100% realistic!" discussed above. Dr. Long also reports that NDErs tell him their greatest level of alertness occurs in the middle of the NDE, not at the beginning or end, which seems to fit fine with the tale I spun above.

Next time: How the congenitally blind see during NDEs.

The 9 Lines of "Evidence of the Afterlife"

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:30:00 GMT

In my previous entry, I outlined the reason why the survey that forms the basis of Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, M.D., cannot provide a scientific proof of the afterlife, and that it even harms the argument for the existence of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a single phenomenon. Over the next few posts, I'll go through the nine lines of evidence that Dr. Long provides in the book, and tell you why I don't find them convincing.

You can find the nine lines of evidence outlined here, if you look toward the bottom of the article under the heading "Evidence of the Afterlife." The link is to a reproduction of the second chapter of the book. In the book itself, each of these nine points forms a separate chapter.

1) It is medically inexplicable to have a highly organized and lucid experience while unconscious or clinically dead.

This is a doozy, and I'll hope you'll bear with me. I got many of the ideas here from G.M. Woerlee's review of this book. The rest of the sections should be shorter. It's important to address this line of evidence, because if it stands scrutiny, the case for the reality of NDEs would be made. It would raise a number of questions -- how close to bodily death does one have to be to trigger the end-of-life process vis-a-vis consciousness, for example, and why are NDEs so variable -- but the reality of consciousness separate from the brain would be established.

First, what is "clinical death"? According to the author, it's "a loss of breathing and heartbeat" (Kindle 804). The standard definition of clinical death is now related to brain death, when the brain ceases all activity (which can be confirmed by two flat EEGs 24 hours apart). According to Dr. Long, someone without a heartbeat will show a flat EEG (which measures electrical activity at the surface of the brain) 10-20 seconds later.

This is true, but misleading. If someone had no heartbeat and had a flat EEG for more than a few minutes, irreparable harm would be done to the brain, and the person would die.

However, all of the people reporting NDEs are still alive, which means that they had to have received some sort of artificial form of blood circulation, which means that their brains were still capable of experiencing the world around them, even if they appeared unconscious. Heart massage (such as CPR) keeps semi-oxygenated blood flowing to the brain.

The amount of oxygen provided to the brain by heart massage can be enough to allow someone to actually be conscious without a heartbeat. Sometimes this is accompanied by the ability to move, sometimes there is paralysis. Even when actual consciousness is not achieved, there will be enough blood flow to be able to receive and store sensory data from the outside world, which can later be used to (unconsciously) fabricate out-of-body experiences. It's like when you're dreaming, and sensory information from the outside world (the smell of bacon, the sound of the alarm clock) become incorporated into the dream.

Dr. Long claims that these people had lucid experiences even though they were unconscious. As I've explained, there is no reason to believe that the experiences that are reported occurred during a period of total unconsciousness, and every reason to think that the brain is still doing some processing of sensory information even if unconscious.

Many NDErs report that they had enhanced mental abilities, including enhanced visual perception despite being unconscious (Kindle 861). However, they never report seeing in the ultraviolet, infrared, radio, etc. -- it's always the same visual spectrum of light, except clearer. If consciousness really left the body, there's no reason to assume that it would be incapable of seeing these other wavelengths; that is a limitation of our brains or our eyes, not necessarily our inner selves. In fact, chickens are able to see in the ultraviolet; are our souls that much weaker?

Some NDEs involve excellent hearing: "clearer and crisper, as if in a chamber of silence listening to whispers" (Kindle 907), according to one NDEr. Some NDEs involve profound silence: "There was no sound at all. [. . .] Thick, thick silence" (Kindle 930). Why the difference, if consciousness is actually leaving the body? Are some souls deaf?

At the end of each chapter, Dr. Long tries to provide the skeptic counterargument. In this case, he says that the counterargument is that NDErs aren't really near death. He says that hypoxia (described above) would result in confused NDEs, rather than the smooth narratives that arise in NDEs. I don't have the expertise to counter that claim, but perhaps there's an analogy to sleep. If you are feeling very tired, you are not as coherent as you usually are; however, if you sleep your mind can experience very smooth narrative dreams.

The other notion he tries to dismiss is "the Oprah Factor"; that is, the cultural transmission I mentioned earlier. Basically, the objection skeptics make is that NDErs are exposed to the basics of an NDE (going to the light, out of body experiences, etc.) through the pop culture (such as through Oprah), and use that background information to construct, consciously or not, their own NDE narrative. Dr. Long claims that this is impossible, since the term Near-Death Experience was coined in 1975.

His reference for that assertion is a study he published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies where he took the responses to his web survey and compared NDEs that were reported as occurring before 1975 with those occurring after 1975 and found no difference. That is jaw-droppingly bad research. The sampling bias is clear: these are people who have self-identified as having NDEs -- they knew what they had, and they knew how to find the survey -- and they were filling out a survey at least 25 years after their claimed experience.

But that doesn't even matter. Let's assume the NDE is consistent pre- and post-1975. Here's a picture painted depicting several elements of the NDE:

Can you guess when this was painted? I'll give you a hint: It was before 1975. The point here is that depictions of NDEs were in the culture, even if the term we currently use -- near-death experience -- wasn't. According to Dr. Long's survey, 66% of NDErs claimed not to "have any knowledge of near-death experience (NDE) prior to your experience." I say that's a badly-written question. If someone heard of someone's life flashing before their eyes, if they heard about ascending toward the light, but never heard the term near-death experience, then they might answer "no."

In any event, Dr. Long closes the chapter by saying "Standard logic does not apply." I couldn't have said it better.

"Evidence of the Afterlife" can provide no such thing

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:23:00 GMT

I'm certainly not the first to cast a skeptical eye on Evidence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long, MD, the latest best-seller on near-death experiences (NDEs). In fact, if you go to Dr. Long's homepage, his wife is asking for near-death experiencers (NDErs) to write reviews on Amazon to counter the "negative reviews by ignorant , opinionated people." I think she's talking about people like me! But, I read the book, and I feel like I would have wasted the $10 Kindle purchase if I didn't write up a review.

Dr. Long and his publisher have put the second chapter, the real introduction, online for free. If you read that, you'll get the essence of the book.

I don't want to squeeze everything I have to say into one blog entry, so this is the first of a few posts on it. In this post, I'll try to address the question that the survey Dr. Long conducted can actually help answer.

The subtitle of the book is "The Science of Near-Death Experiences," which brings me to my main critique: The book is based on data from people coming to his website and describing their NDEs. This information can only be used to establish the existence of the NDE phenomenon; it is not evidence of the afterlife, it's only evidence that people are reporting these experiences. There are a hundred little things that go wrong with Long's treatment of the survey data once it is received, but this is the central complaint I have. It's trying to answer a question it just can't.

Throughout the book, I kept seeing parallels to alien abduction research, something I've investigated previously before interviewing Dr. Chris French and Dr. David Jacobs. The main example of this is that both NDE and alien abduction (AA) researchers claim that the personal experiences of the people they have interviewed constitute conclusive evidence for the existence of the phenomenon as more than something happening in the brain. Relying on such a low level of evidence for the objective reality of NDEs and AAs sets a threshold for belief that is too low; there is virtually no limit on the number of things that someone would have to belief if they applied that threshold for every claim.

What, then, is the use of survey data? Survey data can be used to identify the phenomenon. If I want to prove the existence of the Eiffel Tower, I need to first define what the Eiffel Tower is. Let's say our definition is "a tower a thousand feet high, made of metal, and in the city of Paris." To simplify the definition down to factors easily observed, "The Eiffel Tower is tall, gray, and in a city." If we survey 100 people who have seen the Eiffel Tower and 20% of them say it's made of bright green wood, then we have a problem.

Is there a consistent near-death experience? No. In the beginning of the book, Long provides a list of the elements of the NDE. He then lists the percentage of people who reported having each element. Consider the following:

1) 25% of NDErs did not have an out-of-body experience.
2) 65% didn't experience going through a tunnel.
3) 35% didn't experience a bright light.
4) Only half met other beings such as dead relatives.
5) Less than 25% reported a "life review" (their life flashing before their eyes).

All of the elements excluded at least 20% of respondents. If NDEs were a single phenomenon, we would expect a lot more agreement between the stories. For example, one person reports seeing "a beautiful landscape of tulips of every color imaginable." If the NDE is something actually objectively happening, why wouldn't more NDEs involve a field of tulips? On the other hand, if NDEs were really manifestations of something happening in the brain, we would expect the kinds of variability in general experience and specific detail that we actually see.

The NDE proponent will say that the differences in the NDEs are insignificant compared to the similarities -- a sense of consciousness when the brain should not be able to produce such a thing. "It's like a bunch of blind people all feeling different parts of an elephant, and describing only the parts they are aware of. One person will say that the elephant is like a snake, because he feels only the trunk. Another says that it's like a tree, because he feels only the legs. Similarly, one person sees a field of tulips, another has a life review, and another travels down a tunnel." I don't buy that explanation, and I have an alternative one.

What we call "near-death experiences" might have a number of complementary explanations, each describing a different type of NDE. In the same way that alien abduction reports might be explained by a number of different psychological factors (such as hypnogogia, fantasy-prone personality type, and cultural transmission), NDEs might have different explanations (such as cerebral anoxia, REM intrusion, and cultural transmission).

An important point to remember, though, is that Dr. Long has the burden of proof here. When skeptics say "REM intrusion is the cause of NDEs," they assume the burden of proof for their claim, but here Dr. Long is saying that the existence of the afterlife is the cause of NDEs. So even if every theory put forward by skeptics falls, that doesn't mean that NDEs are proof of the afterlife. Dr. Long has to actually make a case showing that NDEs prove the existence of the afterlife.

In the next post, I'll list Long's nine proofs for the existence of the afterlife, and I'll explain why they're wrong.

Deep Brain Stimulation in OCD

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:24:00 GMT

Modern psychiatry has a number of treatment modalities at its disposal. The most commonly known and used modalities are psychotherapy (talk therapy) and psychiatric medication (such as Prozac). Sometimes, however, drugs and talking just can't resolve a person's problems.

There are a number of other more invasive interventions. Psychosurgery is one option, where a doctor removes part of the brain to improve symptoms. Another last-ditch procedure is electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), where electrical pulses are sent through the brain to sort of "reset" the brain. While both of these procedures show efficacy in difficult to treat cases, the side effects are so significant that they are rarely used.

One of the most promising new last-ditch treatment options is called deep brain stimulation (DBS). The best analogy is that it is a pacemaker for the brain. The device is surgically implanted into the brain, where it emits periodic bursts of electricity to interfere with the brain activity associated with the target site. Like with a psychiatric medication, it can take time to get the dosage right.

This "brain pacemaker" makes sense on the surface. We know that certain parts of the brain are associated with certain behaviors, and with some behaviors there is enough accuracy to justify the surgery. We also know that the brain operates largely on the sending of electrical signals; inputting electrical signals that don't belong will mess up the system. It's the same theory behind ECT, but more refined and with fewer side effects (the side effects of ECT include serious memory loss, which is not a side effect of DBS).

But does it work? Yes, for certain problems. Parkinson's Disease, major depression, and Tourette Syndrome all seem to respond to DBS, though the sample sizes in the studies are small and most of the trials have no placebo wing, so it's hard to know if it's the actual electrical pulses doing the work or just the fact that the person is receiving any new treatment at all.

Neuroskeptic covers a new study on the use of DBS for obsessive-compulsive disorder that does use a placebo control. He (or she?) covers the study in more detail, and has a much firmer grasp on the neurology of the study.

The study has a small sample (6 patients), but divides the sample into two groups of three patients. All six patients received the surgery to implant the "pacemaker," but the doctors activated one group's pacemaker thirty days after implantation, and the second group's pacemaker was activated sixty days after implantation. The patients weren't told when the devices would be turned on. It's unclear from what I've read, but I would hope that the doctors at 30 days pretended to turn on the devices in that second group of patients.

Two of the three patients in the first group responded immediately after the device was activated, and none of the three patients in the second group responded until their devices were activated. About a year into the study, one of the patients suddenly stopped responding to the treatment. However, it was discovered that this was because the battery died. After the battery was replaced, the patient improved again. The fact that there was no response after the battery died provides additional evidence that the effect is due to the electrical impulses being sent through the brain, rather than only a placebo effect.

More studies like this are needed, and on larger scales, before definitive proof can be provided for deep-brain stimulation, but the results so far are promising for this relatively new treatment.

Why people blame rape victims, part 2

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:30:00 GMT

In my last entry, I talked about some of the faulty linguistic thinking that helps people feel comfortable blaming rape victims for their plight. In this entry, I want to talk about two other factors: the "just world" assumption, and the "Lake Wobegon Effect."

The "just world" assumption is this: We live in a world that is fundamentally fair (just). People get what they deserve. However, we are constantly assaulted with situations that seem to contradict this assumption. If there is a major earthquake in Haiti, how can that happen in a just world? There are fundamentally two ways to make the just world assumption seem correct when it is challenged.

The first possible reaction is to act to maintain the existence of a just world. This can be done by donating to an earthquake relief fund, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or performing some vigilante justice. We alter the world around us to create a more just world. As my examples illustrate, this can take a number of forms, not all of them necessarily for the better.

The second possible reaction is to twist the events in such a way that what seems unjust is actually just. If there is an earthquake in Haiti, someone might say that it is God's punishment for making a pact with the devil (true story). If someone is poor in this life, then they have great riches awaiting them in the afterlife. If someone gets hit by a car, it's karmic retribution. And if someone gets raped, they did something to deserve it.

The problem with the second reaction is that it cuts off our ambition (since our poor lot will automatically be enhanced in the future by the just universe) and, importantly for rape victims, it cuts off our natural sympathy. Those looking to rationalize away suffering in a just world must blame the victim. Anything will do: 8% of respondents in a recent survey said that a woman can be held responsible for her own rape if she accepts a drink from and talks with a man.

The "Lake Wobegon Effect" is sometimes called the "above average effect". A public radio program (A Prairie Home Companion) features a weekly news report from a fictitious place called Lake Wobegon, where, as Garrison Keillor reminds us each week, "all the children are above average."

If you understand anything about statistics, you know that all the children cannot be above the average, by definition. And yet, it describes a real phenomenon. Most people think that they are above average in many tasks. Just ask 100 people if their driving skill is above average, and you'll find that most people do consider themselves above the average. I took a cognitive psychology class where we were discussing how easy it is to fall victim to biases, and that everyone exhibits them from time to time. She claimed that that might be true for most people, but certainly not her -- thus exhibiting the Lake Wobegon bias!

Likewise, some women might be stupid enough to get raped, but not me -- I'm too smart to walk down a dark alley, or take a drink from a creepy guy, or dress "provocatively."

These three aspects -- passive voice thinking, the just world phenomenon, and the Lake Wobegon effect -- combine to give people the means and motive to blame women for their own rapes. Passive voice thinking helps enable a "blame the victim" reaction under the just world phenomenon, and that is compounded by the desire to think of one's self as better than others (the Lake Wobegon effect). The result is the harsh, cruel, evil statement "Women are responsible for their own rapes."

Why people blame rape victims, part 1

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:30:00 GMT

A poll sponsored by a British rape crisis center found that "over half of those surveyed think that there are some circumstances where a person should accept responsibility" for being raped (you can get the PDF summary of the survey on Haven's website here).

It was an Internet poll of 1,000 people, so that's reason enough to doubt the results. The group that actually conducted the research, OpinionMatters, is basically a PR firm that uses dubious polls as a method of getting a company or issue group into the newspapers. The PDF linked above doesn't list the actual questions and responses asked, and there is no other mention of the survey on Haven's site. Without knowing the exact questions asked and more demographic information about the 1,000 people polled, it's hard to make a real judgment about the validity of the percentages presented in the results. After all, according to a CBS poll, 59% of Americans "strongly favor" allowing gay men and lesbians to serve in the military, but only 34% "strongly favor" allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. The blogger Neuroskeptic provided a good critique of a similar online polling group a few months ago.

But that only changes the number on the margin; the fact remains that a significant portion of the population is willing to say that a woman bears some responsibility if she is raped. I'd like to offer three reasons for this; let me know what you think.

The first is a trick of the language. Think back to English class. There are two basic forms of sentence structure: active and passive. Active sentences go "Subject verb object," while passive sentences go "object verb subject." For example, "Joe ate the hamburger" is active, while "the hamburger was eaten by Joe" is passive. We use the active voice for the most part, but we use the passive voice to emphasize the object of a sentence, usually for dramatic effect. "Ten students are needed to start a campus group" is passive, but it works because there is no ambiguity and no distortion of the facts. The popular phrase "Mistakes were made" is passive, but it doesn't work because there is intentional ambiguity and a gross omission of the facts.

It is true that there are things a woman can do that will make her more likely to be raped. If she leaves a drink unattended, if she goes home with a guy she doesn't know well, if she walks down a dark alley, if she drinks to the point of blacking out. All of these things can increase a woman's risk of being raped.

In a similar way, smoking can increase a person's likelihood of getting lung cancer. If Bob never smokes a day in his life, but gets lung cancer, no one says he is responsible for getting lung cancer. If Bob smokes two packs a day and gets lung cancer, everyone says he is responsible for getting lung cancer, because he exposed himself to such a great risk that he is in some way responsible for the outcome.

I suspect that some people think that if someone does not take precautions against rape, then they are responsible for that rape. "If Sally didn't walk down that alley, she wouldn't have gotten raped" sounds a lot like "If Bob didn't smoke two packs a day, he wouldn't have gotten lung cancer." This comparison becomes more obviously absurd if we re-phrase the sentences from the passive voice to the active voice. "If Sally didn't walk down that alley, the rapist would not have raped her" sounds very different from "If Bob didn't smoke two packs a day, lung cancer wouldn't have afflicted him."

The sentences sound different because the rephrased sentence about Sally acknowledges a second moral agent -- the rapist -- while the sentence about Bob doesn't introduce anything new. By thinking in the passive voice, by hiding the presence of the rapist, it becomes easier to blame the victim. The perpetrator of the crime just doesn't show up.

Using the passive versus the active voice is not just something to worry about when writing, it's something to worry about when thinking. Hmm, I bet I could write a self-help book containing just that piece of advice.

This is getting a little long, so I'll make this a two-part post. Tomorrow I'll examine two of the cognitive biases, or mental shortcuts, that may underlie this "blame the victim" phenomenon: the "just world" assumption and the "Lake Wobegon Effect."

Why treat the dead with respect?

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:15:00 GMT

A few months ago I picked up Edith Hamilton's Mythology. It's a collection of myths from Greek and Roman religion (though the last 30 pages or so are Norse myths). It's also one of those books I read in high school but never really appreciated. One of the aspects of some of the stories that struck me was the degree to which they would honor the body of a fallen comrade. In The Illiad, when Achilles and Hector face off, Hector accepts that he is going to die, but he asks Achilles to treat his corpse with respect, so it can receive a proper burial. Achilles refuses, and when Hector is dead Achilles desecrates the body, until the Greek gods -- the gods, so you know this is culturally important -- step in and make sure the body is returned.

Modern cultures, too, can fetishize corpses. An episode of Criminal Minds I recently watched featured a killer who took a part of his victims' body as a trophy. The family of a Hindu victim told the investigators that they really needed to find that missing body part, otherwise the victim's soul would wander for eternity looking for it.

The Israeli government has traded captured guerilla fighters in exchange for body parts of dead Israeli soldiers. The American military received criticism for burning the corpses of two insurgents in Afghanistan -- especially offensive because Islam prohibits cremation.

This last story shows just how arbitrary the specific rules can be. Islam forbids cremation, while last week, a Hindu man in Britain won the right to an open-air cremation. The man claims that it is a necessary part of "a good death." Meanwhile, the British government argued against the open-air cremation because it was an afront to "decorum and decency."

When I talked to a few of my non-religious friends about why cultures seem to be so concerned about what happens to human remains, the first suggestion was that this is something religions created as part of their concern with the afterlife. That doesn't sit right with me, though. I don't hold any supernatural beliefs about an afterlife, and yet I know that if I saw someone urinating on a human corpse I would feel incredible disgust. I might be able to talk myself out of that disgust, but that initial reaction is a real feeling. Even though I know no harm can come to the person who used to exist in the corpse, I would still feel as though he was being violated. I suspect that religions have co-opted that sense of disgust and created rituals to remove that disgust, rather than actually creating the disgust in the first place.

The second suggestion I came across was that perhaps the obsession with the corpse is an evolutionarily adaptive feature, based on the common thought that dead bodies are bad for public health. Unfortunately for this theory, dead bodies aren't that dangerous (exceptions would be during a plague outbreak of some sort). A decomposing body is not a pleasant smell, but it's not a carrier of disease.

This leads to the third suggestion, that the proper care of the deceased is part of the grieving process. Even if having corpses lining the streets in Port-Au-Prince won't lead to outbreaks of disease, it must be psychologically very difficult for the survivors to walk by such literal reminders of their own mortality, not to mention reminders of their own dead loved ones.

The instinct to take care of the dead isn't so much about protecting the dead, though religions might say it is, but rather it is to protect the living from feeling despair at their grief and at their own mortality. Maybe later this week I'll find some published studies supporting this view.

Episode 6: EMDR and the Military, with Cmdr. Mark Russell

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:32:00 GMT

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My apologies for taking so long between episodes. I just finished unpacking after a move, which will explain the harsher sound in my outro this time. The room I'm recording in now is much more echoic than my old recording space. I also just finished studying for the GREs, as I'm on the march toward grad school application season. But, never fear, I'm committed to keeping this going. It's just too much fun!

This episode features a great interview with Commander Mark Russell, Ph.D. Commander Mark Russell and I discuss Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), with a focus on its use in treating post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. EMDR is a controversial treatment. We discuss evidence for its efficacy, doubts about its proposed mechanism of action, and Cmdr. Russell's battles with the military hierarchy. Spoiler: He lost the battle, but he's hoping to win the war.

I came into my research for this episode a knee-jerk skeptic, but I'm leaving more curious than ever. It works as well as other conventional treatments: the Cochrane review seems to show this pretty conclusively. But how does it work? Supporters say that bilateral stimulation of the brain, achieved by inducing rapid horizontal eye movement, helps reprocess the memory. The more "out there" supporters say that EMDR works by manipulating an as-yet-undiscovered energy field in the brain. There is evidence to suggest that it works by having the patientperform a distraction task while recalling the memory, and that anydistraction task -- Tetris, for example -- might help. What seems clear to me is that some more research into its mechanism is a good idea.

I hope you'll give it a listen, and let me know what you think! I'm especially interested to see if the conversation changes anybody's mind. I know it changed mine. And let me know if I shouldn't have changed mine; let me know why you still think EMDR is bunk!

Commander Mark Russell's faculty page at Antioch University, Seattle
British Psychological Society Research Digest reports on a study questioning the mechanism of EMDR
Cochrane review showing EMDR's efficacy
USA Today article chronicling Cmdr. Russell's travails

Follow-up to my interview with Dr. Jacobs

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:30:00 GMT

About a week ago, I posted my interview with Dr. David Jacobs, of the International Center for Abduction Research. My process is to record my introduction before starting the interview, so that if I get some facts wrong the guest can catch me and I can redo the intro. For example, I mistakenly said that Temple University, where Dr. Jacobs is a tenured professor, was in Chicago, when it was actually in Philadelphia (and I had even written in my notes beforehand that Temple was in Philadelphia; something got lost on the way to my mouth). Then, I edit the interview, and as I do so I come across things to bring up during my outro, which I record after the interview is edited down. In the past, it's been a few things, so I've just shared all my thoughts there. But listening to the interview with Dr. Jacobs, there was so much to add that I didn't want to make the episode longer than it already was. Below the fold are my long-winded thoughts.

A good place to start is to look at the comment left by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files, another excellent psychology podcast, which recently celebrated its 100th episode. Congratulations, Michael! Michael notes that Dr. Jacobs sets up a dilemma where people who aren't as steeped in the scientific literature as he is shouldn't be taken as seriously as people who have devoted their lives to the area of research. The thing is, you're never going to find a critic of the alien abduction phenomenon that has devoted their life to it. There are researchers, such as Dr. Chris French, whom I interviewed previously, who have done some level of serious published research into the matter, but their knowledge is nothing compared to the stories Dr. Jacobs has. The reason that critics don't spend their lives studying the abduction phenomenon isn't because they are ignorant of the data, it's that they've examined the best data and found it lacking. Why study something without promise? For skeptics, it's just a few people who have weird experiences. It's of interest, but not of dire consequence for most. But for believers, it's a total world-changer; if we were actually being visited by aliens, I would be really tempted to make that my life's work too.

The second point Michael made that I wanted to discuss is about memory. Dr. Jacobs claimed that memory won't be heavily distorted in alien abduction accounts, because the time between the event and the reporting is sometimes days, or even hours. I'm taking a cognitive psychology class on the side, and we're just getting to memory research. The distorting effects of memory occur seconds after the event. There seems to be a lot of research about cars. For example, if we see a BMW and a Volkswagon Polo going the same speed, we're likely to remember the BMW as going faster, and this effect only takes a day to set in -- and may increase over time. Elizabeth Loftus, in a four-page, very accessible article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (PDF), points out many similar examples from real life. For example, people misreported the D.C. sniper as driving a white van, when this was not the case -- and the witnesses gave their reports days or even minutes after reportedly seeing it. In short, Dr. Jacobs underestimates the malleability of memory.

I started having questions and objections from the beginning. I was talking with a tenured professor at a major university who has made his career, from his Ph.D. dissertation onward, defending the existence of the UFO and alien abduction phenomenon. He's edited and written several popular books. So it sounds disingenuous to me to say that it's all hardship to come out of the abduction closet as an intellectual. It seemed like an attempt to gain sympathy from me and my audience, and to establish his credibility using an argument from embarrassment, but for me it rang hollow.

Speaking of the argument from embarrassment, the first few minutes of the interview consisted of Dr. Jacobs explaining why the argument from embarrassment should give us confidence that the accounts of alien abductions are true. I've never found the argument from embarrassment very convincing, and all it could prove is that these people are honest and earnest in their statements -- something skeptics like Dr. French don't doubt.

When Dr. Jacobs was talking about group abduction stories, where two or three people are able to confirm each other's stories, he's assuming that since this proves they aren't having delusions that that makes it true. It reminds me of the Salem Witch Trials, where a few teenage girls made up stories, and the lies got out of control. Dr. Jacobs would say that no one would ever lie about such an outrageous thing, but hey – the stories, true or false, are believed by many. And he could have used the same argument at the Salem Witch Trials.

I would also disagree with his description of fantasies as basically “happy places we can go in our mind” (my words, not his), and that fantasy-prone personality is when men indulge in feeling powerful and sexually awesome and whatnot. What it's really about is having an active imagination and about blurring the lines between that imagination and reality. Scientific studies have shown that alien abductees DO blur the line between reality and imagination, according to the criteria of the fantasy-prone personality. Joe Nickell – an investigator, but I'm sure Dr. Jacobs would call him a debunker – reviewed the thirteen cases described in John Mack's seminal Abduction, and found that the majority of them fit the diagnosis. Dr. Jacobs is confusing the lay definition of fantasy with the technical definition provided for FPP.

As Michael Britt points out in his comment, some skeptics do have a knee-jerk "it can't be true because of reason X" reaction. But some skeptics, such as Dr. French, take a broader approach. They don't argue that one explanation fits all the evidence, they say that lots of explanations are needed, with a few overarching ideas (for example, media influence). Road hypnosis can't explain everything, sleep paralysis can't explain everything, but if you start adding up the explanations, pretty soon you've covered the vast majority of cases. Dr. Jacobs is setting up a strawman.

I still don't trust hypnosis. It's clear that Dr. Jacobs is shaping the memories over a handful of hypnosis sessions, which is why they start as “confabulations” and end with the same story. When you harp on something, in a disapproving, unbelieving tone, you shape their memories. You can't tell them straight out “You're a chicken” (starting 9 minutes into the video) unless they want to act like a chicken like with stage hypnosis. But you can mold memories. That's my armchair explanation of why the confabulations resolve, to please the hypnotizer. Especially revealing was this: when were were discussing hypnosis, he mentioned that disconfirming evidence that comes up under hypnosis – evidence that doesn't fit the narrative – is ignored until someone else mentions it. The problem is that he then says that the stories aren't idiosyncratic. Well, of course not, because he's ignored out of hand all the idiosyncrasies! He can't have it both ways.

Let's talk scars. People have scars, and they don't know how they got them, and they discover them all the time. Just a week ago, I found a scar in my bellybutton. I happen to remember that I had surgery a few years ago that went in through my belly button, but imagine if I had forgotten that. Or waking up with clothes on backwards. A few weeks ago, I took the bus to work, went around my business, and only near noon did I realize my shirt was on inside out. Isn't it possible that these people just put their clothes on incorrectly? In fact, that's a common theme I picked up from the interviews. Stuff happens to people, they can't explain it, therefore it's an abduction. It's the argument from ignorance: “We don't know what's causing it, therefore we know what's happening.” It's more complicated than that, with hypnosis and cultural influence, but that's a significant part of it.

Almost done. I want to talk about the depth of the evidence. When Dr. Jacobs was talking about the ghost phenomenon and how little knowledge there is about it, he mentioned where they get their energy, who they haunt, where they spend their down time, why they haunt some times and not others – all questions we could ask about the aliens! A common atheist line is that everyone thinks everyone else's religion is absurd. Maybe that's true of people who believe in the paranormal.

Lastly, the point skeptics hate to make: people lie. They do it all the time. They do it for any number of reasons. Dr. Jacobs admitted there were scammers and liars in the UFO abduction phenomenon, but he seems to imply that they're all easily discovered. I don't know one way or the other. What I do know is that people can hold very elaborate lies for very long times, regardless of what Law & Order says. Bill Clinton lied on national television for months about Monica Lewinski. Spouses lie for lifetimes about their illicit affairs. It's something that has always bothered me about self-report, one of the most common tools in social science research. For example, there was a pilot study conducted by a university research group in London that aimed to track how active children were. They gave the children pedometers that would track the number of steps they took. The researchers were shocked to discover that some obese children were extremely active. This finding contradicts all sorts of evidence showing the exact opposite: sedentary lifestyle leads to obesity. So what happened? The children were attaching their pedometers to their dogs' feet. The lesson: people lie. It's rude to accuse someone of lying without hard evidence, but I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that someone who claims to have been abducted is lying.

I tried. I really tried to believe it. How fantastic would it be to be visited by aliens? All the skeptics' questions could be answered. How did they get here? Well, we could ask them. In fact, I want to be abducted. I want so badly to get a chance to talk to these guys, to meet them and believe in them. I'm a science fiction dork, I would love it. But . . . . eyewitness testimony just isn't enough. No matter how hard Dr. Jacobs tried to say these witnesses were unimpeachable, I just can't buy it. Some physical evidence – a subdermal implant, a captured alien hybrid, anything. People are so susceptible to the variety of psychological phenomena that Dr. French discussed, so susceptible to false memories – and to telling exaggerated stories, and outright lies – that the rate of abduction stories, given the cultural influences, isn't a big shock.

Episode 5: The Evidence of Alien Abductions, with Dr. David Jacobs

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 05:39:00 GMT

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This is a fun one. Skeptics, stick with this one if you can; the psyconodrabble ("The Bunker") at the end will make it worth your while. In a response of sorts to episode 4, Dr. David M. Jacobs and I discuss the evidence for alien abductions. Be sure to listen toward the end, we talk about the mean old jerks who call themselves "skeptics." I have too much to say about this interview, and once you listen, I think you'll understand. We get into some deep water. Expect a blog post later in the week about this one.

Assorted links:

Dr. Jacobs' organization, The International Center for Abduction Research
Dr. Jacobs' book The THREAT: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda on Amazon
My interview with Dr. Chris French, a skeptic of the alien abduction phenomenon.

Episode 4: Psychology of Alien Abduction Experiences, with Dr. Chris French

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:09:00 GMT

Time for another episode! This episode is an interview with Dr. Chris French of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in London. He's a famed British skeptic, and we have a great discussion. We start by talking about the Shirley Ghostman incident (check out the YouTube link below), and move on to the topic of his lab's research. He says that alien abductions can be explained largely by psychological phenomena, including false memories and sleep paralysis. We spent a while talking about false memories in general, it's a fascinating topic. At the end, there's a new thing I'm trying to do: drabbles. Drabbles are 100-word fiction stories. I wrote one about Dr. French and the topic we were discussing. I hope you like it! I'm going to try and do one for each episode going forward.

I think I fixed some of the problems with the audio I was having. The levels were way off. Thank you to Michael Britt of The Psych Files and "Dr. Dave" Van Nuys of Shrink Rap Radio for pointing out the problems and helping me fix them. Check out their podcasts, those two are what got me into psychology podcasting in the first place.

Links:
The website for the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit
An abstract for a paper on alien abductions authored by Dr. French
Shirley Ghostman's lame attempt at humor, with Dr. French and other British skeptics
Michael Shermer and Brian Dunning had more recent run-ins Ghostman
A favorite episode of mine from Shrink Rap Radio
A recent episode of The Psych Files on replication of Stanley Milgram's famous experiments

Episode 3: Article Review: Astrology Versus Personality Tests

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:33:00 GMT

This episode is a change in format. I go solo to explain a particular piece of research. The article is "Science Versus the Stars: A Double-Blind Test of the Validity of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory and Computer-Generated Astrological Natal Charts," by Alyssa Jayne Wyman and Stuart Vyse. It appeared in The Journal of General Psychology in 2008. It touches on a few issues raised in episode 2, my interview with Dr. Glenn Perry. Let me know how you like it!

Some links:

The abstract of the Wyman & Vyse paper
A short personality test based on the Big Five personality traits
Blog entry outlining the proposed move to make personality disorders based on the Big Five (part 2)
B.R. Forer's 1948 "personality analysis"
Tyler Cowen's tasty, tasty economics blog
Zac Efron

Episode 2: An Astrologer Critiques Science, with Dr. Glenn Perry

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:40:18 GMT

My last episode was with a staunch proponent of the scientific method. This time, I interview a critic of the scientific method. Dr. Glenn Perry is an astrologer with a doctorate in clinical psychology. He maintains that some phenomena, such as astrology, cannot be detected by scientific methods. It's a good interview, Dr. Perry does his best to defend his views, and I do my best to push back a little against them while letting him have his say. It's good for defenders of science to interact with critics of science. I hope you'll give a listen, take his criticisms seriously, and see if they change your mind. I'll be updating my blog with more later, so click on that button on your right to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Links:

Dr. Glenn Perry's website
An article from Dr. Perry's website: "From Paradigm To Method In Astrological Research"
Dr. Perry's self-published books
The unaccredited Academy of AstroPsychology

Episode 1 Transcript

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:49:04 GMT

Below the fold is the transcript of my interview with Dr. Keith Stanovich. I didn't realize how much work it was to transcribe a conversation! I'm thinking of farming out future episodes to a transcription service, but that runs $40-$50/episode, and I'm not interested in spending a whole lot of money into this project quite yet. I haven't even forked over the money to pay for hosting (hence the GoDaddy banner ad up top). Isn't it great to live at a time when this is possible -- for nearly free? I've peppered the transcript with links expanding on some topics or terms we referenced in passing, including some blog posts I've written (or will soon write). Some are links to Wikipedia, some are just fun. I may come back and add links as I produce more content and come across more cool stuff; feel free to offer suggestions in the comment section for stuff I can add. I hope you enjoy, leave a comment and show some love!

David Bradley: Hello, and welcome to episode one of Psyconoclasm, a skeptical exploration into the field of psychology, recorded April 17, 2009. My name is David Bradley, thank you for joining me. I couldn't think of a better person to kick off this podcast series than Dr. Keith Stanovich. Dr. Stanovich is a professor of applied cognitive science at the University of Toronto, He's a leading educational psychologist, and an expert in the fields of rational cognition, reading, and intelligence . He's the author of several books, including The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. His most recent book is What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought. We'll be focusing on what he discusses in what might be his best known book: How to Think Straight about Psychology, which is in its eighth edition. Dr Stanovich, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Well thanks for having me, David. I'm glad to be here.

Bradley: So you begin How to Think Straight About Psychology by talking about what you term The Freud Problem. What's wrong with Freud? What's the problem?

Stanovich: Freud presents many problems for the student's understanding of psychological science. First of all, there's the unrepresentativeness. Freud's the best known name that people free associate with psychology, including the introductory student, who is the focus of my book, How to Think Straight About Psychology. And yet, Freud and Psychoanalysis represents a very small proportion of the interest and work done in psychology. First of all, there's the statistical unrepresentativeness of Freud. But in fact in my book, I stress some other problems. Knowing only Freud sets the student down the wrong track to understanding how psychological research is done. Freud's work is best known for his famous case studies. But ,of course, one of the most important principles that a methodology instructor in psychology or a statistics instructor in psychology wants to get across to their students is that you can't make causal inferences from case studies. One needs controlled observation on a large number of people. Those controls being the things like the true experiment, where we invoke random assignment of subjects to groups, where we isolate variables for study, where we manipulate an independent variable and look for its effect on a dependent variable. All of the sort of normal science – and I say normal science because these types of methods are in no way unique to psychology, they're the normal method of science in all the other social sciences and the physical sciences. So knowledge of Freud and the idea that one can make large theoretical statements from simply a case study of an individual fundamentally puts students on the wrong track of understanding what psychology is about. Psychology proceeds normally like the other sciences do by trying to isolate variables for study. First, you have to find out what the important variables are. That's where case studies do come in to play, because they may give people insight about what might be important to study. That's a different thing entirely, the insight of what might it be important to study is a very different thing from saying “from this case study, I derive this causal conclusion.” The world of research methodology, those are two very different things. Freud's work fuses those together in a way that is atypical and misleading for our students.

Of course, one of the basic introductory methodological things that a psychology student learns is that to test theories you have to design an experiment that differentiates theories. It will enable you to tell not only that the data supports A, but that the data rules out some other explanation B. That's the reason for the structured observations that we call the true experiment in science. All of those insights are obscured for the student if they have the misleading impression that Freud is somehow typical of psychology.

Before I leave this topic, I want to get in one other misleading aspect, and that is the nature of the theorizing. Freudian psychoanalysis has been deeply criticized by a number of different authors for being unfalsifiable. Falsifiability – and now we're moving to the domain of theory – falsifiability is the fundamental criterion of theories in all sciences, but, again, something we have to stress in psychology. For a theory to be useful, it must specify a prediction about the world, and that prediction must have some specificity to it, and a prediction having specificity means that it must rule something out. This is the notion of falsifiability that, again, we've stressed in introductory methodology in the study of psychology. Freud's theories are dangerously close to being not falsifiable in the sense that good theory in the social sciences is. So the reason I started this book that way is to take on some of those misconceptions very directly.

Bradley: There's a lot in Freud that you have to criticize. I wonder if the reason that Freud gets so much play in psychology texts books and introductory psychology courses is because it shows up so often in the culture. For example, when you started to talk about Freud, you said that Freud is what students free associate with when they think about psychology. Free association is, in my mind, linked to Freud. Did he come up with that concept, or was that something he . . . ?

Stanovich: I wasn't using that in a Freudian sense. I mean, association in psychology also has roots separate from Freud. But I agree with your point at the outset, the idea that the general culture is saturated with Freudian references. But again, the instructor can use that to make the point in the sense that Freud is of more interest to the literary theorist than he is to the psychological theorist.

Bradley: So someone taking a course in English literature, for example, might find more use than someone in a psychology lecture?

Stanovich: That's exactly right. If someone is interested in Freud, that may be a better route for them.

Bradley: Interesting. So you said that the main way the field has changed since Freud, generally speaking, is in the methods that psychology uses. Instead of using case studies to prove things, they might use them to ask questions instead of answer them, is that a fair characterization?

Stanovich: Yes, exactly, that's a fair characterization. It's not just in the methods. But again, Freud gives a misleading idea of the range of topics that we study in psychology. Yes, psychology studies psychopathology and problematic behavioral traits of all kinds, but again the bulk of psychological research is not focused in that manner. The bulk of psychological research is focused on normal cognition, and normal personality traits that are manifest in all individuals. It's a more universal conception of mind.

Bradley: So you also speak, in addition to Freud and the problems that he raises, there are some intuitions that we have about psychology, what you term folk wisdom and folk psychology. What are the problems with those? Are they the same sorts of problems as far as nonfalsifiability and those sorts of issues?

Stanovich: Yes, very parallel issues there. Again, we all have folk theories or folk wisdom about various things in the world. I think psychology is a little different in the sense that our folk theories engage us more in the domain of human behavior than they do perhaps in some other endeavors. For example, physics instructors study folk physics. People have folk notions of how objects move in the world (PDF), and about fire and various other things, and you know many of them are mistaken. Ideas of inertia and gravity and so on and so forth, there has been a reasonable amount of study in the educational literature on this, and how physics instructors should approach a student who brings to the study of physics a folk physics that is incorrect. It is true that the student might come to physics with folk notions of physics, but they are never usually held with the emotional fervor that folk theories of human behaviors are held. So although all disciplines have this problem, it's particularly acute in psychology, because the folk notions of human behavior are very close to us. The idea of scientific objectivity, then, looms so much larger in psychology than it would loom in geology, where the student has little problem in geology with approaching the study of sediments with objectivity. It's much more of problem for psychology getting students to approach issues of personality, of behavior, of thinking, of interpersonal relationships, with a fresh eye, with an objective eye, and -- in fact, in the book I label this the preexisting bias problem -- without imposing their preexisting biases on everything. And the other aspect of folk wisdom and folk psychology is the one that you correctly pointed to, it's a similar one to Freud, in that a lot of the folk theories we have turn out to be unfalsifiable.

Of course, every intro textbook plays to this. I do this in my own book, where many of our theories are simply folk cliches that we trot out on the appropriate occasion to explain an instance of behavior. Most of us are pretty good at it. We have a cliché that can cover everything. The problem is that that seeming strength of folk psychology is actually its weakness, because if it can explain everything after the fact, then it must not be very falsifiable. I have a list in my own book of these folk cliches that are totally contradictory, but we use no matter what the evidence is. “Opposites attract,” except for “birds of a feather flock together.” Regardless of what happens, if like people cluster together, then we say “birds of a feather flock together.” If two people have very different traits, then we say that “opposites attract,” but the theory gives us no way of saying which is going to happen under which circumstances. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but “out of sight out of mind.” “Better safe than sorry,” but “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” And then, of course, in folk psychology are all the what are sometimes called “psychofacts,” or another author , I'm forgetting who, has called them “factoids,” these things that are passed around folk culture. This notion that “people only use 10% of their brains.” That's one of those factoids that doesn't map anything that we know in psychological neuroscience, but every person in the street, quote, “knows” it. Those are some of the problems that folk psychology presents for instructor in psychology.

Bradley: Are there any examples of those factoids that you've had to give up as you've learned more and more about psychology?

Stanovich: That's an interesting one. I think I have held some of the factoid beliefs. I did hold some of them in my earlier life prior to an intense study of psychology. Let's take an example, this is one I think that I did hold many many years ago: Ideas about the causal efficacy of self-esteem, for instance. The idea, very popular, and it's still very popular, that if we raise people's self-esteem, then that will result, causally, in increases in some types of target behavior. The very common one is in schools, the idea that people's school achievement will go up if you first raise their self-esteem. And I emphasize the “first” to emphasize that I'm talking about people who say this is a causal connection, not just a correlational one. We've had a lot of recent work in the last 10 years, some by Roy Baumeister of Florida State, has a big, big review article on this (PDF). If anything, the causal connection goes in the other direction.

Bradley: People do well, then they have self-esteem?

Stanovich: It's an outcome of superior achievement, not the cause of superior achievement. I can plead guilty to believing the standard causal, folk model about that one some years ago, until I became familiar with Baumeister and others' evidence on that. So I certainly do think that I've been affected by some of these folk theories. Another kind of factoid belief that I believed until being exposed to the scientific evidence was in one of my research areas. You mentioned in your introduction many years I studied the psychology of reading and reading acquisition, and also reading difficulties. It's still a folk view that people with reading difficulties, so called dyslexia, have their problem because they reverse letters visually. I believed that for a long time too, until I did studies in the area, and found out that that was not the primary cause of reading difficulties. The primary cause of the dyslexia lie in the speech domain and the domain of speech segmentation and philological awareness, and not in the visual domain. Troubled speech regions outnumber visual difficulties 9 to 1 at least. And yet, the folk belief that visual reversals are the cause of dyslexia is still out there. And again, I understand why it is, because I held it myself until actually doing research in this area.

Bradley: It's really interesting, just how important it is even in a field of expertise, to be willing to be disabused of these notions we have.

Stanovich: Right. Again, the thinking attitude we try to instill in students when we teach them about falsifiability. We teach is as a technical concept having to do with theories and so on, but actually, the way I teach of it is also as a personal thinking tool, that one should allow beliefs that haven't stood the test of evidence to fall by the wayside, that it's no sin to give up a belief. That may make us less reticent to actually try to say something with more specificity knowing that we may have to admit error in the future.

Bradley: Right. That's been something that I think a lot of people getting into the scientific way of thinking struggle with, is that they realize how many wrong ideas they've had, and so they become a little more timid about sharing the ideas that they do have that they think are right.

Stanovich: Yes, that can be a problem, and there is a scale that we use in our rational thinking research in my lab called the Belief Flexibility Scale, and its trying to tap how easy or hard it is for people to give up beliefs that have been falsified. It's a very important intellectual trait in a psychologist.

Bradley: So speaking of wrong ideas and people being persuaded by evidence, in the book you talk about someone named Clever Hans – I love this story. Could you explain, who is "Clever Hans" and what does he teach us?

Stanovich: Clever Hans is a horse, actually, in the early 20^th Century, and it's a beautiful illustration why mere observation – and by using this phrase “mere observation” I mean simply looking unaided by the experimental manipulations and controls and interventions, the experimental interventions that a researcher actually does, those interventions can sometimes look funny and artificial to an observer, all the controls and random assignment and this and that – clever Hans teaches us the reason for the intervention, and that is unaided observation can be misleading. Hans was a horse who garnered tremendous publicity in early 20^th Century Germany when his owner presented him as a horse who had mathematical abilities. The trainer would shout out mathematical problems, or indeed even just show the horse a mathematical problem (simple addition, subtraction, that type of thing, division). Then the horse, with one front hoof, if you can imagine, you've seen this kind of thing in the movies – would slam the hoof on the ground and tap out the answer to the mathematical problem. And indeed, in most of the cases, the horse was correct. The trainer would show 5-3, and the horse would give two taps.

This was in the newspapers, and learned individuals traveled to come see this horse. It was a sensation. And indeed, a panel was set up of very eminent lawyers and judges and people of that type who came to formally attest that the horse indeed had mathematical ability. And of course, the problem is, and some of the psychology students will be shaking their heads right now, they'll know the answer, how this goes, whether they've heard of Clever Hans or not. You needed actually a psychologist. There is a hero, an experimental psychologist by the name of Oskar Pfungst. He came and pointed out all of the methodological issues that a modern psychologist would now see in this situation. First of all, there was a little conceptual trick going on here, in that we've made a very quick jump from observation to theory, and that is what we've seen is the horse tap out the correct answers to mathematical problems, but immediately the trainer jumped to the theory or tried to sell the theory that the horse had mathematical abilities, but that is a theory, and there may be other theories that could account for the horse's behavior, i.e. an alternative theory that then the psychologist would want to match against the theory that the horse had actual mathematical abilities. That's exactly what Pfungst did.

The alternative theory that a behavioral scientist would wonder about was whether the horse wasn't getting some type of cues from the trainer. These can be of various types; that is, cues consciously given by the trainer, i.e. perhaps this whole set up about the mathematical horse is a fraud; but a real behavioral scientist would think of a more subtle possibility, that there's no conscious fraud going on, that the trainer actually thinks that the horse has this ability, but is somehow giving off some type of subtle behavioral cue that is telling the horse when to stop the hoof counting. And that indeed turned out to be the case; that is, the horse wasn't a mathematician, but the horse was a very good behavioral scientist, in that he had very acute observational powers, and what was happening, of course, was that the trainer was giving a subtle little tilt of the head when the horse got to the right answer, well the horse had learned how to pick up this little tilt and hence had learned exactly when to stop.

What the psychologist, Oscar Pfungst, did, was set up experimental procedures that would differentiate these two theories; that is, the theory that the horse was picking up behavioral clues from the trainer, from the theory that most people had was the horse actually had mathematical abilities. If the horse actually has mathematical abilities, it shouldn't matter who was presenting the problem. One test would be to give matched problems, one given by the trainer but the other given by someone who didn't know the horse to see if the horse could solve the problem. There's a whole very interesting book on this. Pfungst did all sorts of setups with this similar logic to it, and it turned out that the horse couldn't perform when he wasn't getting the subtle cue from the trainer. Note that Clever Hans often shows up in methodological textbooks because, I want to reiterate the point that I made in the introduction to it, that mere observation was not enough. The lawyers and the judges who came, all they were able to say was that the horse did X, the horse actually did tap out the correct answer to these mathematical problems. Not thinking like scientists, they did not realize that that's not enough proof for the theory that the horse actually had mathematical abilities. That theoretical leap requires controlled observation of the type that the experimental psychologist Oskar Pfungst carried out. Controlled interventions. That's why science, scientific testing, and the experimental method is more than just raw observation, or observation of the natural world as it naturally occurs, but involves interventions and manipulations. So that's the main theme of the Clever Hans example as he appears in many methods textbooks in psychology

Bradley: It's interesting, It reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons, where Maggie, the baby, is taking an IQ test. Lisa Simpson, one of the other children, is there. Maggie does really well on the test, but then they slow down the frames and you can see Lisa Simpson giving the answers to the test to Maggie, subtly, without anyone noticing.

Stanovich: I'd say that's analogous; yes, it's very analogous.

Bradley: We're running short on time. I know we only got a chance to talk about a few of the topics of your book. I was wondering if there were any other essential points we should examine before winding down.

Stanovich: The point I ended on at the end of the Clever Hans example, where I said that observation in the natural world is not enough. I have a chapter in the book that explains some of the misconceptions that people have about laboratory research and why its done and why its necessary. That chapter is designed to address the lay person's criticism of psychology. You often hear, “how can you find out anything in a laboratory?” that's a very ironic criticism. If you think very hard about the Clever Hans example, and you can see just how ironic that criticism is. The artificiality of the laboratory is not a problem for psychology, it's not an Achilles' Heel, it's not an issue for criticism, it's an issue of strength. It's nothing to apologize for, it exemplifies the advance of psychology as a science. We have laboratories, and what's done in laboratories doesn't always look like the natural world, because we need to intervene, because we need to manipulate, because we need to isolate variables that in the natural world are all entangled with each other. That makes a nice addendum to our discussion of Clever Hans, so I thought that I would throw that in to end things.

Bradley: Is it possible that there is a drawback to some of these controls that we put on some research? For example, what pops to my mind is research on depression. In a lot of clinical trials, they remove a large number for being too suicidal, or for having too severe a depression, so for ethical reasons those subjects are removed from the groups. Is that an example of somewhere where we have to be cautious of the conclusions we draw from studies like that?

Stanovich: Yes, there are certainly differential attrition issues in real life study of something of that type. But absolutely right, and you told us the step that we take from that, that is when various methodological strictures can't be met, we appropriately increase the tentativeness of the conclusions. But I'd like to throw in another thing here, that is another principle from my book, and that is the principle of converging evidence. In any complex problem, we often have very different types of investigation that we use to converge on the conclusion. We can study things in the field, we can study things epidemiologically, we can set up a field experiment – that's why we're all taking the little aspirins now, because in the past someone set up a study where a random group got the little aspirin, and another randomized group received the placebo, and of course there are problems there, there are attrition issues in medical research as well. Ah!, but then we add to that laboratory trials, laboratory models with nonhuman animals. That involves an extrapolation. Each of these methodologies for getting at the problem have fundamental problems of the type that you're alluding to, Dave. But when very different investigations all point in the same direction, and they are so different that they have very different weaknesses, instead of each one having exactly the same weaknesses. It's not that they don't have weaknesses, they do, it's that each of the weaknesses is a little different, and despite that, the bulk of evidence points in one direction, we then start to feel confident in science of drawing a conclusion despite the flaws in any single study. Each of our methods have flaws, but when things all point in the same direction, we say that the evidence has converged. We look for converging evidence, not necessarily a single knock-down study that proves everything.

Bradley: Thank you very much. Dr. Stanovich is the author of How to Think Straight about Psychology. You can find links to his home page and links to his look on Amazon.com on the website for this podcast, Psyconoclasm.com. Dr. Stanovich, it's been an enlightening discussion. Thank you so much for coming out on a limb and being my guest today.

Stanovich: It's been great talking with you, Dave. I've enjoyed participating.

Bradley: Thank you again to Dr. Stanovich for being my first guest on Psyconoclasm. His book, How to Think Straight About Psychology, is very readable and accessible to the lay reader, I recommend it. And thank you, for taking the time to listen. I hope you'll drop me a line and let me know how I did: host@psyconoclasm.com. I'm still getting my footing as far as audio and editing, interview tempo, interview length, and personal tone, so any feedback, positive or negative, is appreciated. So send me an e-mail or leave a comment on the website, where you'll find a transcript of this interview later in the week. Psyconoclasm is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. You can reach me by e-mailing host@psyconoclasm.com, I promise to get back to you. Opening and closing music by Spiraling, from the Podsafe Music Network, available at music.podshow.com. I'll end this week with aquote from ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus: “One must not pretend to philosophize, but philosophize in reality. For we do not need the semblance of health but true health.” Talk to you soon.

Preexisting bias problem in geology

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:22:00 GMT

Dr. Stanovich said something during our discussion that I wish I caught and followed up on at the time. We were talking about how people approach psychology with a variety of preexisting biases, and he contrasted this with geology, saying that people didn't have this emotional attachment to how sediments form in the geologic record. I disagreed at the time, but didn't think it was worth interrupting his flow to bring it up. There are people who have emotional attatchments to the way sediments formed: Creationists. According to the "Creation Science" website:

More than 27 billion tons of river sediments enter the oceans each year. Probably the rate of sediment transport was much greater in the past as the looser topsoil was removed and as erosion smoothed out Earth’s terrain. Even if erosion has been constant, the sediments now on the ocean floor would have accumulated in only 30 million years. No process has been proposed which can remove 27 billion tons of ocean sediments each year. So, the oceans cannot be hundreds of millions of years old.

As Dr. Stanovich notes, the pre-existing bias problem appears in every science. It can occur with all the emotional attachment possible in any field. In the United States,nearly one half of the population are creationists. Twice that many (that is, everyone) has these preconceived, emotionally-held beliefs in psychology, though. I wonder what differences arise when trying to inform laypersons about evidence disproving the Judeo-Christian creation myth versus informing them about evidence disproving the "we use 10% of our brain" myth.

Episode 1: The scientific approach to psychology, with Keith Stanovich, Ph.D.

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:10:00 GMT

Research methods. It's what separates science from pseudoscience. For my first interview, I thought it would be good to discuss how psychology's research methods meet the criteria for science. When I was first planning for this podcast series, I contacted a few peopleto judge how easy it might be to get guests. In doing the research for that step, I came across the work of Dr. Keith Stanovich, of the University of Toronto. He had written a great book called How to Think Straight About Psychology. I read the book's description and immediately purchased it. When it arrived and I started reading it, I was not disappointed. It was an excellent primer on the scientific approach to psychology, with descriptions of the ways we get fooled when thinking about psychology and how research methodology works to counteract those pitfalls. It's a classic, a book I'm sure I will refer back to often.

A few weeks ago, when I started searching for potential guests, I knew Dr. Stanovich was the right man to have as my first interview. Much to my surprise, he agreed! So below, you'll find my interview with Dr. Stanovich, in which we discuss the problem of Freud, the development of a rigorous scientific study of psychology, and what a mathematically-gifted horse can teach us about research methodology -- and much, much more! Man, I'm starting to sound like an informercial host; time to stop. I'll have the transcript posted within a week. I may pepper the transcript with links, so check it out!

Here are some links to Dr. Stanovich and his work. I can personally vouch for How to Think Straight About Psychology. Another of his books is on the way to my house, I'm sure it's excellent as well.

Dr. Stanovich's home page

Amazon.com: How to Think Straight About Psychology

Amazon.com: What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

Amazon.com: The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin

I hope you enjoy the episode, there's more to come! Send your feedback to host@psyconoclasm.com. Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated!

Episode 0 Transcript

host@psyconoclasm.com (Psyconoclast) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:37:00 GMT

Hello everyone, and welcome to episode zero of Psyconoclasm. Today is April 15, 2009. Psyconoclasm is a podcast where we examine psychology and related fields with a skeptical, scientific eye, trying to determine fact from fiction, educated guess from total nonsense. My name is David Bradley, and I am your host. Today I want to provide a little background on myself and this project. Psyconoclasm is what's known as a portmanteau (and I know I totally botched the pronunciation on that). It's a new word formed by fusing two other words: in this instance, psychology and iconoclasm. In the Intro to Psychology textbook I once read, it says that the etymology, or origin, of the word comes from the root psyche and the suffix -ology. -Ology means study or learn, so psychology is the study of the psyche. Psyche is a Greek word that can be loosely translated as “soul,” meaning the innermost part of life. It comes from the Greek myth of Psyche, which I won't get into here, but I'll link to it on the website, www.psyconoclasm.com. Psychology, then, can be thought of as the study of what it means to be human. Or animal. Or, even, a plant – but that last bit is the subject of another episode, I'm sure. A more formal definition I found in my textbook is this: psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. If you ever take an Intro to Psychology course, I've saved you the trouble of reading the first page.

Iconoclasm has several meanings. Originally, it referred to a group of people who destroyed the religious icons of their own culture. The word today, then, refers to someone who breaks from or disdains the dogma and traditions of his own culture. Colloquially, the word is used to refer to someone who is a contrarian by nature. What I hope to do is something similar. I want to put rational pressure against all ideas pertaining to psychology, from the mainstream to the fringe, and see what cracks and what doesn't. I want to destroy the icons that are not based in truth. I don't want to be a blind iconoclast, more nihilist than anything else. Instead, I want to expose as false those things taken on faith, and in doing so strengthen those things taken on evidence. I want to be a considered iconoclast in the field of psychology. I want to engage in: psyconoclasm.

I subscribe to a number of podcasts about various topics, including science and specifically psychology. While listening to some of them, I got the feeling that the hosts didn't apply rational thought or the scientific, skeptical way of thinking. They had guests on with fascinating claims and areas of expertise, but I was left wishing that the interviewer had pushed back a little more, if you know what I mean.

Each week or so I'll post an interview or solo content exploring some aspect of psychology. It'll be between 20-40 minutes, unless there's something super-compelling I want to post. Perhaps it'll be an interview with an expert on Emotional Freedom Technique, or someone explaining the usefulness of the Stanford Prison Experiment, or someone debunking claims of subliminal advertising. I may offer up a critique of an article in the popular press that reads more like a press release than a news piece. If anyone has any ideas for show topics or segments, feel free to e-mail me, David Bradley, at host@psyconoclasm.com.

And speaking of me, let me give my credentials: I have none. I graduated from Boston College in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in history. I've taken a half-dozen undergraduate psychology courses. I'm no expert. But, I don't think we need to be experts to examine these topics. We can't be experts in everything, so we need to be able to sift through what real experts say, what fake experts say, what the media say, and what our own intuitions say on a variety of topics. I hope you'll e-mail me to let me know what you think as you listen to this podcast, and let me know when I've neglected or discounted the opinion of a real expert, been taken in by a bad experiment, been too trusting of media accounts, or given my own biases – of which I know I have many – preference over the facts.

Thank you for listening to what I hope will be the most boring episode of Psyconoclasm. Psyconoclasm is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. You can reach me by e-mailing host@psyconoclasm.com, I promise to get back to you. Opening and closing music by Spiraling, from the Podsafe Music Network, available at music.podshow.com. I'll close with a quote from Carl Sagan, appropriate to launch this podcast series: “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.” Talk to you soon.