Buddha & Bombs

Here is my talk from TAM 2012 where I talk about the basic premise of The Self Illusion.

If you read some of the comments (which I know an author never should) there are some complaints that this sounds a bit like the teachings of Buddha – well duh! I make this point almost at the very beginning of The Self Illusion but when you only have 30 mins to give a talk and you have been told to make it even shorter because of scheduling problems, then you don’t have time to give a full account.

More importantly, I wanted to squeeze in a mention of the dowsing bomb detectors story as the perpetrators of this shameful activity were scheduled to appear in court that very morning in London. An officer from Avon & Somerset police kindly called me last night to inform me that the gang were due back in court on October 18th but they fully expected the case to be prosecuted in the spring. I knew that of course, because of the tireless efforts of Techowiz & Peter Robinson who have been keeping informed of events. Watch this space as they say.

How Best to Educate Our Children

I must apologize to regular readers of this blog as I have not been updating content and keeping you informed. As I mentioned earlier, this is largely due to my commitments to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, “Meet Your Brain” to audiences in Japan and Singapore. Today, I deliver the final lecture in Singapore that will be filmed for their television.

I have a couple of hours to kill and rather than spending them sightseeing, I thought I would take the time to update this blog. Despite the exhausting time spent traveling, as you can see from these photographs, I think the effort has been well worth it. Here is the crew in Japan…

 

Japanese Crew at Sendai

And here are two fans from the Singapore shows.

It is sometimes hard to take an objective view of public engagement of science when the benefits are too long-term to see. We need science to get humanity out of the hole it is digging itself into but still governments are being very short-sighted in how we promote and value science. Even then, the focus is on applied science and technology which of course is how science becomes useful, but ultimately science should be guided by theoretical curiosity.

I think my travels in the Far East have brought a few points home to me. In particular, I am concerned about education and the way it is heading. In the Far East, education is seen as the pathway to individual success and so there is an incredible pressure on students to succeed at school and enter University in order to enter a profession.

In the UK, we are treading down the same pathway to a similar model where the emphasis is on streamlining into professions rather than training children in critical thinking and a general appreciation of the diversity of human interest. To give credit to Japan and Singapore, these professions include engineers and scientists. I was also surprised to learn that many of the Singapore politicians have science backgrounds, which reflects very badly on our paltry single UK politician with a science degree.  So it would seem that science is valued in the Far East much greater than in the UK but even then, I am concerned with the way that this is being driven. Much of my media interviews have been focused on how to make our children smarter rather than how to make them happier. Of course, success and wealth are better than failure and poverty, but at what cost?

Children are competitive but this trait is fostered and encouraged by the need to match the expectations of their parents and the educational systems. I don’t have a simple solution and it is easy to see flaws. I also don’t think parents are necessarily wrong for wanting what is best for their children. My own daughter has just successfully entered University (way to go Martha) but with the rapid rise in tuition fees, most will be burdened by debt when they graduate. It’s no wonder then, that so many want to go into the financial “industry.” I have always found it amusing that this sector is called an ‘industry’ with financial ‘products.’ It is not an industry. It is organized (an often disorganized) gambling and nothing is made, so there are no products.

So I applaud the emphasis on science education in the Far East, but I lament the loss of encouraging the pursuit of science to foster curiosity and a sense of wonderment in children. My mentor and former colleague Richard Gregory was the epitome of this attitude as he often got excited like a child when talking about some amazing fact of the human mind.

My own field of psychology is often dismissed as worthless and not a science – often by ignorant people who cannot distinguish between science and technology. I also recognize that psychology has a real PR problem in the way it is presented to the general public as obvious truisms. (Look out for further posting on whether psychology is a science or not). However, I would argue that understanding the mind has important implications for how we conduct ourselves.

Irrational beliefs aside, I can clearly see why an obsession with status, wealth and how we value others has fuelled greed in the short term to produce the global recession we are currently in and will be for the foreseeable future. Only last week, during the euphoria and hype of the Olympics, the Bank of England, slipped out the gloomy prediction that there will be 0% growth for the next two years.

It doesn’t take psychologists to point out the reason why greed is not good, but I think psychologists can remind us about why happiness and fulfillment requires more than status and wealth and why most of us are destined to end up on our deathbeds thinking that we did not live the life we would have wanted. Once again, we are just not that good at knowing what is best for us, and more importantly our children.

 

Dowsing For Death- the end of ATSC?

Many people regard magical beliefs as a bit of harmless fun and in most cases that is true. However, there are those who are prepared to take advantage of other’s gullibility. In 2009, I was shocked to discover that a British company ATSC Ltd had been selling bomb-detecting devices to security forces around the world. The devices were nothing more than dowsing rods, a supernatural practice believed to reveal the location of water and minerals that has been around for hundreds of years. Despite the claims of various associations and practitioners, dowsing is nothing more than a psychological phenomena known as the “ideomotor effect.” Simply put, when you are aware of the location of a potential target, you make imperceptible body movements that make finely balanced rods or pendulums point in the same direction. There is no evidence that these devices or the user can detect sources through supernatural powers. Nevertheless many people believe that dowsing works.

The founder of ATSC Ltd, Jim McCormick, had decided to exploit this belief. His sophisticated dowsing rod, the AED 651, did not only reveal water and minerals but could detect concealed explosives, narcotics, weapons, human bodies, illegal ivory and even truffles whether they were underground, underwater and even at a distance of 3 miles from a plane. The key to the system was “programmed substance detection cards” which each carried the “frequency” of the substance they’re supposed to detect. This was achieved by a technology based on “nuclear quadruple resonance.” According to their website

“ADE651® is the latest generation of long-range detector products offered by ATSC. As with other ADE™ substance detectors, it incorporates long-range electromagnetic attraction to enable the effective identification of even the most difficult substances including explosive and narcotic materials. Unlike other trace detectors, that are limited by the need to have actual physical contact with the item sampled, the ADE651® is able to detect programmed substances at long distances safely and without the need to have actual physical contact with the substance. As such, the ADE651® continues to set standards for the detection of substances. “

Clearly bulls**t but not if you think dowsing can work. The reason that the device hit the headlines in 2009 was that the New York Times revealed that the Iraqi authorities had invested $80million to use them at security checkpoints rather than conducting thorough searches of potential suicide bombers. As a consequence, thousands of lives were lost in Baghdad due to car bombers driving undetected through checkpoints.

The reason I got involved was that it turned out that Jim McCormick lived locally to me in Somerset. So I blogged about it, to help raise awareness. In the month I got involved over 1,000 had been killed. To my utter surprise, I received a comment from Mr McCormick  defending his actions and the device and issuing me an invitation to check out his device. This was an opportunity to expose a fraud that was too good to miss. Maybe he really believed the device worked but I was dubious. As a former police officer with connections to security forces around the world, I thought that Jim McCormick had cynically exploited desperate situations to profit.

When it became known that I was in contact with the elusive Mr McCormick the BBC Newsnight team contacted me and we set about trying to set up a sting to confront the fraudster. I corresponded with Jim via email to organize a meeting but he failed to show. In any event, we decided to go ahead with the broadcast in Jan 2010. The following day, McCormick was arrested and an export order ban was imposed.

That was nearly two and a half years ago. In the meantime, ATSC Ltd continued to trade with other countries not covered by the ban including Mexico. It looked like all our efforts had been to no avail. However, in February this year, I was visited by detectives from the Avon & Somerset police and asked to give a statement. Yesterday I got a phone to say that Jim McCormick was due in court to face six counts of fraud. I await the outcome but sincerely hope that this is not considered a simple lapse of magical thinking when it comes to dowsing but an act of deliberate profiteering that has indirectly cost thousands of lives.

Blogmania

I started this blog back in 2008 at the suggestion of the publisher of my first book. I have posted 372 items that have generated over 3,700 comments. The numbers are ok (700,000 visits) but if you really want to make an impact you need to blog on sites that have huge volumes of traffic.

I have just published my first blog for the Huffington Post which has been an exciting experience and have a steady start on the Psychology Today site. I will keep writing blogs here and of course, it is a handy website to load up showreels and pictures but it will be difficult to keep generating new material. I note that many of the bloggers out there are chasing original material which is why any new science story is immediately snapped up. In my field it is easy to spot where fellow bloggers are getting their stories, mostly from the top journals such as Psychological Science. Their job is made all the easier by many associations providing press releases on home websites.The trouble is that there is only so much information that can go round and many writers end up recycling items in a world that expects rapid online publication as described in Nick Davies in his book on the phenomenon of “churnalism.”

I have to also admit that some of the blogs I write have ended up in my books. For example, one of my personal favorites about being followed by a troll claiming to be Helen Mirren last year ended up in a chapter in The Self Illusion about how the internet is changing the way we portray our selves in the new social media networks. However, unlike churnalism, I have authored much of the material though I accept that this is mostly based on my research of other people’s work.

But there is a danger of trying to write too much to satisfy demands. Only this week, Jonah Lehrer attracted flak from journalists who accused him of self-plagiarizing his own work. He was forced to make a public apology but I fully understand how he came to end up recycling his own writing. I too have done this on occasion as when you write something that really works and then use it again.

So it would be wiser to stop writing for so many outlets. However, this blog is mine and I write it for freedom of expression and no financial gain. (I also don’t get paid for blogging on the other sites FYI). I am also effectively unedited here so I can say what I want and that is a luxury that I will not give up. It may mean fewer postings in future but do stop back for thoughts that I would hesitate to publish publicly on other sites. After all, this is my little baby

Finally,”The Self Illusion” eBook is Out

Normal blogging services will soon be returned but I am pleased to announce that the Kindle eBook version is now available here on Amazon.com. Apologies to all of you who have been frustrated trying to get an eBook version and I hope that you still have the enthusiasm for it. So far, the signs are all promising. In the meantime, there is an forthcoming episode of “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman” being aired this week in the US that I believe will cover some of the material my book deals with. It’s a shame the producers did not know that my book was available. If you are a US viewer and do watch the show, post here to let me know what you made of it. We don’t get the show in the UK until next year I guess.

Why You Don’t Use Only 10% of Your Brain

No doubt you have heard the saying that we humans only use 10% of our brain. It is a phrase that has been used in adverts for computer hard drives to choosing which airline to fly and is so common that a large proportion around 25-30% of well-educated university students believe that it is true as reported in a paper back in 1998 by Higbee and Clay. Even our kids believe it. Earlier this year, I gave a lecture on the brain to 300 teenage school children. We wanted to get an idea of what they knew already before the lecture so we asked questions such as do you know what a brain cell is called and so on. We also asked them how much of their brain did they think humans use. Nearly all of them gave the 10% figure.

As familiar as the 10% claim may seem, it is a myth. Moreover, it’s a pernicious myth exploited by those who want to sell us hope of greater success by tapping into hidden reserves of mental energy either through brain enhancing programmes or supernatural powers. There is something appealing about the idea that each us harbours untapped powers. The shelves of pop psychology are dominated by books that claim they will help you unleash your full potential and this strategy of selling false neuroscience is shamelessly perpetuated by authors and publishers who think that the public prefer to buy books that they believe will empower them by unlocking the unused secret 90% of their brain.

The truth is you use all of your brain. Humankind did not come all this way down the difficult evolutionary path that ruthlessly whittled away our descendents with less complex brains just so we modern humans could loaf around using only one tenth of that hard won mental machinery. Neurons are continually discharging nerve impulses at a background rate. If they are not active they lose their connectivity. When they are stimulated, this idling rate rapidly increases like the chatter of a Geiger counter but they are always on as it were.

No one is quite sure who started this rumor but some think that it can be traced to the North American father of psychology, William James who wrote in The Energies of Men, “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” Taken out of context, this could mean that we don’t actually use part of our brain, which is an unfortunate claim coming from someone who otherwise, anticipated many of the major discoveries in the study of the brain and mind.

James was making an impassioned plea to readers in an essay about striving but unfortunately when it comes to your brain, not using any part of it does not make any scientific sense. You can of course, learn to use strategies to improve performance and that is perfectly valid but that does not mean that you are not using some parts of your brain. All of the brain is always on and is always hungry. The brain weighs on average only 2% of the body but uses 20% of the energy. A recent imaging paper by Zhu and colleagues shows that the grey matter, which is predominantly composed of neurons, uses up 77% of the energy requirements of the brain. It may sound like vast amounts of energy are being expended but if you remember that overall hourly body energy usage is about 100W. So the brain uses the equivalent of a 20W domestic light. Maybe that’s where bright ideas come from? Hold on, a light bulb just went on over my head. I feel another urban myth in the making.

US Publication Day!

At last it is publication day in the US. Here is an interview that I did with Sam Harris talking about it. If you have come to this site then you are probably already very familiar with Sam who is one of the most influential and brilliant thinkers today.