Wowi Maui

I have not been posting alot recently because I have been trying to finish a bunch of work. But as you can now see, I have finally found my self stranded on a desert island so I have time to start blogging again. My new book. “The Domesticated Brain” has been handed in to the publishers and is due out next May. So what next? While the Western hemisphere settles down to miserable winter, I am on the island of Maui working on a film project based around SuperSense. I am here to edit the footage that we have shot and get some inspiration – well that was the line that my partners sold me when they persuaded me to come out to the Pacific island

Maui is a real trip. Unbelievable beauty and some of the most “colorful” individuals. Last night I met Mur at a dinner party who is an “Earthman” currently visiting the island. He proceeded to tell the gathered guests about his new book where he describes his love affair with a goddess from another dimension, his travels in Tibet and his personal war against authority, the Vietnam war, and yup everything that was not cool. Some asked him what was it like making love to a goddess. With a completely straight face he explained how their auras of different shades of light had mixed to form a new blend. I’m thinking cosmic photoshop. He really did make me think I had entered a wormhole as it sounded straight out of an Oliver Stone reconstruction movie of the 1960’s. Another guest asked me, “Well that’s amazing, how does a scientist make sense of that story?” I was dumb-struck and offered “No comment.” Jeez, Maui is Californian woo on steroids.

There is so much woo in Maui that I am regarded as a bit of an outcast which is an interesting turn up for the books. Still I hope to report back shortly with more stories of the extra-dimensional people I hope to meet. At the very least I hope to work on my tan  – oops – I mean chakras.

Not Just Ladders Trigger Superstitious Behavior

 

I am appearing at this years Secret Garden Party where the theme is Superstition….though with David Icke on the bill, general wackiness might be more appropriate as a theme. Anyway, it has been a while since I posted (The new book is nearly done!). So I was pleased when my Icelandic friend Hjalti Hjalmarsson sent me this photograph of a public path in Russia. It is not a ladder but clearly there is some superstitious thinking going on. It reminds me of an old 1974 study where they found that people would be more likely to walk under a ladder after observing a someone else tempting fate, but not when they were unobserved.

Updates & Next Year

It has been a while since I last blogged but it’s not because I did not have anything to say but rather there has been too much happening. I was abroad touring most of April and have yet to write up my account of China and S. Korea as well as Sweden. I hope to get to them soon as I have some interesting insights.

Then there was the outcome of the trial of Jim McCormick, the businessman who sold dowsing rods as bomb detectors on the day of my return to the UK. There is still more to come from that story over the coming months as Gary Bolton and others face the wrath of the law.

In the meantime, it has been exam period so that has been busy. I  have also been fitting in a bit of  TV here and there but increasingly I am finding that I have to turn down invitations – which is a good thing I guess. One thing I did do this week was Dara O’Briain’s Science Club – a popular BBC2 science show which was a great laugh. I will post nearer the broadcast date but here is a picture of me with this giant of a man – he really is – I look like his glove puppet in this picture

I have just finished marking the final year exam papers for my undergraduate and aside from some project students and admin, I am nearly the completion of the 2012/13 academic year.

So what of next year? Well I am finally taking that sabbatical fellowship I was awarded last year by my wonderful University who have been incredibly supportive in my activities. I doubt another institution would have been so good – how many workers get to say that about their employers? I really cannot say how much I enjoy being at Bristol.

Even though I could just sit about on my backside, the reality is that I will be working harder than ever. I have a new book published by Penguin which is currently going through the edit stage but due out in the summer of 2014. I also have a controversial new grant starting in September which I will tell you more about then. There are various other seeds that have been planted but the one thing that I am most excited about is that I am making an independent documentary based on the content of “SuperSense” that will be filmed over the course of the next year. These are definitely unchartered waters but after years, I am finally been given the opportunity to do something that I want.

So hopefully I will be able to keep you posted with updates of the various events along the way – if I get the time.

Not Exactly the Drug Company I Had Expected

Over the past couple of years, I have done quite a few public speaking events as well as corporate engagements. When I received an invitation from Jay to speak at a “Science and Cocktails” in Copenhagen, I checked out the website and assumed on the basis of the sleek and stylish design that this was another corporate gig. Maybe a pharmaceutical company with a plethora of web designers, polished steel and glass sculptures. It also had the Niels Bohr endorsement.

I guess I should have reconsidered when I was asked if I wanted to stay at a house in the community of Christiania where the event was being held. I try to avoid, if I can, staying with hosts because a) it is good to have space and b) some hosts can be well-intentioned but fail to gauge what speakers need.  So I declined and accepted a room in a hotel in downtown Copenhagen much to my later regret.

If I had had the time and inclination then I should have checked out Christiania as I was confused by a place that seemed to exist inside Copenhagen. Even the email from my friend Susan Blackmore, telling me that I was going to have a great time did not twig in my overly occupied brain. I should say that from December, I have been teaching full time (when I was supposed to be on sabbatical), finishing the first draft of my new book (more about that later), submitting grants (I’ve let this slip with all the other commitments) and co-writing papers with my students and colleagues (sometimes you have to be very pushy here). Moreover, I had block-booked April for speaking engagements. I’m off to China and South Korea at the end of the week and I am hoping that I return un-nuked for a speaking engagement at the end of the month in Sweden.

When I arrived at Copenhagen, I was met by Jay (a theoretical physicist with dreadlocks), Costas (a theoretical physicist who knows a thing or two about string theory) and Rob (who knows a thing or two about making cocktails). They kindly escorted me to the hotel and then we made our way over to Christiania for dinner.

Christiania established in 1971 on the site of a former military ammunitions site is a massive 84 acre site with around 1,000 hippies. Also known as “Freetown” it has its own TV station, garbage collection and other municipals.

A Christiania Garbage Truck

There are three rules when entering Christiania, “Have fun. Don’t Run and Don’t Take Photographs.” The many cannabis dealers that line a dirt track through the middle of the campus known as “Pusher’s Road” are breaking the law and to be frank, are less hippie and more “pop a cap in your ass” types. Of course, just about everyone smokes pot in Christiania but the heavy dealers aspect of the set-up is less savory.

The Bath House Where I Was “Goosed” During the Midnight Sauna

Speaking of which, I ate some delicious vegetarian food when I was Christiania, some of the best I have tasted. I also arrived on a special day of the month when the Bath House stays open until midnight for mixed saunas. This is one for the bucket list. Fifty men and women (a record I am told) were squeezed into a sauna, while a shamanic “goose master” flavored the hot air with essential oils and gesticulations as he wafted the scented steam over the naked bodies. When I was told there would be a goose master, I wondered exactly what he would do. Apparently goose or something very close to it, means “misty” in Danish.

Bar Staff in Lab Coats Mixing Wicked Cocktails

Anyway the next day, I had my gig to a packed audience of over 300 in the cinema which had a bar at the back. The cocktails very really excellent and the volunteers were a wonderful mixed bag. Rob & Costas made an amazing frozen cocktail sorbet using liquid nitrogen that was sublime. Unlike other meetings were the audience tends to be pretty partisan, this was a mixed bunch. The thing about Christiania it attracts all types. There is even a bar called “Woodstock” that seemed to be entirely populated with Inuit – a legacy of the time that Denmark ruled over Greenland.

Anyway, I had a great time and while I know that I am not really suited to this kind of lifestyle, part of me felt that there was more to life that slogging from one corporate gig to another. I look forward to being invited back one day.

Essential Bears

I am finishing off the first draft of my next book which is one reason why I have not been updating my blogs recently. I also have several spinning plates up in the air related to various projects I am working on – all will be revealed later!

In the meantime, while researching the book, I came across this company, “Treasured Teddy Bears” of New Jersey that makes teddy bears our of sentimental garments that have belonged to loved ones. Again, essentialism is the best explanation for this type of thinking which is supported by the testimonials provided by satisfied clients,

“I can feel my Grandmother’s spirit in Kathryn the Bear
Kay in Cincinnati, OH
“Absolutely Magnificent! These Bears have a personality all their own”
Maureen in Newark, NJ
“When I opened the box and saw the Bears, I had tears in my eyes. They are beautiful”
Ronna in Savannah, Ga

What would they do with Jeffrey Dahmer or Fred West’s clothing? Probably make a Chucky Doll

 

Modern Witch Burning Shock

I just saw this pop up on my Twitter feed from Derren Brown about a US magician who was set alight by the host of TV show in the Domican Republic. Here is a link to the article and details are still very sketchy but apparently, the host ignited a liquid that is used to exorcise witches, and threw it over the head of US magician Wayne Houchin.

Wayne suffered severe burns and is currently in hospital though he has just Tweeted that he may not be permanently scarred. Doesn’t matter, he could have been killed. This is such a strange attack as the host seems to offer assistance but we are assured that this was not a stunt to get publicity. Derren Brown tweets that the host set fire to Wayne to rid him of evil spirits. It doesn’t look like a stunt and so reminds me of the blog I wrote about modern beliefs in witches and the horrific examples of witch burning in Africa as shown in this distressing footage. WARNING – NSFL . So it is not just, primitive, uneducated natives in Africa who don’t know better (BTW I am being deliberately facetious!) but also Westernized, presumably well-educated TV presenters.

Here is another blog that provides more details and a translation of the statement released after the attack.

Oh Those Sexy Swedes

I am due to give a talk in Gothenburg (Göteborg) Sweden next April at a International Science Festival. I was planning on talking about The Self Illusion or some other brain-related talk but after hearing about the arrest of an unnamed woman who has been charged with violating the peace of the dead, I think that I must talk about disgust and essentialism.

When police turned up her apartment they discoverd over 100 human bones and initially thought that a murder had taken place. It turns out that she probably obtained them from a morgue. However, it is not the theft that has the liberal Swedes in such a bother but rather this may be a bona fide case of necrophilia.

In addition to the bones, they discovered photos on two CDs labelled “My necrophilia” and “My first experience” which contained a number of document files and pictures where she is using the bones as sex toys. I am assuming that the femur came in handy. I have posted one of the less disturbing images of her licking a skull. Actually, the one of the skull and her teddy bear kills two birds with one image so that I can talk about essential objects and how these are extensions of our materialism of the self.

Somehow, I don’t think I can resist the temptation to talk about our attitudes to the dead and the bones they leave behind when I visit in the spring. This will be one example of disgust that the Swedish audience should understand!

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