Science, Superstitions and Skeptical Life

From Wikipedia:

Michael A. Stackpole (born 1957) is a science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Star Wars and Battletech books… From 1977 on, he worked as a designer of role-playing games for various gaming companies, and wrote dozens of magazine articles for the industry. During this time, in response to the accusations of Patricia Pulling (among others) who felt that the “occult” elements of Dungeons & Dragons were driving people to satanism, murder and suicide, perhaps even as part of a vast Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy, Stackpole did a research study on all American legal cases where injury or death had been attributed to gaming. He found that not only were the links to gaming very weak, but that even if all of the reports had been valid, they showed that gamers were violent or suicidal far less often than the general public [my blog entry on studies regarding the claims can be found here on my post ''Dungeons And Dragons - Or Mazes And Monsters?].

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… that every animal in Australia releases its own Christmas album.

If Steve Irwin was still around, we’d have him doing this with a sodding crocodile. Despite this, I suspect we should be girding ourselves for the horror of Terri using John frackin’ Edward - click the link, a rather revealing attitude there - as a ‘psychic conduit’ to tell the world that he’d really like everyone to buy three copies.

Next, Sammy The Saltwater does ‘Let It Splash, Let it Splash, Let it Splash‘ for an extended remix, with a Baz Luhrmann-directed video featuring dizzying editing that’ll have you vomiting your figgy pudding. Then it’ll be Wal The Wombat presenting a confused, muffled rendition of ‘I Saw Marsupial Snogging Sandy Paws‘ with his bottom in the camera for much of the song as he tries to back his snorting way out of his burrow.

Please, fight back, America. Let’s have an hour of a puzzled Bald American Eagle blankly staring us down as someone plays ‘Jingle Bells’, urging it off camera to bop about a bit. Maybe Derek of Skepticality can have their gorgeous logo Remy pug-dog wuffle a few snorfs to augment a luv-dup rendition of Weird Al’s classic, ‘Christmas at Ground Zero‘. Arroooooo….

Credit to ‘Living the Scientific Life‘ for having me aghast over the possibilities. Not the bells. Noo… please, not the bells, the bells!!!!

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From The Scientific American Magazine an excellent six-page article - “Magic and the Brain: How Magicians “Trick” the Mind - Magicians have been testing and exploiting the limits of cognition and attention for hundreds of years. Neuroscientists are just beginning to catch up”:

…In an unpublished study in 2006 Kuhn and cognitive neuroscientists Ben A. Parris and Tim L. Hodgson, both then at the University of Exeter in England, showed videos of magic tricks that involved apparent violations of cause and effect to subjects undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The subjects’ brain images were compared with those of a control group: people who watched videos showing no apparent causal violations. The investigators found greater activation in the anterior cingulate cortex among the subjects who were watching magic tricks than among the controls. The finding suggests that this brain area may be important for interpreting causal relationships.

The work of Kuhn and his colleagues only begins to suggest the power of the techniques of magic for manipulating attention and awareness while studying the physiology of the brain. If neuroscientists learn to use the methods of magic with the same skill as professional magicians, they, too, should be able to control awareness precisely and in real time. If they correlate the content of that awareness with the functioning of neurons, they will have the means to explore some of the mysteries of consciousness itself.

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Okay - strike me confused… he’s now saying he IS doing magic tricks? Thanks to iTricks, the home of magic news online:

International Magic Convention in London - the recipient of the Berglas Foundation Award is Uri Geller.

In reflection of all of the nonsense he’s promoted over the years - you can see many of these on the YouTube videos, such as those featuring Randi debunking Geller - and even magicians he’s taken to court… well, you can see why I’m confused as to why he gets an award!?

Is this a political effort to align himself with magicians, seeing that the ‘tricks of the trade’ are becoming more and more known as just ‘tricks’? Can the likes of Richard Saunders openly holding ‘bending spoon’ sessions in Sydney and even Dr Wiseman holding the largest ‘mass spoon bending’ session at TAM6 play a part?

I guess Geller was acknowledging it in a way with answers he gave to questions at the convention:

From the exclusive on iTricks: When asked about his career, Uri was very open about if he’s be able to start his career in today’s age:

If I was to start my career now, my career would be destroyed, the speed of the internet, the technology allowing events to be reported, I’d not be able to start my career in the way I did those years ago.

Get all of the exclusive interview on the iTricks site - and enjoy the classic Fry and Laurie take on it all, way back when…

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“Although it is hard to estimate just how many people have conscious memories of apparently being abducted by aliens (French, 2001), it is likely that the figure runs into at least several thousand worldwide.” (French, Santomauro, Hamilton, Fox & Thalbourne, 2008).

In a study of hypnotic-like experiences, Spanos and Barber (1968) gave the following instructions to 90 student nurses: I want you to close your eyes and hear a phonograph record with words and music playing “White Christmas.” Keep listening to the phonograph playing “White Christmas” until I ask you to stop. (Mintz & Alpert, 1972).

Thanks to Mind Hacks blog, which recently featured an entry about a paper on Ganzfeld Hallucinations from the latest special issue of Cortex (an edition which explores the “Neuropsychology of Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs”), I became intrigued by another new paper in the same issue. It’s by Christopher French, Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton, Rachel Fox and Michael Thalbourne, on ‘Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience‘. There I discovered a rather amusing Christmas theme when investigating belief in aliens!

Firstly, Thalbourne’s work on paranormal scales is something I’m using in writing my own M.Ed studies - in particular, the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale, or’ ASGS’ (Thalbourne & Delin, 1993). In the ASGS, an 18-point scale is used to measure belief in psychic ability terms, and to differentiate groups who believe in paranormal phenomena (’sheep’) and those who do not (’goats’) (Blackmore, 1992; Schmeidler & McConnell, 1958; Thalbourne & Delin, 1993).

The Australian Sheep-Goat Scale cropped up again when I was doing the Koestler Parapsychology online course on Parapsychology created by Dr Caroline Watt. The required studies for the section on “Belief in the Paranormal” discussed the research and how researchers discriminate between what makes a believer and what makes a non-believer in paranormal phenomena. For my own part, I questioned how we can so easily split people into two categories of either ’sheep or goat’ - could a survey of a large group of people find some ‘middle-ground’ subjects and use them instead for a psi study? That way, eliminate a strictly polarised sheep-goat effect? With only a few weeks left in the course, I can say that it’s been a fascinating journey through parapsychology and how skeptical viewpoints (rather than just nay-saying ‘counter-advocates!’) do indeed enrich and help promote rigorous science in response to paranormal claims.

In regards to the first author of the 2008 paper, I originally learned of French’s work last year in regards to the psychological variables which appear to be correlated with susceptibility to false memories. Apparently such memories also correlate with paranormal belief and the tendency to report anomalous experiences, including claims of alien contact (French, 2003). Some of this was presented as a part of Dr Krissie Wilson’s lecture at the Australian Skeptics National Conference 2007, in Tasmania (you can see my interview with her on a TANK Vodcast episode, hosted on YouTube).

So, you can understand my interest in seeing this co-authored paper as combining several people’s work that I had learned about! Despite this, I became interested in one particular reference within this newer study:

[click to continue…]

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As you may have heard in the interview featured on the last episode of the Skeptic Zone podcast, there’s protests going on to avoid being prosecuted for protesting World Youth day - by using a fake “Pope-mobile” - thanks to http://worldtruthday.org/

If you didn’t see it in action around the streets of Sydney, it looked like this:

Now, there’s a court case going on regarding the ‘mobile’:

A Protest Popemobile was built by Sydney activists as a protest against the Pope’s visit and World Youth Day activities in July. Details of its adventures, photos, and a video, are linked from the website worldTRUTHday.org.

It received the attention of the police, with vehicle driver Ian Bryce being booked and fined for “having a roof ornament likely to distract motorists”.

[This, in a city that has many, many popular 'signs' on cars? That are popular world-wide with 'car advertising' strategies? I think that'll be the case for the defence.]

The vehicle (in this form) was issued with a Defect Notice and put off the road. The operator, Ian Bryce, is to appear on court on Monday 1 December, at Downing Centre (Local Court - Criminal), 143 Liverpool St, near Elizabeth St. Your support is encouraged (contact 0408 177 007):

We now learn that the State Government ran $100 million over its WYD budget. Come and let them know what you think.

Here’s a photo taken from today from the court appearance - all the best to Ian Bryce with his court-case!

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