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Later in this article, I’m going to use an example that will involve a garden, a sailboat, a running man, or a train. Can you accurately guess which one? In a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) Cornell psychology professor Daryl Bem has published an article that suggests you can, more often than you might expect just by chance.
Does hands-on “energy healing” really work or are outcomes attributed to such healing merely a matter of self-healing, as in the placebo effect? This is what sociologist (by day) and energy researcher (by night?) William Bengston set out to test, motivated by his own remarkable experience with an energy healer who cured his intractable back pain. To avoid the placebo effect, he used laboratory mice instead of human subjects. The mice were injected with a form of cancer that would normally cause fatal tumors within a few weeks. This mouse-model of cancer development is a standard, well-understood method of conducting cancer research, used in dozens of laboratories around the world. No mice ever spontaneously cured themselves of this cancer, and the best cancer drugs in the world only slow its progression. Bengston hoped that if an energy healer could slow the cancer growth in these mice even a little, as measured by a few more days of survival than expected, it would provide dramatic evidence that something big was going on. Bengston got his evidence…and then some. Here’s a short excerpt from his new book:
I have lectured and written about the scientific taboo that prohibits scientists from openly studying psi. One way this prejudice manifests is by being invited to give a lecture at a scientific conference, and then finding yourself disinvited after someone on the conference committee discovers that the invitee has an interest in parapsychology. The idea of psi is so troubling to this person that he or she (mostly he) insists that the committee cancel the invitation. One can imagine the hysterics that must accompany this request.
The Wikipedia entry on Masaru Emoto is a good example of why no one should trust an encyclopedia written by anonymous amateurs. I know it is possible, at least in principle, to edit Wikipedia pages to make corrections. But it is also possible for pranksters to change information on any page just for fun. And I know teenagers who regularly do this to confuse their classmates.
“No journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith
Pasted below is an excellent article describing why, in science, it is important to feel comfortable with one’s stupidity (more like ignorance than stupidity). Non-scientists may not realize that most of the time in scientific research – especially research at the edge of the known, where all the excitement is – we really don’t know what we’re doing. Those few things we think we do understand are taught in elementary college textbooks.