Order the book from Amazon

LISA RANDALL HAS BEEN JUSTLY APPRAISED by Time magazine as one of the “100 most influential people in the world” for her work in theoretical particle physics. From her position at Harvard University, she often travels: to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Switzerland, where her theories are being put to the test in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); to speaking engagements with professional and public audiences about her work in particular and the awe and wonder of science in general; and to rock formations where her chalked fingers can find ways to defy gravity. On the side, she writes popular books, such as her acclaimed Warped Passages¹.

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Randall picks up the story from where she left off when the LHC was years away from first collision, expanding her horizon from, as she poetically puts it, “what’s so small to you is so large to me” to “what’s so large to you is so small to me.” In other words, the book ranges from the smallest known particles to the entire bubble universe, from 10⁻³⁵ meters (the Planck length, where quantum gravity rules) to 10²⁷ meters (the entire visible universe, 100 billion light-years across, where dark matter and dark energy dominate), a stunning 62 orders of magnitude. (Randall correctly notes the age of the universe at 13.75 billion years, clarifying her apparently paradoxical figure of 100 billion light-years thusly: “The reason the universe as a whole is bigger than the distance a signal could have traveled given its age is that space itself has expanded.” She unpacks that sentence in the book.)

At the time of this writing, eBooks occupy about 20 percent of sales space; that is, one out of every five books sold has no cover or binding save the faux effects offered digitally by the various eBook readers. Of late, however, a tiny and growing sliver of the pie is being carved out by audio books (primarily through Audible.com and iTunes), most unabridged and read by professional actors and readers. These provide a welcome alternative to those of us yoked to our iPods and MP3 players inside cars and gyms or on bicycles and hiking trails. Since fumbling around with cassette tapes and Sony Walkmans in the early 1980s, I have consumed on the order of 500- plus nonfiction audio books, so a measure of an author’s skill to communicate complex material clear enough to penetrate a multitasking cortex has become a mark of quality (or lack thereof). Many are called. Few are chosen. Randall’s explanatory prose places her among the elect. She is not alone, but she is rare among the many who have attempted the herculean task of explaining to us uninitiated the daunting science of theoretical particle physics. She devotes most of Knocking on Heaven’s Door to covering this science, along the way offering fascinating accounts of how the LHC was built, how the experiments are run, and, most notably, the engineering prestidigitation involved in teasing out nature’s secrets via energies never before witnessed on Earth.

The book’s subtitle hints that it may be yet another long and tiresome treatise on science and religion, with either convoluted (and ultimately failed) attempts at conciliation or pugnacious left hooks and fast jabs at the faithful. Neither are Randall’s modus operandi. She states her case succinctly and moves on. Stephen Jay Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria,” for example, would work if only religions would stick to doing what they do best (providing aid and comfort to the poor and needy). However, conflicts arise the moment “religions attempt to address the external reality of the universe.” When they do, Randall notes, “[t]his leaves religious views open to falsification. When science encroaches on domains of knowledge that religion attempts to explain, disagreements are bound to arise.” As science expands its realm, the magisteria are becoming ever more overlapping. The deeper problem, however, is that if divine providence were on the offing, “it is inconceivable from a scientific perspective that God could continue to intervene without introducing some material trace of his actions.” In other words, if God did act in the world scientists would want to know how he did it. “Did He apply a force or transfer energy?” Randall asks rhetorically. “Is God manipulating electrical processes in our brains? … On a larger level, if God gives purpose to the universe, how does He apply His will?” Inquiring minds want to know. Religion has no answer. I know because I have asked many times.

Another myth Randall thankfully busts is the notion of truth and beauty in science. What can a “beautiful truth” in science possibly mean? Take a look at a page of equations and formulas from a recent theoretical physics paper. Mind-boggling to the untrained maybe, complicated and detailed undoubtedly, surprising or inspiring occasionally, but beautiful? “Beauty is often agreed on only a posteriori,” Randall explains, although she adds the proviso “even though aesthetic criteria for science might be poorly defined, they are nonetheless useful and omnipresent. They help guide our research, even if they provide no guarantee of success or truth.” Considering weak interactions, which violate parity symmetry, she remarks, “The breaking of such a fundamental symmetry as left-right equivalence seems innately disturbing and unattractive. Yet this very asymmetry is what is responsible for the range of masses we see in the world, which is in turn necessary for structure and life.”

Knocking on Heaven’s Door came out before the faster-than-light neutrino experiment was announced² and paraded through the press as an ostensible refutation of Einstein, implying in some circles that science is nothing more than one failed theory after another. Why thence should we believe anything scientists say about evolution, global warming, or vaccines? Randall ends her book with a thoughtful discussion of how science really works to resolve anomalies unexplained by the prevailing paradigm. Einstein did not overturn Newton; he just expanded on the physical properties of the universe at high speed and large scale. If you want to get a spacecraft to the moon, Newton will take you there. As flawed as it sometimes can be, science is still the most reliable tool ever devised for understanding the world. Few have captured this essence better than Randall in Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

This review was originally published in the November 2011 issue of Science magazine.

A review of Pope Brock’s Charlatan. America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam.

Human cognition has a problem — anecdotal thinking comes naturally whereas scientific thinking does not. The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism illustrates this barrier. On the one side are scientists who have been unable to find any causal link between the symptoms of autism and the vaccine’s ingredients. On the other are parents who noticed that shortly after having their children vaccinated autistic symptoms appeared. Anecdotal associations are so powerful that they cause people to ignore contrary evidence. In the vaccination case the imagined culprit for autism’s cause is the preservative thimerosal, yet it breaks down into ethylmercury that is expelled from the body too quickly to have a damaging effect (plus autism continues to be diagnosed in children born after thimerosal was removed from vaccines). The story holds power despite the contrary facts.

The reason for our cognitive disconnect is that the brain evolved to be cautious. We favor anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are `belief engines’ that seek connections.

Even in the age of modern science, our faith in anecdotes can make us easy to exploit. Any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful testimonials. Enter John R. Brinkley, one of the most notorious medical quacks of the first half of the twentieth century, and his nemesis Morris Fishbein, the quackbusting editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Their long struggle throughout the 1920s and 1930s, wonderfully retold in a gripping narrative by Pope Brock, brings to life this tension between folk and scientific medicine.

As Brock ably demonstrates, Brinkley came of age on the tail end of the freewheeling patent remedy era in which con-men hawked their wares out of the side of wagons:

They usually performed at night. A platform was unfolded and torches placed at each corner as the audience gathered, drawn by handbills and word of mouth. First a fiddler or a dancer got the crowd warmed up. A short morality play followed, in which a noble head-of-house or ringleted female died pathetically for lack of a miracle tonic, identified by name. Finally the physician himself (Brinkley) shot onstage in a dinner-plate hat, cutaway coat, and pious pants that buttoned up the sides, theeing and thousing, singing and selling, waving a bottle of Ayer’s Cathartic Pills. Or maybe Burdock Blood Bitters or Aunt Fanny’s Worm Candy. One thing was for sure, whatever it was cured whatever you had.

What many men had, Brinkley discovered as he honed his scam, was a lack of sexual vitality, and he developed a surgical technique that offered the type of firm results that his male clientele so desperately sought: goat testis sewn right into the patient’s scrotum, which he likened to “embedding a marble in an apple.” Come one, come all. And they did, to the tune of $750 per surgery, advertised widely in newspapers (a study revealed that over half of all newspaper advertising at the time was for patent medicines) and the new fangled technology, radio, which Brinkley took to like an evangelist to television. It made him a rich man, but as his business grew he got careless, performing operations both before and after happy hour, and fobbing off work to assistants whose medical credentials were even shadier than his own (Brinkley graduated from the unaccredited and improbably named Eclectic Medical University of Kansas City). “As a result dozens of patients died over the years, either in the operating room or shortly after their return home,” Brock explains. “Many others were permanently maimed.”

This attracted the attention of the ambitious Morris Fishbein, whose career coincided with the rise of the American Medical Association’s attempt to reign in flimflamery through accrediting medical colleges and licensing practitioners. Fishbein made his public mark in 1923 when the Chicago Daily News sent him to investigate the “Hot Girl of Escanaba” (Michigan), a woman who suffered from a temperature of 115 degrees for two weeks. Fishbein exposed her as a “hysterical malingerer” when he discovered that a flesh colored hot water bottle was employed to elevate rectal thermometer readings. “Along with making him famous as a fraud buster extraordinaire,” Brock notes, “the case fixed him in a role he would revel in for years to come: the face, the popularizer, the lord high priest of the AMA.” For the next two decades Fishbein pursued the country’s “most daring and dangerous” swindler, as he called Brinkley, until he finally brought him down in a decisive courtroom confrontation that reads like a Hollywood film script.

Stripped of his license to practice medicine and embroiled in lawsuits, Brinkley eventually moved to Mexico where he dispensed pseudo-medical twaddle over the airways through a “border blasting” radio station that could be heard all the way to Canada. When the Mexican government shut him down in 1941 — in part because of his public sympathies for the Nazis — he was a broken man. “My health is gone. I am ready for the bed and out…” he wrote his wife three days before a heart attack terminated his tenure of 56 years.

Fishbein’s promotion of science-based medicine was heroic in his day, but medical flapdoodle flourishes today on the internet so every medical association and journal needs a quackbusting Fishbein on its staff, for without such eternal vigilance, folk medicine will trump scientific medicine in the minds of patients.

(New York, 2008, ISBN 978-0307339881)
This review was originally published in Nature.

A review of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe.

In the final weeks of his life Albert Einstein learned of the death of his old physicist friend Michele Besso from his Zurich student days six decades before. “He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” Einstein wrote to the Besso family. “That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.”

What did Einstein mean by “us believing physicists”? Did he mean belief in the models of theoretical physics that make no distinction between past, present, and future? Did he mean belief in some impersonal force that exists above such time constraints? Was he just being polite and consoling? Who knows? Such is the enigma of the most well-known scientist in history whose fame was such that nearly everything he wrote or said was scrutinized for its meaning and import; thus, it is easy to yank such quotes out of context and spin them in any direction one desires. Without a rich personal context in which to situate Einstein’s thoughts and theories it is hard to know for sure how to nuance his words. Until now.

So much has been written about Einstein, but until recently his literary executors protected his convoluted and controversial personal life so carefully that we had only snippets of what was going on outside Einstein’s scientific mind and social circle. Thanks to the Einstein Papers Project under the direction of Diana Kormos Buchwald at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, the archival materials are now available to tell the full story, and Walter Isaacson has written a narrative masterpiece that merges into a seamless whole two worlds that are usually separated by a great divide — scientific exposition and literary style. This is a great read by a great writer about a great man — a biographical perfect storm. (It also makes for great listening in its 21.5-hour unabridged audio format read with appropriate gravitas by the actor Edward Herrmann and produced by Simon & Schuster Audio.)

Predictably, but importantly, Isaacson recounts the well-worn stories about Einstein’s youthful rebelliousness against his early teachers and their insistence that education is best imparted through rote drills and the memorization of countless factoids, as well as the famous story about the teacher who declared that the young Einstein would never amount to much. “From his boyhood on Einstein understood that freedom of thought is the key to imagination,” Isaacson writes, “and, as he famously declared, ‘imagination is more important than knowledge.’” Yes, well, you do need to know what the facts are before you overturn them, and it helps to have Einstein’s imaginative skills if you wish to challenge the likes of Isaac Newton. You and I may have dreams about what it would be like to ride alongside a beam of light (time appears to stop), or imagine what it means to play catch in a free-falling elevator (you, your partner, and the ball would all be “weightless” in a “zero-gravity” environment relative to the free-falling frame of reference), but it takes an Einstein to translate a thought experiment into meaningful mathematical equations, and then employ those equations to challenge the very nature of space and time. But as Isaacson demonstrably shows, Einstein had just such a mind that allowed him to puzzle over commonplace things (like light beams and elevators) and incorporate them into his most uncommonplace theories.

As well, Isaacson stitches together the loose patches of Einstein’s personal life, most notably his problematic relationship with women that could best be described as, well, problematic. The best shot he had at enjoying an equal loving partnership was with his fellow physicist Mileva Maric, a Serbian three years his junior but close to his equal intellectually (to the extent that anyone was). But that unraveled under the strain of having an illegitimate daughter who was put up for adoption, marriage and childrearing two boys for which Mileva bore the brunt of the work, and Einstein’s inability to land an academic position (settling for the Patent clerk job during which he experienced his annus mirabilis of 1905 when he produced four papers in five months, any one of which would have been a career-topper for most scientists but were just the beginning for Einstein). To get Maric to agree to a divorce, Einstein had to promise her the money from his Nobel Prize that, he assured her, would eventually be his. (She collected in 1922 and purchased three apartment buildings in Zurich with the money.) In the meantime, she had to agree to a list of cruel conditions that included “you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you approach me in any way,” “you will stop talking to me if I request it,” “you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it,” all while she was instructed to do his laundry, serve him three meals a day, and keep his bedroom and study neat. Although Maric had a tough-minded personality herself and suffered from depression, the treatment of a fellow physicist as if she were a charwoman reveals a darker side to Einstein’s personality.

Which brings us back to God, the universe, and everything. Einstein matters not just because of his science, which was spectacularly important in his own time and in ours still, but because of how he connected his science to the politics of his time and the religion of all time. Einstein’s Jewish identity was undeniably important to all aspects of his life, especially and including his politics (“My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human tie” he wrote after declining the presidency of Israel). And the religiosity of his childhood still compelled him in mid-life: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

Being religious in some esoteric sense of the awe and wonder over the cosmos is one thing, but what about God? When he turned 50, Einstein granted an interview in which he was asked point-blank, do you believe in God? “I am not an atheist,” he began. “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

To a Colorado banker who wrote and asked him the same question, Einstein responded: “I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation. My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend about the knowable world. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”

Finally, in what has become the iconic answer to the God question, Einstein was instructed to compose a statement of 50 words in a telegram. Einstein did it in 32: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

Fortunately for us, Einstein concerned himself with the fate and doings of the universe, and mankind is richer for him.

(Simon & Schuster, 2007, ISBN 0743264738)
This review was originally published in New York Sun.

A review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Bantam Books, 2006, ISBN 0618680004). This review was originally published in Science, January 26, 2007.

There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me … that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are?

Such stirring words, spoken with such moral conviction, must surely come from an outraged liberal exasperated with the conservative climate of America today, and one can be forgiven for thinking that in a review of The God Delusion these are the words of Richard Dawkins himself, who is well known for not suffering religious fools gladly. But no. They were entered into the Congressional Record on 16 September 1981, by none other than Senator Barry Goldwater, the fountainhead of the modern conservative movement, the man whose failed 1964 run for the presidency was said to have been fulfilled in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, and the candidate whose campaign slogan was “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.”

If Goldwater had been president for the past six years, I doubt that Dawkins would have penned such a powerful polemic against the infusion of religion into nearly every nook and cranny of public life. But here we are, and like Goldwater, Dawkins is sick and tired of being told that atheists are immoral, second-class, back-of-the-bus citizens. The God Delusion is his way of, like the Howard Beale character in the 1976 film Network, sticking his head out the window and shouting, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

But The God Delusion is so much more than a polemic. It is an exercise to “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.” Dawkins wants atheists to quit apologizing for their religious skepticism. “On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind.”

Dawkins also wants to raise consciousness about the power of Darwin’s dangerous idea of natural selection. He believes that most people — even many scientists — do not fully understand just how powerful an idea it is. He attributes that failure to the need to be steeped and immersed in natural selection before you can truly recognize its power. In this context, natural selection “shatters the illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well.”

Out of obligation, of course, Dawkins reviews and offers rebuttals to all the standard arguments for God’s existence. He concentrates on dissecting the anthropic principle and dismantling intelligent design creationism. (As part of the latter efforts, he redirects the creationists’ argument from complexity to show that God must have been designed by a superintelligent designer.) He then builds a case for “why there almost certainly is no God.” The remainder of the book outlines possible evolutionary origins of morality and religious belief, a justification for being hard on religion, childhood religious indoctrination as child abuse, and an elegant commentary on the progressively changing moral zeitgeist. Dawkins closes with a tribute to the power and beauty of science, which no living writer does better.

When I received the bound galleys for The God Delusion, I cringed at the title, wishing it were more neutral (why not, say, The God Question?). As I read the book, I found myself wincing at Dawkins’s references to religious people as “faith-heads,” as being less intelligent, poor at reasoning, or even deluded, and to religious moderates as enablers of terrorism. I shudder because I have religious friends and colleagues who do not fit these descriptors, and I empathize at the pain such pejorative appellations cause them. In addition, I am not convinced by Dawkins’s argument that
without religion there would be “no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers,’ no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’…” In my opinion, many of these events — and others often attributed solely to religion by atheists — were less religiously motivated than politically driven, or at the very least involved religion in the service of political hegemony.

I also never imagined a book with this title would ever land on bestseller lists in the United States. But I was wrong. The data have spoken. The God Delusion is a runaway bestseller, a market testimony to the hunger many people — far more, I now think, than polls reveal — have for someone in a position of prestige and power to speak for them in such an eloquent voice. The God Delusion deserves multiple readings, not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature.

A review of George Basalla’s Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials.

On February 8, 2000, the New York Times science section featured a newly published book, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe¹ by the paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee, who were called radicals for daring to challenge the orthodox assumption that the cosmos is probably teaming with complex life. “Now, two prominent scientists say the conventional wisdom is wrong.”²

How did the belief in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) change from the heresy it was in the early 1960s when Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and others took up the search, to “conventional wisdom” by the late 1990s? It certainly was not due to any new empirical data for the existence of ETIs, since this continues to be a science without a subject. A compelling answer may be found in George Basalla’s critically important new book, Civilized Life in the Universe, the best treatment on the history and science of the subject since Steven Dick’s magisterial two volumes, Plurality of Worlds and The Biological Universe.³

Basalla’s tightly-woven and highly readable narrative begins with an epigraph from the theoretical physicist Paul Davies: “What I am more concerned with is the extent to which the modern search for aliens is, at rock-bottom, part of an ancient religious quest” (p. 3). That is precisely what it is, says Basalla, who precedes to outline three assumptions underlying the thinking about extra-terrestrial intelligence from antiquity to the present:

1. the universe is very large or infinite,
2. there are other inhabited worlds,
3. these other complex and intelligent beings are vastly superior to us.

Modern cosmology has confirmed the first assumption. We live in an accelerating expanding universe some 13.7 billion years old, which contains several hundred billion galaxies each of which houses several hundred billion stars. And modern astronomy is in the process of confirming half of the second assumption: there are a great many worlds circling those hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Whether they are inhabited or not, of course, remains to be seen.

As for the third assumption, if we did make contact with an ETI, they would have to be vastly superior to us (since we just recently mastered radio and space-flight). On an evolutionary time scale, an ETI species only slightly ahead of us biologically could be millions of years ahead of us technologically. Pace Arthur C. Clarke, I have called this Shermer’s Last Law: “Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.”⁴

This is actually an ancient belief, says Basalla.

The idea of the superiority of celestial beings is neither new nor scientific. It is a widespread and old belief in religious thought. Aristotle divided his universe into two distinct regions, the superior celestial realm and the inferior terrestrial realm.

The incorporation of Aristotle into Christian theology carried this belief into the Middle Ages. “Christians populated the celestial regions with God, the saints, angelic beings of varying ranks, and the souls of the dead. These immortal celestial beings were superior to mortals, who inhabited the inferior terrestrial realm” (p. 10). Even though the Copernican revolution overturned Aristotelian cosmology, “the belief that creatures living on a distant planet were superior to the human species” hung on into the modern age, and that “religious elements continue to adhere to the perception of extraterrestrial life even as we study it in the twenty-first century” (p. 12).

As I demonstrated in an analysis I conducted on the SETI pioneers,⁵ most were once religious but became either atheists or agnostics as adults. Radio astronomer Frank Drake — creator of the canonical “Drake Equation” for estimating the number of ETIs inhabiting the galaxy — was raised Baptist, and later reflected: “A strong influence on me, and I think on a lot of SETI people, was the extensive exposure to fundamentalist religion.”⁶ In his book on the subject, Drake suggested that “immortality may be quite common among extraterrestrials.”⁷ Carl Sagan — who did more than anyone to conventionalize SETI — was raised Jewish and became agnostic, later writing of SETI’s importance: “It touches deeply into myth, folklore, religion, mythology; and every human culture in some way or another has wondered about that type of question.”⁸ ETIs are secular Gods. Deities for atheists.

Why should so many people — theists and atheists, theologians and scientists — believe in the existence of superior celestial beings, be they angels or aliens? Basalla’s answer is twofold:

1. the psychologist Robert Plank suggests that humans have an emotional need to believe in imaginary beings.⁹ “Despite all their scientific trappings,” Basalla writes, “the extraterrestrials discussed by scientists are as imaginary as the spirits and gods of religion or myth” (p. 14);
2. the historian of science Steven Dick thinks that when the Newtonian mechanical universe displaced the spiritual world of the Middle Ages it left a vast and lifeless void, which was filled by modern science with ETIs. Consider Sagan’s vision of alien intelligences, says Basalla. “Sagan was certain that these creatures were benevolent. They would help us solve current problems, like the spread of nuclear weapons and environmental pollution, by sharing their advanced knowledge with us” (p. 13).

Basalla is also highly critical of the anthropomorphism inherent in SETI science. Although Sagan identified a number of chauvinisms (oxygen, carbon, temperature, etc.) that cloud scientific thinking on this subject, Basalla thinks that he didn’t go far enough. The chauvinism that ETIs will communicate via radio signals, that their intelligence will take a form similar to ours, and especially that they are social beings who live in civilizations are anthropomorphisms that have no basis whatsoever in reality. We cannot even communicate with terrestrial intelligences such as apes and dolphins, Basalla notes, “how can we hope to decode complex messages sent by superior extraterrestrial ones?” (p. 200).

Nevertheless, if we do make contact with intelligent celestial beings, all of this speculation and conjecture will fall by the wayside in favor of real science. So in the spirit of scientific inquiry, the search must go on. Ad astra!

References & Notes

1. Ward, P. D. and D. Brownlee. 2000. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. New York: Copernicus Books.
2. Broad, W. J. 2000. “Maybe We Are Alone in the Universe, After All.” New York Times, February 8.
3. Dick, Steven J. 1982. Plurality of Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1996. The Biological Universe. New York: Cambridge University press.
4. Shermer, Michael. 2002. “Shermer’s Last Law.” Scientific American, January, p. 33.
5. Shermer, Michael. 2001. The Borderlands of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Swift, D. 1990. SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk About Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, p. 57.
7. Drake, Frank and Dava Sobel. 1992. Is Anyone Out There? New York: Delacorte, p. 160.
8. Swift, D. 1990, p. 219.
9. Plank, Robert. 1968. The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas.

(Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0195171810)
This review was originally published in Science.

A review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

Anyone who does a lot of public speaking knows there are certain questions that inevitably arise from the audience in a Q&A session. In my case, lecturing on pseudoscience and the paranormal, I am almost always asked: What is my position on the afterlife? (“I’m for it”), have I ever encountered a mystery that science cannot explain? (“Paris Hilton”), and have I ever been skeptical of something that turned out to be real? For this final question I have a serious answer: intuition.

As a skeptical scientist, I have always treated with disdain the notion that one can intuit a truth about reality. Scientists should employ the logic of Mr. Spock, the deductive reasoning of Mr. Holmes, and the rational calculus of Mr. Data. Hunches, guesses, insights, feelings, and intuitions lead to misdirection and error. Thinking things through rationally and systematically is the royal road to reality.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out there’s a lot more to thinking than meets the experimental eye, and Malcolm Gladwell has penned an absolutely delightful summary of all the important research in the study of intuition. His title, Blink, is apt, for we humans have a remarkable — and heretofore unproven — capacity for making judgments in the metaphorical blink of an eye that are often superior to those we might have made had we taken the time to assess all possible variables.

Gladwell begins with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forged Kouros, a sculpture of a youth allegedly carved in 6th-century B.C. Greece. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests. For example, one of the art experts — Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — later recalled that the first word that popped into his mind when he saw the Kouros was “fresh.” Although he could not say precisely what about the statue was fresh, it was a general feeling he had about it. “I had dug in Sicily where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just don’t come out looking like that. The Kouros looked like it had been dipped in the very best café au lait from Starbucks.”

What is happening here is nonrational (not irrational) analysis at a level below conscious awareness. Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor’s effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. (This may also mean that student evaluations are actually based on first impressions rather than extensive analysis.) The same effect — called “thin slicing” — can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried “speed dating,” a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple “dates” in one evening lasts only six minutes. Thin slicing is intuitive thinking, “thinking without thinking” as Gladwell puts it. That’s not quite right, however, as I suspect it is more of a subtle, unconscious (or subconscious) form of thinking that we just don’t know that much about as yet. We are collecting data about a person or situation, and that data is being analyzed somewhere in the brain. How precisely that is being done remains a mystery.

Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive “feel” in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour. Contempt for one’s spouse, for example, is a powerful predictor of a doomed marriage, and rolling one’s eyes when one’s spouse is speaking, is a proxy for contempt. A lot can be read in the blink of an eye.

We are especially good at snap judgments when it comes to human relations, because we evolved as a social primate species living in small tribes in which social relations were extremely important. We needed (and still need) to know whom we can trust and whom we cannot trust; in the prehistoric world of our Paleolithic environment we had only our wits and intuitions, the “sense” or “feeling” we had for someone’s trustworthiness, to rely on. The social calculus was not the slow and systematic logic of analysis; it was (and is) the subtle and fast feeling of a felt emotion. That “feeling” is the expression of an internal computation whose consequences are important.

This explains the interesting results of an experiment conducted by the psychologist Samuel Gosling. He rated 80 subjects on the “Big Five” personality scale (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience). He found a high correlation with similar ratings of the subjects done by their best friends — no surprise. But then he sent total strangers into the dorm rooms of the subjects and gave them 15 minutes to answer questions about the person who lived there. The strangers were not as good as the best friends in evaluating extraversion and agreeableness, but on conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience, the strangers knew the subjects better than their best friends!

Some of the research findings on what might be called “the blink effect,” so well encapsulated by Gladwell, are startling. The best predictor of whether a physician will be sued for malpractice is not the doctor’s training, credentials, or track record, but a subjective evaluation by observers of short clips of conversation between doctor and patient. Physicians who seem warm and empathetic — traits that can be sensed in a blink — are less likely to be sued by their patients, regardless of the number of errors they commit. As one lawyer explained it, “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent. We think it’s your primary care doctor who was at fault.’ And the client will say, ‘I don’t care what she did. I love her, and I’m not suing her.’”

Unfortunately, in what Gladwell calls “the dark side of blink,” we sometimes make snap assessments of people based on inappropriate criteria, such as their gender or race. Research with the Implicit Association Test has shown that we form connections between things faster when there is already an association, such as between “female” and “laundry,” “home,” “kitchen,” “housework,” and “babies”; and between “male” and “professional,” “merchant,” “capitalist,” “corporation,” and “entrepreneur. Even more sinister are the associations of African-American or European-American with such adjectives as “hurt,” “evil,” “glorious,” and “wonderful.” “It turns out that over 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations,” Gladwell explains, “meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete the test when they are required to link good things with black people than when they are required to link bad things with black people.”

Gladwell took the test and was rated as having “moderate automatic preference for whites”; “but then again, I’m half black,” he points out. Meaning what? “What it means,” he concludes, “is that our attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have conscious attitudes. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately.” The IAT, on the other hand, measures “our racial attitudes on an unconscious level — the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think. We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good.”

Blink is packed with examples of such intuitive processes, a thoughtful and thought-provoking look into both the light tunnel and the dark well of our minds. But I wish to praise it on another plane as well.

There are, roughly speaking, three levels of science writing in our culture: (1) technical (peer-reviewed papers, monographs, and university press books written by and for professional scientists); (2) popular professional (essays and articles in popular magazines and trade press books written by scientists for both scientists and moderately informed general readers — Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond come to mind); (3) popular general (essays, articles, and books by journalists and science writers for completely uninformed readers).

We live in the Age of Science, and all three levels are vital for the dispersal of scientific knowledge to an educated democracy. Sadly, too many professional scientists think level one is the only legitimate form of science writing, and that anything else is simply “dumbing down.” For his presentation of science to hundreds of millions of people, the astronomer Carl Sagan was slammed by his peers, denied tenure at Harvard, and rejected by the National Academy of Science. Yet he never stopped producing peer-reviewed articles, averaging one a month for his entire career.

Gladwell is presenting science at level three, where it is most needed, and where good writing is most vital. He has the ability to synthesize a large body of scientific data into a highly readable, page-turning narrative, and to convert the raw numbers of research and statistics into meaningful facts for our personal lives. I thought he did this brilliantly with The Tipping Point, and I think he does it even better in Blink. For this feat all of us in the scientific community should be grateful, because the craft of writing good science is just as important as the skill of producing good science.

(Little, Brown & Company, 2005, ISBN 0316172324)
This review was originally published in New York Sun.

A review of Michael Ruse’s Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?.

Psalms 19:1 declares: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” The divine design inference is not confined to the ancient Hebrews.

In 1999 social scientist Frank J. Sulloway and I conducted a national survey, asking Americans why they believe in God. The most common reason offered was the good design, natural beauty, and complexity of the world. One subject wrote: “To say that the universe was created by the Big Bang theory is to say that you can create Webster’s Dictionary by throwing a bomb in a printing shop and the resulting explosion results in the dictionary.” He is not alone. A 2001 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” 37 percent believe that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” while only 12 percent believe that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

The reason people think that a designer created the world is because, well, it looks designed, and philosopher and Darwinian defender Michael Ruse thinks that it’s high time we quit tiptoeing around this inference. This he does in Darwin and Design, the comprehensive, scholarly, and highly accessible third volume in his trilogy on the history and impact of evolutionary thought that began with Monad to Man (on progress in evolution), and continued with Mystery of Mysteries (on evolution as a social construction). Ruse has done as much as any scholar of the past century to explicate the social and cultural meanings engendered by the theory of evolution, and to identify clearly when scientists step out of their roles as objective observers of nature to speculate on the higher and deeper implications of their theories (compare, for example, Edward O. Wilson’s technical book The Ants with his general work attempting to unify the sciences in Consilience). In this third volume Ruse asks whether the apparent design of nature implies not only a designer, but a purpose.

Let’s admit right from the start, says Ruse, that life looks designed because it was … from the bottom up by evolution. Purpose follows. “There is nothing very mysterious about purpose in evolution,” Ruse explains. The purpose is functional adaptation: “At the heart of modern evolutionary biology is the metaphor of design, and for this reason function-talk is appropriate. Organisms give the appearance of being designed, and thanks to Charles Darwin’s discovery of natural selection we know why this is true. Natural selection produces artifact-like features, not by chance but because if they were not artifact-like they would not work and serve their possessors’ needs” (273). More cautious evolutionary theorists like Ernst Mayr worry that “the use of terms like purposive or goal-directed seemed to imply the transfer of human qualities, such as intent, purpose, planning, deliberation, or consciousness, to organic structures and to subhuman forms of life.” To which Ruse replies: “Well, yes it does!” So what? At the heart of science is metaphor — Ruse notes that physicists talk of force, pressure, attraction, repulsion, work, charm, and resistance, all quite useful metaphors — and the metaphors of design and purpose work well as long as we stick to natural explanations for nature and understand that natural selection (another metaphor) is the primary mechanism for generating design and purpose, from the bottom up.

What role, then, is there for a top-down designer? If you are one of those 37 percent who believe that God guided the process of evolution then, on one level, Ruse has no truck with you, and he is in good company. In his 1996 Encyclical Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Pope John Paul II told a billion Catholics that, in essence, evolution happened — deal with it: “It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.” Since both the Bible and the theory of evolution are true (and truth cannot contradict truth), John Paul II reconciled theological dualism with scientific monism by arguing that evolution produced our bodies while God granted us our souls.

This conciliatory position is fine as far as it goes, but Ruse shows through a rich and variegated historical recapitulation of design arguments that many thinkers are not content to keep the magisteria of science and religion separate. They want empirical data to prove faith tenets, and it is here where Ruse steps out of his role as historian and philosopher and becomes an evolutionary activist, debunking in no uncertain terms the claims of the latest species (some would call them mutants) of creationists: Intelligent Design Theorists, or William Paley redux. Paley was the 18th century natural theologian whose “watchmaker” argument became the foundation of all modern design arguments. IDers recast Paley in modern jargon with new and more sophisticated biological examples (such as bacterial flagellum and blood clotting agents). But as Darwin showed — and a century and a half of research has proven — the designer is (in Richard Dawkins’ apposite phrase) a blind watchmaker. Complex structures can and do arise out of simple systems through blind variation, selection, and adaptation. This is an inevitable outcome of Darwinism which, says Ruse, “Whether we like it or not, we are stuck with it. The Darwinian revolution is over, and Darwin won” (330).

It would appear that this leaves us with a worldview shared by only 12 percent of the American public. This will not do, so Ruse closes his volume with an intriguing plea: “What I am arguing for is a theology of nature … where the focus is back on adaptation. A theology of nature that sees and appreciates the complex, adaptive glory of the living world, rejoices in it, and trembles before it. I argue for this even though the people who reveal it to us today in its fullest majesty may be people for whom Christianity evokes emotions ranging from bored indifference to outright hostility. This is irrelevant, especially to those of us who know professional Darwinian evolutionists. As Ernst Mayr once said to me: ‘People forget that it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of theological belief.’ Theologians working on the science/religion relationship, few of whom have actually had hands-on experience with nature, let the hostility of atheists like Dawkins, or their embarrassment with the Intelligent Design enthusiasts, blind them to the genuine love and joy with which today’s professional evolutionists respond to their subjects” (335).

Ruse’s poetically courageous proposal will no doubt generate cries that the theory of evolution is a religion, but the fact is that as pattern-seeking, storytelling primates who need origin myths, the theory of evolution fulfills that need for us and has the added advantage that, unlike most origin myths, it is very probably true.

(Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0674016319)
This review was originally published in the New York Times.

The following book review of Mark Oppenheimer’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (Yale University Press, 2003), (originally published in the Los Angeles Times) ran in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (4/1/04). I used the book review to further support the group selection thesis proffered by David Sloan Wilson in his book Darwin’s Cathedral, as well as my own analysis in The Science of Good and Evil, to explain the success of religion. It was published as Countering the Counterculture. My original title better describes my thesis and what the book is about. But it is an unalterable law of nature that all book review and opinion editorial editors must change the author’s original title or else they will go to editorial hades.

In April, 1993, in his address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Pope John Paul II acquitted Galileo for his heretical belief that the earth goes around the sun, explaining that “the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences.” Three years later, in his October, 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, this same Pope avered that Darwin was right because the theory of evolution is “more than a hypothesis,” and assured believers that it is possible to be both a Christian and an evolutionist because “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Scientists who perceive religion as a dinosaurian relic incapable of adapting to an ever-changing cultural landscape should take note. Religion is inescapably Darwinian, evolving to fill empty niches and mutating to compete with cultural competitors. No where is this adaptability more apparent than in America, where the separation of church and state has forced religion to compete with other cultural traditions and social institutions for the minds, souls, and dollars of consumers. A spiritual free market has produced a mélange of cults, sects, and religions, from Mormons and Moonies to Scientologists and Southern Baptists, all of whom have adopted the uniquely American style of advertising and marketing their products and services.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the secularization of society, mandatory public education, and the rise of modern science, over the past century Americans have become more religious than ever before. Pundits who call for America to return to the good ol’ days of our Christian foundation have their history bass-ackwards. Historians and sociologists have demonstrated that belief in God, religiosity, and church attendance have all steadily increased over the past two centuries. This is the American religious paradox, resolved if we think of religions in Darwinian terms as social organisms competing for limited resources to try to pass on their ideological genes to the next generation.

A splendid test of this theory is how religion faired in the turbulent 1960s, the subject of Mark Oppenheimer’s insightful and charming cultural history in Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. In Europe, where religion and government are inextricably intertwined, change comes about glacially, if at all. “The Lutheran Church in Sweden is not much affected by rebellious youth culture or the fall of foreign governments; the Church of England is anemic whether the radio is playing the Beatles or Oasis,” Oppenheimer asserts. “But American religions must constantly sell themselves, and the ones that last are the ones that discover ways to exert imaginative sway.”

Busting the myth that mainstream religions suffered irreversible blows from their 1960’s countercultural competitors, Oppenheimer demonstrates that, for example, Catholics, Mormons, and Pentecostal groups such as the Assemblies of God saw their membership rolls swell. From 1963 to 1976 the Southern Baptist Convention grew by 2.5 million members, while Unitarians saw their ranks bulge by 30 percent (from 147,000 to 191,000 members), and Catholics by 15 percent (from 43 million to 49.5 million). The perception of the 60s as an era in which Americans dropped out of mainstream religion in order to hitch rides “on the paisley bus of religious experimentation” (in one of Oppenheimer’s many clever phrases that break up copious statistics) such as TM, EST, and Silva Mind Control, is simply wrong. Americans may have experimented with alternative religions, but they did not inhale.

In a 1973 study conducted in San Francisco, for example, only one percent said they knew a lot about Hare Krishna while 61 percent knew nothing; three percent knew a lot about Zen Buddhism, 27 percent knew a little, and 70 percent knew nothing; only 8 percent had participated in yoga, 5.3 percent in TM, and 2.6 percent in Zen. “In other words,” Oppenheimer deduces, “in a famously liberal, iconoclastic city, a random sampling of the population revealed low, even minuscule, levels of familiarity with prominent alternative religions.”

What did happen in the 60s (itself something of a myth, Oppenheimer argues, since the decade of social and cultural turmoil is more like 1967 to 1976) is that traditional religions evolved to remain “the spiritual homes for most Americans.” Although “many people pass through periods of religious seeking, often shopping at different churches, they finally settle into membership at one.” Oppenheimer defines religion, in fact, as “a sacrificial system whose adherents do not ascribe to another religion.” It is one thing to be titillated by alternative belief systems (and maybe even briefly sample one or two), it is quite another to tithe a percentage of your hard-earned income to one. Oppenheimer defines counterculture as “a self-sustaining alternative model of culture.” Alternative religious movements were not truly countercultural because, for the most part, they did not displace mainstream religions. Instead, what happened is that traditional religious cultures evolved just enough to survive and outlive their would-be competitors (whatever happened to Silva Mind Control?)

Unitarians and Gay rights, Roman Catholics and the folk mass, Jews and communal worship, Episcopalians and feminism, and Southern Baptists and Vietnam War protestors are Oppenheimer’s case studies in how remarkably adaptable religions are even in the most turbulent times. Oppenheimer chose these five religions because they are well established enough that, in his pragmatic definition of mainstream, “adherents can run for office without having to explain their religion.” How each of them adapted to these challenges to their orthodoxy determined, in part, how well they survived into the post-60s world. Unitarians (so called because they reject the trinity), for example, with a history of liberal support for progressive causes, took well to feminist, antiwar, and civil rights movements, such that an openly Gay minister would quickly find succor in most Unitarian churches (with feeble resistance from southern and midwest congregations). As a cultural species, Unitarians were already well-adapted for the countercultural challenges and thus they passed through the crisis unscathed.

As did the Jews, who had already undergone profound changes earlier in the century under Reform Judaism, and whose essence was more cultural than religious. “Jews are Jews because of descent,” Oppenheimer opined, “they don’t have to be under a synagogue roof, in communion with other Jews, or in good standing with a religious hierarch. They were always freer to experiment outside the established religious bodies.” Which they did with the havurah, a counterculture movement of small communities who gathered to study or worship outside a synagogue and away from the rabbi. As an example of religious plasticity, even in what constitutes religion per se, Oppenheimer notes: “Jews could be profoundly, traditionally Jewish while rebuking Jewish institutions.” This is how to survive a cultural crisis.

Episcopalians and Southern Baptists were not nearly as liberal as Unitarians and Jews, so the feminist movement for the former and Vietnam War protestors for the latter were not so easily incorporated. Yet in these case studies one can find in religion a certain controlled tolerance, even if it is implemented for the purpose of preserving power and control (in the former) and gaining additional members (in the latter). The Catholic Church is a case in point when it abandoned the Latin Mass in 1967 in order stop the bleeding of weekly Mass attendance, which was declining an average of two percentage points a year throughout the decade. Both Catholic school enrollment and conversion rates were dropping, along with vocations to the priesthood. Pope John XXIII’s call for aggiornamento, or updating, of the church came none too soon. Vatican II was the result. Mass would be celebrated in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the priest would face the congregation, and dry Gregorian chants would be replaced by the innovative sounds of the electric guitar.

Rock of ages.

(Vail-Baillou Press, 2003, ISBN 0300100248)
This review was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

A review of Robin Waterfield’s Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis.

In the early 1980s I began a personal odyssey into altered states of consciousness. Because I thought I might like to use my brain again, I eschewed mind-altering substances and instead opted for a sensory-deprivation tank (a sound- and light-proof container of warm salt water), sleep deprivation (once enduring 83 straight hours), and even undergoing a series of sessions with a professional hypnotherapist who trained me to go in and out of alpha-wave land at will.

In the water tank I experienced only modest visual hallucinations — dim blotches of color — but nothing to rival the reputed effects of LSD. By contrast, my sleep-deprived brain — the result of racing a bicycle nonstop from Santa Monica to Nebraska as part of the 3,000-mile transcontinental Race Across America — became convinced that the members of my support crew were aliens from another planet attempting to abduct me into their spacecraft. And for a television segment on my preparations for the race with my hypnotherapist, I was so far “under” that she could not bring me out with the usual “awake” command, causing a moment of concern for an anxious Wide World of Sports camera crew.

What does it mean to be “under” in hypnosis? The standard answer — an altered state of consciousness — explains little for a simple reason: we don’t really know what consciousness is, making it difficult to explain what an altered state of it means. Of all the methods of plumbing the depths of consciousness by altering its normal awake state, hypnosis has the longest and most checkered history, with a correspondingly massive and confusing body of literature. Hidden Depths, by British scholar and writer Robin Waterfield, masterfully encapsulates that history and literature through a delightful work of reportage and successfully navigates the treacherous straits between acolyte sycophancy and dogmatic skepticism.

To explain what hypnosis is, Waterfield begins with a discussion of what it is not. Hypnosis is not a state of sleep or unconsciousness. It is not like meditating or being in “flow.” It is not a paranormal or satanic phenomenon. It is not limited to weak-willed or gullible people. It is not a lie detector or memory retriever. It cannot cure disease or guarantee weight loss. It cannot turn people into assassins (ala the Manchurian Candidate) or make them commit acts they would not normally perform (hypnotizing someone to engage in sex). Through a judicious use of history and breezy storytelling, Waterfield demonstrates that it is easier to show what hypnosis is not than what it is. Since Franz Anton Mesmer popularized hypnosis as “animal magnetism” in mid-eighteenth-century France, it has been variously described as monoideism (single focused thought), a form of sleep, passive suggestibility, active selective attention with reduced planning, hysteria, dissociation, Oedipal love of the hypnotherapist (Freud’s theory, of course), a state of inhibition between sleep and wakefulness, task-motivation, imaginative response to test-suggestions, goal-directed fantasy role-playing, and activation of the implicit memory system.

With this obfuscating potpourri of theory, and no definitive experimental test to lead us to a singular consensus, Waterfield wisely concludes: “All of the current theories may be wrong, or none of them may be wrong, while all giving a partial picture.” Even the theory that hypnosis doesn’t exist compels because “no one really knows what hypnosis is.” In the end, “Faced with this welter of definitions, it has to be borne in mind that nothing about hypnosis is uncontroversial, and that these various definitions depend on various theories of what is going on, psychologically and neurologically, and these in turn depend on the approach taken by the particular researchers.”

Still, one cannot write a book about nothing (or everything), so Waterfield offers his readers this concise definition: “Hypnotism or hypnosis is the deliberate inducement or facilitation by one person in another person or a number of people of a trance state … in which a person’s usual means of orienting himself in reality have faded, so that the boundaries between the external world and the inner world of thoughts, feelings, memories and imagination begin to dissolve.”

It is in that borderland between reality and fantasy where the power and mystery of hypnosis lies. Although Waterfield remains relatively neutral in his summary of the various theories and recapitulation of their fascinating histories, he does conclude that hypnosis — whatever it is — is real and serves as empirical evidence of something called mind, distinct from the brain. Here he will find support from many, but skepticism from those of us who believe that mind is nothing more than a product of neuronal activity. The notion of the “ghost in the machine” (the mind in the body) is a chimera, a product of scientific ignorance on par with 19th-century philosophers speculating there was a homunculus (little man) in a sperm cell.

Waterfield contends, for example, that “inexplicable things happen in everyone’s lives” (true enough) and thus it is a fact that “we have all experienced telepathy” means that “anyone with an open mind” should “pause before dismissing the whole domain as fantasy and rubbish.” Wrong. Just because we do not yet have an adequate neurophysiological model to explain hypnosis, or other mental mysteries such as apparent telepathic events, does not mean they are inexplicable, or that they represent metaphysical entities. Here Waterfield distinguishes between paranormal powers (such as ESP, of which he is mostly skeptical but not completely) and supernormal powers (such as the power of hypnosis to attenuate or eliminate pain). “We all have supernormal powers locked up inside our minds; we are all capable of miracles.”

This is sloppy thinking in an otherwise careful analysis. Calling unexplained mysteries supernormal or miraculous explains nothing. In point of fact, there is no paranormal or supernormal, or even supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural and mysteries we have yet to explain. Hypnosis is one of those mysteries that, while real, remains elusive for predatory scientists bent on capturing all mentality in a scientistic net. And we are closing in. Brain scans of hypnotized and unhypnotized subjects, for example, show distinctly different patterns when performing the same task. What this means is not precisely clear, and thus far no specific brain module has been found that regulates the hypnotic state. Nevertheless, at the end of the day neuroscience is where an adequate theory of hypnosis will be found.

It is with hypnosis in particular that I depart ways from many of my skeptical colleagues who argue that it is nothing more than fantasy role-playing, or worse, pure fakery. From my personal experiences with altered states of consciousness, whatever they are, their effects are dramatic and real. The aliens really did speak to me in my sleep-deprived state of mind, an experience as real as the voices of suggestion while in a hypnotic altered state. There are natural explanations for these apparently supernatural phenomena, of course, but that does not in any way attenuate the reality of the experience, even if that reality exists only in the mind.

(Brunner-Routledge, 2003, ISBN 041594791X)
This review was originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

A review of David G. Myers’ Intuition: It’s Powers and Perils.

Imagine yourself a contestant on the classic television game show Let’s Make a Deal. You must choose one of three doors, behind one of which is a brand new automobile (while the other two harbor goats). You choose door number one. Host Monty Hall, who knows what is behind all the doors, shows you what’s behind door number two, a goat, then inquires: would you like keep the door you chose or switch? It’s 50/50 so it doesn’t matter, right?

Wrong. You had a one in three chance to start, but now that Monty has shown you one of the losing doors, you have a 2/3rds chance of winning by switching doors. Think of it this way: There are 10 doors; you choose door number one and Monty shows you door numbers 2 through 9, all losers. Now you would switch because your chances increase from 1/10 to 9/10. This is a counterintuitive problem that drives people batty, including mathematicians, and is just one of numerous examples presented by Hope College psychologist David G. Myers in his latest book on the “powers and perils” of intuition.

The perils are legion. Gamblers’ intuitions, for example, are notoriously flawed (to the profitable delight of casino operators). You’ve hit five reds in a row on the roulette wheel. Should you stay with red because you are on a “hot streak” or should you switch because black is “due”? It doesn’t matter because the roulette wheel has no memory, but try telling that to the happy gambler whose pile of chips grows before his eyes.

What about hot streaks in sports? Intuitively don’t we just know that when Kobe’s hot he can’t miss? Intuitively yes, but Myers presents the findings of a fascinating 1985 study of “hot hands” in basketball by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, who analyzed every basket shot by the Philadelphia 76ers for an entire season. They discovered that the probability of a player hitting a second shot did not increase following an initial successful basket (beyond what one would expect by chance and the average shooting percentage of the player). What they found is so counter-intuitive that it is jarring to the sensibilities: the number of streaks, or successful baskets in sequence, did not exceed the predictions of a statistical coin-flip model. That is, if you conduct a coin flipping experiment and record heads or tails, you will shortly encounter streaks. On average and in the long run, you will flip five heads or tails in a row once in every 32 sequences of five tosses. (Since we are dealing with professional basketball players instead of coins, adjustments have to be made. If a player’s shooting percentage is 60 percent, for example, we would expect, by chance, that he will sink six baskets in a row once for every 20 sequences of six shots attempted.) Players may feel “hot” when they have games that fall into the high range of chance expectations, but science shows that this intuition is an illusion.

Myers systematically catalogues the countless ways our intuitions about the world lead us astray: we rewrite our past to fit present beliefs and moods, we badly misinterpret the source and meaning of our emotions, we are subject to the hindsight bias where we falsely surmise that we knew it all along, we succumb to the self-serving bias where we think we are far more important than we really are, we see illusory correlations that do not exist (superstitions), and we fall for the confirmation bias, where we look for and find evidence for what we already believe.

Since I’m a scientist and skeptic Myers’ demonstration that intuition cannot be trusted triggered my own confirmation bias — everyone knows that intuition is just mushy new age nonsense. But as Myers demonstrates through countless well-documented experiments, our intuitions about intuition may be wrong. There is something else going on in the brain. That something else, for lack of a better word (and I do wish there were a better word), is intuition, or what Myers defines as “our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason.”

Consider the research by Harvard’s Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, who discovered that the evaluation of teachers by students who saw a mere 30-second video of the teacher were remarkably similar to those of students who had taken the course. Even three two-second video clips of the teacher yielded a striking .72 correlation with the course student evaluations!

Occasionally the staccato pacing of Myers’ scientific analysis is jarringly punctuated with such sentimental expressions as “What the conscious mind cannot understand, the heart knows,” and a few too many pithy and over-familiar witticisms of writers and poets. But these are easily overlooked by the hundreds of studies presented to make his case that intuition is a fruitful field of scientific analysis. For example, I was stunned by, and still do not quite know what to make of the experiments by researchers on how unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. Scientists flashed emotionally positive scenes (kitten, romantic couple) or negative scenes (werewolf, dead body) for 47 milliseconds before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally-linked scenes, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photos had been associated with the positive scenes. Something registered somewhere in the brain beneath awareness.

This effect is most striking in brain-damaged patients. Myers describes a woman who is unable to recognize her own hand, and when asked to use her thumb and forefinger to estimate the size of an object was unable to do it. Yet when she reached for the object her thumb and forefinger were correctly placed. Another study revealed that stroke patients who have lost a portion of their visual cortex may be consciously blind in part of their field of vision. When shown a series of sticks they report seeing nothing, yet unerringly identify whether the unseen sticks are vertical or horizontal. That’s weird.

Even for us non brain-damaged folks, subtle perception and learning is ongoing, especially in the social sphere where, Myers speculates, evolution would have designed our brains to be finely tuned to important relationships. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist will work out for you, for example, is your initial reaction in the first five minutes of the first session (not unlike the first impression on a first date). And research supports another intuition we have that women are more intuitively sensitive to subtle cues: women are better lie detectors than men, are superior in discerning which of two people in a photo was the other’s supervisor, and were more able to tell whether a male-female couple in a photograph is a genuine romantic relationship or a posed phony one.

What is going on here is not fully understood, and I worry that such research will be used to bolster belief in psychic power. Before we say something is out of this world we must first establish that it is not in this world. That has yet to be done with intuition. Intuition is not subliminal perception; it is subtle perception and learning — knowing without knowing that you know. A full scientific explanation is still forthcoming because this is a relatively new field of inquiry, but Myers’s book brilliantly establishes intuition as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry.

(Yale University Press, 2004, ISBN 0300095317)
This review was originally published in Los Angeles Times.