My 2008 resolution: be more skeptical

Scientific articles in the media can be misleading

Trevor Bekolay, Volunteer

As I was searching for significant breakthroughs that happened in 2007, I came across an article published in London’s Daily Mail entitled “Many Scientists are Convinced that Man Can See the Future,” written by Danny Penman. This could be the breakthrough of the year, I thought. If a scientific study showed some evidence of precognition in humans, the scientific community would be floored. Yet, the article was written several months ago; why had I not heard of it before?

The long and short of it is that the article is half rhetoric attempting to make the reader more open to the idea of paranormal activity and half reporting on a pseudoscientific study that has not been published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. This article, like other hypotheses and conspiracy theories, draws the reader in with anecdotes and the illusion that you are learning something inherently special; certainly, the idea that we may be able to harness this ability to see parts of the future is incredibly sexy. However, as I’ll show through examining quotes from the article, the author’s strength lies in manipulating the audience, not educating them.

The article begins by describing an MRI scan, the results of which are being eagerly anticipated.

“[The] results — released exclusively to the Daily Mail — suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them ‘see’ the future.”

Why would a scientific study release its results to a daily tabloid instead of a scientific journal? Simply put, it wouldn’t; scientific journals print new research. If a study has been previously published it is not new research. However, the exclusivity of the results enhances the reader’s sense that this information is special and that, in knowing it, the reader is part of a group of insiders.

“Such amazing studies — if verified — might help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such as Extra Sensory Perception, deja vu and clairvoyance.”

I commend the author for including the phrase “if verified,” though this is an easy phrase to pass over. The issue comes right after that: ESP, déjà vu, clairvoyance, and other paranormal phenomena have already been “mundanely” explained by scientists. Chris Moulin, a senior lecturer in cognitive neuropsychology at the University of Leeds, has done extensive research that shows that déjà vu is simply a brief error in the memory systems of the brain. ESP and clairvoyance have never been demonstrated in controlled environments. James Randi, of the James Randi Educational Foundation, has offered a prize of $1 million to the first person to present objective proof of the paranormal. Since offering a prize of $1,000 in 1964 that soon turned into the $1-million prize, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests. Penman flippantly contradicts decades of scientific research without citing any sources.

“Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: [ . . . ] ‘In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.’ Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through time — they can work either way, regardless.”

Josephson, despite his qualifications as a physicist, is dangerously misrepresenting the facts. While theoretical physics posits theories that would allow information to travel through time, and indeed through different universes, the article is about human cognition, not theoretical physics. Humans live in three dimensions and even if information were to come from the future we still have no evidence that the human brain can perceive that information.

Semantically, science cannot prove anything with absolute certainty; gravity is a well-tested theory, yet scientists cannot prove that it will continue to hold tomorrow. The scientific method involves making hypotheses, testing those hypotheses and refining our understanding of phenomena. In science, a theory is simply the best way that we can explain our observable world, and for that reason, any theory put forth by science must be falsifiable. If the sun doesn’t come out tomorrow, you can be sure that our model of the solar system is going to be put into question.

The article continues by citing the anecdotal evidence of individuals who claim to sense catastrophic events before they occur.

“[Shortly] after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage.

“It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease.

“It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ‘something’ was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.”

Cognitive science offers us numerous explanations for this phenomenon. Memories are not as solid and unchanging as they first seem. We tend to identify events that have already occurred as more predictable than they were before they took place, a bias known as the hindsight bias. Memory is also subject to suggestibility; if someone asks one of these lucky people if they had some kind of premonition or uneasy feeling that something would happen, they may create the memory of having such a premonition.

Even if we presume that one did truly get such an uneasy feeling, it does not suggest the ability to see the future. Humans feel uneasy often, for a myriad of reasons. Of the people scheduled to board the plane, it is not unreasonable to expect that some would change plans because of uneasy feelings. Every day, many make the decision to take a day off of work for personal reasons. Were that decision to result in avoiding a disaster, one would remember that day and forget other personal days. The tendency for us to remember the hits and forget the misses is well-documented, and known as confirmation bias. Penman’s article continues:

“If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future.”

This is an example of the common logical fallacy that correlation proves causation. Even if it were true that fewer people flew on an aircraft that crashed, it would in no way support the idea that humans have an ability to predict when planes will crash. Correlation does not prove causation.

“Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what happens.

“The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually empty.”

In this case, the article fails to show even correlation. What does it mean to be unusually empty? Empty compared to an average day or previous data on 9-11? Sept. 11 falls shortly after Labour Day, which commonly sees a drop in airline usage. Is it not a more plausible explanation that it would be easier to hijack an empty plane, and therefore be more logical to choose a day that typically has fewer passengers?

The article goes on to cite a number of other depressing events in which survivors claim that they felt uneasy the day before.

“Dr. Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of ‘lucky’ soldiers to forecast the future. . . . Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings — and occasionally-actual glimpses of the future — could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers. . . . He devised an experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured an electrical current across the surface of the skin.

“This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an extremely violent picture or video. It’s the electrical equivalent of a wince. Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer. And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures before they saw them. It was unmistakable. They began to ‘wince’ a few seconds before they actually saw the image. And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow.”

This thinly veiled pseudoscientific experiment will never grace the pages of any peer-reviewed journal. From the outset, the “researcher” has a clear bias towards a certain result. Radin’s experiment measures the reaction of the subject over a certain time period and then compares that to the distastefulness of the images shown. He claims that there is a correlation between reactions and the picture that will be shown a few seconds later — “way beyond what chance alone would allow.” Are subjects simply anticipating distasteful images? Where is the control group? Was anyone shown only pleasant images or only unpleasant images? What about the rest of the data? Is this supposed precognition more strongly correlated than actual cognition — the correlation between the reaction and the image currently displayed?

Even if we were to assume that there is a significant correlation between reaction and the image that will come soon, as discussed earlier, this does not imply that the reactions were caused by the picture that will appear soon. This experiment is based on a false dichotomy: either there is no correlation between reactions and future images, or humans are capable of precognition.

While I may be criticized for picking apart an article about wacky claims in a daily tabloid, it should be noted that the author and many of the people quoted in the article have graduate degrees and lecture at prominent universities.

There is no worry that studies like these will be published in scientific journals, but paranormal phenomena, conspiracy theories, and other “unexplainable” occurrences tend to be reported in some sections of mainstream media. Maintaining a skeptical point of view is a necessity. Even this article is not exempt from skepticism; I encourage you to pick apart and criticize every word I’ve written.

And to help you with some other resolutions, Danny Penman has also authored a book to help you reach your weight loss goals; it’s called “The No Diet Diet!”

Are you skeptical yet?