The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

Your brain also constructs its internal model of your body. You probably take for granted that you are in your body, you own your body, and you can control your body. It might seem like these sensations are inevitable consequences of the obvious fact that you are your body. This isn’t true, however. All of those bodily sensations are active constructions by the brain, requiring specific circuits dedicated to that purpose. First, we feel like we are in our bodies because our brains compare what we see and what we feel. We literally see ourselves in our own body, and we feel the parts of our body, and when those things sync up, our brain constructs the sensation of being in our body.

This construction can be disrupted, which results in an out-of-body sensation. Some drugs can do this, as can seizures in certain parts of the brain, or even just some easy trickery. Researchers have found that it is actually quite simple to get people to feel as if they are inside a virtual body or a prop body rather than their own. The setup is straightforward: Wear virtual reality goggles that are being fed real-time video from a camera behind you. This way you are seeing the back of yourself. Someone then touches the back of your shoulder. You see the virtual image in front of you being touched while simultaneously feeling the touch. This is enough for your brain to construct the sensation that you occupy the virtual image of yourself rather than your actual body.

How does all this affect critical thinking? Well, just as with memory, be wary of saying, “I know what I saw.” Hmm… no, you don’t. You have a constructed memory of a constructed perception based on filtered partial sensation and altered by your knowledge and expectations. Psychologists have recognized some specific and dramatic manifestations of the limits of human perception.

To illustrate this, there is a website made by Tyler Vigen called Spurious Correlations. You can enter a number of variables into databases linked to by the site, which will then display a graph showing how well they correlate.

The Moving Goalpost

Anti-vaxxers claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism. When scientific studies shot down that claim, they moved on to thimerosal (a mercury-based preservative in some vaccines, but not in the MMR). They predicted that when thimerosal was removed from standard vaccines in the US in 2002, autism rates would plummet—they didn’t. So they claimed that mercury from other sources, like coal factories, made up for the drop in mercury exposure from vaccines. When the evidence did not support that claim, they moved on to aluminum as the cause (nope). And now they just reference vague “toxins.” No amount of safety data on vaccines is ever enough. They just keep moving the goalpost.

the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—once you stumble upon an obscure word or fact, you encounter it again and again, seemingly against the odds.

Here is another example, this one from psychologist Thomas Gilovich: A husband believes he always puts down the toilet seat. His wife, with whom he shares a bathroom, believes he never puts down the seat. They are working from the exact same set of data but arrive at opposite conclusions. Why? Well, the husband notices when he remembers to put down the seat. The wife notices when he doesn’t. He doesn’t notice when he forgets (because that’s what it means to forget). She doesn’t notice when he does, because it’s a nonevent.

When referring to psychics we call this “remembering the hits and forgetting the misses.” A psychic will throw out all sorts of statements, and the client is likely to remember only the ones that stand out for being accurate.

The very concept of an exception implies a conclusion. It’s not an exception—it’s data, data that are as valid as the instances that appear to support your narrative. But we subconsciously treat confirming instances as data and disconfirming instances as exceptions.

Pseudoscientists, by contrast, will tend to accept any testimony or anecdote that supports their desired belief. They will sometimes present large volumes of low-quality evidence, implying that a large amount of poor-quality evidence equates to high-quality evidence. Alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil, for example, supports the use of “uncontrolled clinical observations” in determining whether or not a treatment works. Such observations have a history, however, of being contradicted by later well-controlled and more reliable experiments. This is a lesson that good scientists have learned and that pseudoscientists deride.

Anti-vaccinationists who deny the safety and effectiveness of vaccines commonly ask for a randomized vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated study. While this may seem reasonable at first, they know such a study will never be done. They are essentially requiring a study that randomizes children to receive no vaccines at all. It’s unethical: Vaccines are already part of the standard of care because they have proven benefits. In a clinical trial you cannot randomize subjects to not receive standard treatment. They set the bar this high so they can deny the value of all other evidence that shows vaccines are safe. There are vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated studies, just not randomized, and there are many other types of studies showing the safety of vaccines. This strategy also uses special pleading. If a study shows that there is no association between the timing of vaccines and the incidence of autism or any other outcome, they’ll say that the effect is delayed or is from the vaccines the mother received while pregnant. If there’s no dose response, that’s because maximal negative effects are reached at tiny doses. If an ingredient is removed, then trace amounts are sufficient to have the negative effect, or some other ingredient is to blame. No evidence will ever be enough.

Take her reliance on vitamin infusions. Although she swears she feels energized and sharper after a B-vitamin drip, studies don’t support such claims. In fact they consistently show no better efficacy than placebo. And they aren’t without risks—when performed outside of a hospital setting (as most of these so-called “medi-spas” are), there is no guarantee of purity or sterility. And although intravenous vitamin delivery may be recommended for a small percentage of individuals with a medically verifiable deficiency, most physicians agree that oral administration is the proper course.

Perhaps one of the worst offenders in this category is Gwyneth Paltrow (although there sure are others). Her lifestyle website, Goop, is a regular source for Aubrey’s nonsense. She advocates for vaginal steaming and vaginal eggs made of jade (yes, you are to wear these things inside yourself—a practice gynecologists have vehemently condemned). She sells an entire line of unproven supplements and she regularly promotes detox cleanses, colon cleansing, and homeopathy. She erroneously claims (through her “experts”) that underwire bras cause breast cancer and that chemical-based sunscreens (isn’t everything chemical based?) cause hormone disruptions (they do not). Gwyneth Paltrow’s advice is not only misguided, it’s outright dangerous, as Timothy Caulfield, author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? points out. Yet Aubrey and others can’t get enough.

Neal Asher’s Polity science fiction universe.

(I highly recommend Ed Yong’s popular science book I Contain Multitudes for a thorough examination),

Ever the popular wellness crank, Dr. Joseph Mercola is a great example of pseudojournalism. He loves to tout the magical control the microbiome has over every aspect of human health. A cynical person might note that this microbiome hype plays nicely into the products he sells. According to articles on his website, your gut bacteria are responsible for obesity, diabetes, depression, autism, anxiety, schizophrenia, cancer, asthma, and arthritis, among other random ailments. The solution? Buy his book!

A recent review in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry looked at over 120 clinical trials of curcumin, the major chemical component of turmeric. The authors conclude: “No double-blinded, placebo controlled clinical trial of curcumin has been successful… Curcumin is an unstable, reactive, nonbioavailable compound and, therefore, a highly improbable lead.” Curcumin is an experimental agent—it isn’t FDA approved to prevent or treat any disease. In fact, the FDA listed curcumin on its website as one of “187 Fake Cancer ‘Cures’ Consumers Should Avoid.”