SGU Episode 384

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SGU Episode 384
24th November 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 383                      SGU 385
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
RW: Richard Wiseman
Quote of the Week
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.
Bertolt Brecht
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Saturday October 27th 2012 and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

S: And we have a special guest this week, Richard Wiseman, Richard welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.

RW: Bonjour, ça va?

S: You are the host, the MC of CSICon two thousand and twelve.

RW: Yes.

B: Twenty twelve.

S: Twenty twelve, and you're doing and excellent job, we're enjoying it very much and thanks again for joining us on the show.

Special Report: Richard Wiseman on his Dream Research (0:44)

• Richard updates us on his dream research and the iPhone app - Dream:ON

S: So, we were chatting a while ago about your recent work that you've been doing, you're working on something to do with dreams.

RW: I am, I'm working on Dream:ON which is an iPhone app which everyone can download because it's free, and it's an idea that came to me I guess about a year and a half ago when I looked at some very bizarre research from I think it's the early '70s from Stanford I think it was, and it was a guy who was waiting until people were in dream states, he was a sleep researcher.

B: Mr. LaBerge? Stephen LaBerge?

RW: No.

B: No?

R: No, no no. It's William Dement.

S: And we should mention before we go on that you are a psychologist.

RW: We should mention that.

S: Yes.

RW: Yes. Shall we?

S: Yes.

J: (laughs)

RW: Let's mention that. I'm a psychologist.

S: And author of several books, we'd like to...

RW: Oooh the books, Paranormality. That's very good, they were very kind, they gave me a little prize for that at this very conference.

S: Is that right?

RW: It was very nice.

S: A very prestigious prize I understand.

RW: Very prestigious prize, the Robert Bales critical thinking.

S: Yeah, you're following in the footsteps of some very prestigious recipients.

RW: I understand the previous recipient is not very far from me now.

S: That's right.

(laughter)

RW: Did it change your life?

S: Oh tremendously, yes. It altered the trajectory of my life in numerous ways.

RW: But I tell you what's nice is the money that comes with it. Ten thousand dollars, lovely.

(laughter)

E: Dollars or Euros, or Lira? Yen?

RW: So yes, I'm a psychologist, and I got interested in dreaming because of Paranormality actually, there's a chapter on precognitive dreams, so I got into the work of a guy called William Dement and he did this great experiment, best experiment ever, so in a sleep research lab, he waited until people were in dream state, showing REM, Rapid Eye Movement, and then he played in audio sounds, as audio uh, sounds...

S: As opposed to non-audio sounds.

RW: As opposed to those audio-visual images... of things like a steam train for about 20 seconds, and then he woke people up and they were dreaming about, they'd incorporated the sound into their dream.

S: Yeah.

RW: And about 50% of people he got this effect on. So I read about that and I thought, "wouldn't it be great if we could take that and roll it out on the iPhone and influence the whole world's dreams?" So I went to an iPhone company and they said, "that's insanely difficult" but they were prepared to try it, and we worked for a year and basically you take your iPhone at night, before you go to bed, you decide what time you want to wake up and then you put it on your matress next to you and it monitors movement in the half an hour, 30 minutes, before you wake up, it monitors movement very very closely and when it feels that you are very maximally still, i.e. dreaming because you're paralized in your dream, it plays in the sound scape of your choice, could be walking on a beach, could be out in nature, could be on an aeroplane, and that influences your dream, it wakes you up in a nice gentle way and then you're asked to report your dream into our dream bank, called the dream catcher.

S: The dream catcher.

J: Oh, that's very clever.

E: Yeah.

RW: It's good hey?

J: Yeah, that's good.

RW: So we rolled that out and currently, I just checked last week, we currently have 10 million dream reports.

J: Oh my god, wow.

RW: Isn't that scary? And the main finding is that when people wake up in the mornings, they can't spell.

(laughter)

RW: But it's lovely, and it doesn't work with everyone by any means, we're still changing the algorithms on it, because we can do that remotely, it's very scary what you can do on iPhones, over time you log on your iPhone, we send you a different algorithm but you don't know it and we get the data back and so on. And for some people it works very very well so we have people who are almost adicted to it, there's one woman whose dreams I read actually, almost every morning because she's having a long-term affair with George Clooney in her dreams.

S: Mmhmm. In her dreams.

RW: And she met him in Walmart, not for real, in her dream, about a month ago and now she dreams about him every night using the dreamscapes.

J: So really, this whole app was launced because you're just a really creepy voyeur.

RW: Pretty much, or that's also true, but it's incidental.

(laughter)

RW: But! But, but, but. So we've got a new dreamscape coming out this very week, I've completely lost track of time so I think it's coming out either the next couple of days or the couple of days after that, because we ask people what dream would you most like to have? And we ask guys and the answer was, we want to be part of a zombie attack.

B: Really? Wow, awesome!

S: Really?

E: Surprising.

J: Which side of the fence though?

RW: Oh, as a human.

J: OK.

B: Living human.

RW: Yep. So we have a well known news reader who is reading out this sort of news and suddenly there's a zombie attack and he takes you how to kill zombies, so that's the latest dreamscape. And then we're going to premium dreamscapes later on in the year which basically are sexually oriented. So you can have intercourse, as I refer to it as a psychologist...

(laughter)

RW: With celebrities. Yep.

J: How, how is your app going to make people dream those things?

RW: Voiceover artists.

J: So it's going to be basically like, "hey, this is J.Lo, we're gettin' it on."

S&E: (laughs)

RW: Yep. I'm doing the Elvis one.

J: Awesome.

(laughter)

S: Are you doing all dead celebrities, so you can avoid the...

RW: Precisely.

S: Aaah.

RW: Very good. Here we go: Uh huh huh.

(laughter)

E: Wow.

B: Nailed it.

E: I'll tell you.

S: I'm getting a little hard.

E: I'm in Nashville.

(laughter)

J: So that's the first thing that Elvis says. And then five minutes later he goes, "oh, oh."

RW: (laughs) No he only goes, "Uh huh huh" because that's all I can do.

J: Oh, OK (laughs)

RW: So that's the full extent of it. So it is a rather limited sexual dream. So yeah, so that's what I'm doing at the minute. I love it. I love messing around with all of these things.

J: That's cool.

B: Richard, that reminds me, I remember reading research, I think it was Stephen LaBerge, who was studying lucid dreaming and how to induce lucid dreams, he came up with the dream light which created these visual images having to do with sight, as opposed to the ones that don't.

(laughter)

B: So basically it determines when you're in REM sleep, it produces a light and if you're going to sleep you know that if you see a blue light then that means you're dreaming, so you will actually see the blue light in the dream, then you know this is a dream and then hopefully become lucid and then get some sort of control.

S: Well you could probably easily add a lucid track to say, "you are dreaming".

RW: Correct, we do have those.

B: Awesome.

RW: But lucid dreaming is so hard to do, but if you use the tracks a lot then the gentle voice whispers, "you're now dreaming" and you take control of it.

B: Oh, I'm going to try that.

RW: Um, we had a bit to do with Stephen, who is a big lucid dreamer, trying to develop these things, and I didn't know this about lucid dreams, it's so real to them that they have to do things to see whether or not they're lucid...

B: Yes. Reality testing, yeah.

RW: Reality testing. One of the things is looking into a mirror.

B: Really?

RW: Because if you look into a mirror you won't see your own reflection in a lucid dream, I think because the cognitive architecture to produce an image is too much for the brain, so that seems to be their number 1 test, you look into a mirror.

B: I'm familiar with two other ones.

S: To clarify, when they're awake?

RW: Yep.

S: They do these things to make sure they're not lucid dreaming?

RW: No, when they're dreaming, because they can't tell the difference. So yes, that's right. So when they're awake they'd do it, because they think, "oh I might be dreaming" and then see their reflection and think, "no this is reality I'd better not jump out of the building".

S: That's odd.

B: No it's not.

J: No it's not.

S: I mean I could see not knowing, if you're dreaming not knowing if you're dreaming or not, but when you're awake, really? They can't tell if they're awake?

J: No Steve, you're training yourself because if you do it enough, it becomes a habit and then you'll do it in your dream.

B: Right, that's the whole idea.

J: You're conditioning yourself.

S: No I get that. That's what I was trying to clarify. They're not looking in the mirror when they're awake to make sure that they're really awake.

RW: Well they would be because otherwise if they knew that they were dreaming, there'd be no point in looking in the mirror.

S: Yeah, so they're talking about something different from what you're talking about.

RW: OK.

S: They're talking about training yourself to do something when you're awake so that you'll do it in your dream and that will enable you to achieve a lucid state.

RW: No.

S: You're talking about, when they're awake, they're like "hey, am I really awake, or is this a lucid dream?"

RW: Correct.

S: And they'll look in the mirror to check themselves.

RW: That's correct.

J: OK.

S: Now that seems amazing to me.

B: What I've learned with lucid dreaming is that you get in the habit of asking yourself, "am I awake or am I dreaming right now? How do I know I'm not?". And the two ways that I read about, one is to read, open a book, read anything and invariably in a dream if you read something and look away and look back, the words will have changed and be jumbled up and I've done it many times and for me it works every time, the words always change. The other way to test it is to test physics really, you jump up in the air and you try to extend your fall and if you extend it even a fraction of a second, you know you're dreaming or in some kind of microgravity.

J: There's the rub though, because your detection of reality is compromised is dreaming, right? That's the whole thing.

B: But you're not going to read words and then look away and then read back and then you're going to see the same words, they will change.

J: No I agree with you, but what I'm saying is that when you're dreaming, for the most part all these crazy things are happening, and it's not occurring to you that you're dreaming because your brain is not fully functioning.

B: Right, you need a certain level of lucidity just to think about doing that, and people who have good dream recall in general can kind of get into that state more often than people that can't do it because they never really reach a level of lucidity where they can question reality.

RW: That's right, I mean what was quite funny with the Dream:ON app is, because I was actually the main pilot for it, and it's a very difficult thing, the algorithms, the movement, the volume, so the thing is that as you start to move, it lowers the volume in the dreamscape and so on. Anyway, so I'm testing all of this stuff, and so I'm sleeping with Caroline, my partner, who is a very light sleeper, and so I put this iPhone down one night and say, "oh, we're doing a test tonight" and she'd go, "oh, fine" and stuff, and then about you know, 3 am it would zip on with, "you are currently asleep!"

E: Oh gosh.

(laughter)

RW: "You are currently asleep and you can control..." and she was furious! And so I used to wake up with the iPhone in very interesting places. But um...

(laughter)

RW: But I'm quite a heavy sleeper, so I slept through the whole thing.

B: There's an app for that.

RW: Yes. So she had a very tough time with it, but we think we've got it right now, it's not bad.

J: OK, so what's your ultimate goal here?

RW: Well I'll tell you what it is. One is there's loads of research showing the mood that you're in for the day is often set by your final dream, so you have a rough dream and then you're in a bad mood. So trying to change that. The other thing is I really got in to the literature on depression and dreaming, I didn't realise that there's such a strong tie-up. So depressives dream about five times as much as normal people as it were, non-depressives. And then in their dreams they're doing the same as they do in real life, which is ruminating, they're going over their problems time and again. So the idea of kind of going in and giving them a more positive dream experience is sort of an interesting one, it's quite curious.

J: Yeah.

S: Mmhmm. Are you controlling for medication with that? I know medications for depression can give you very vivid dreams.

RW: I don't know the literature well enough to answer that question.

B: Do they dream five times as much or do they have five times better recall?

RW: Well this would be coming from sleep labs, so I would think that it would be about five times as much time in the classic...

S: in the REM...

RW: ... in the REM state.

B: That's amazing.

RW: There's also illusory insomniacs. So these are people who think that they're having a rough night's sleep and in fact you put them into a sleep lab and they're having a perfectly normal night's sleep, but they're dreaming about being awake.

B: Oh, awesome.

RW: It's the weirdest thing. So I've really got into dreaming and sleep, I think it's fascinating.

J: So a couple more questions because I'm totally blown away by people who think that they're not sleeping well. What about people, they think that they don't sleep well and they're also feeling tired during the day, but can you're, is there something about the quality of your dreaming that can affect your wakefulness.

RW: Well part of it is the emotional tone of the dream, so if you're having anxiety dreams, particularly if you wake up from them, you just feel pretty bad, so I just like the idea of trying to sort of tinker with it, and it's not my area or expertise so I know the literature a little bit but not especially well, so I guess what I bring to the party is the mass participation thing, I'm not afraid to roll this out to half a million people and to take risks. I'm sure a lot of sleep and dream researchers would go, "Well, that's all very fringey and weird" but I think you know, let's try it, let's see what happens. And let's just be honest about the results, if it doesn't work, what's it matter? We've all had fun with it.

S: Yeah that's cool, that's interesting. I just, just getting that many data points, you said millions of people, I mean something's got to emerge from that, it's interesting.

RW: Over time, I love the fact that we can change the algorithms, we can change the dreamscapes, getting real-time reports back, and we may develop something, who knows?

S: You know the term dream catcher, you know that was a reference an Indian art form where they make these dream catchers that you.

RW: Precisely, to stop bad dreams coming through the window, yeah. So we had that and we developed a new app which spins off of the one which I can't talk about but it's a big thing at the moment, it's taking up a lot of my time.

S: Cool.

E: Very neat.

S: Good to have a hobby (laughs).

RW: I think so, yeah. It's good to have something you're interested in, other than pornography.

(laughter)

S: Well before we go on to other news items...

RW: Uh huh huh.

This Day in Skepticism (13:34)

• November 24, 1859: On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, is published

S: Well before we on to other news items, or do news items, we're going to do This Day in Skepticism, Evan you're taking over since Rebecca's not with us today.

E: Yep. Yep. So this show's going to air on November 24th, on November 24th in 1859, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin's ground-breaking book was published in England, are you familiar with that Richard?

RW: England, yes. I've heard of it.

E: Yes, once or twice. The British naturalist Charles Darwin detailed the scientific evidence he had collected during his voyage on the Beagle in the 1930s (sic) and he presented his idea that species are the result of gradual biological evolution in which nature encourages, through natural selection, the propagation of those species best suited to the environment, or their environemtns I should say. He'd been prompted to publish it at the time by Charles Lyell and he was the one who advised them that Alfred Russel Wallace, who was also a naturalist, he was approaching the same conclusions and he was about to get ready to publish his own results and he said to Charles, "hey you'd better get on the stick here, you're going to wind up in second place in this contest."

S: Yeah, well what happened was Wallace, being a younger, maybe naive, researcher sent his manuscript to Darwin to say, "hey, am I on to something here? Am I crazy? What do you think about this?" and Darwin was like, "uh, duh, this is, I'm just..." he saw that this guy was ready to scoop him on the thing he's been working for decades on, and it was his friends who said, "do it" so they presented both papers at I think it was the Royal Society and they made sure that Darwin's paper went first.

E: Yep, and on day 1 of the publication, they printed as many copies as they did and it sold out immediately, it was an instant success and hit and the rest is history from there, the controversy, creationism and all that.

S: Yeah, it's amazing how much Darwin got right. He, such a huge idea, evolution through natural selection, and if you read back, and you can actually now, you can get the whole book online for free, so if you want to read any part of The Origin of Species, you can get to it. He really thought through a lot of different things about the evolutionary process and it was, I mean obviously he didn't get everything right, we've come a long way since Darwin in terms of evolutionary theory, but he gave a huge start to that field. Usually you have these fledgling, like a new scientific discipline will start out with just some ideas and it's very preliminary, but he did spend a lot of time developing his theories to a pretty advanced degree before then publishing it, so the whole evolution through natural selection thing hit the ground running in a way, it's interesting.

E: Hit the ground running, definitely, definitely did.

RW: He also did a lot of work on facial expressions of course, as well. It was he who put electrical currents into an alcoholic's face to contort his face into various expressions and take photos and then when people would come around to visit him at his house, he would show them the photos and they had to guess the expression, he was looking at reliability of facial expressions. Apparently it really hurts to have electrical current applied to your face.

J: Yeah, right?

(laughter)

RW: It's true! Tha's why he used an alcoholic, because he couldn't feel the pain.

B: Did you make that up?

RW: It's absolutely true, it's absolutely true. Yeah. I found out some trivia, do you want some David Hume trivia?

S: Yes. sure.

E: Oh.

RW: So David Hume, the sort of founder, in some ways skepticism and humanism and so on...

S: We quote him frequently on the show.

RW: Oh, OK. Right, so I live in Edinburgh for a lot of the time and Hume was in Edinburgh two streets away from where I live and so I thought I'd go and see his house, so I went round and his house is there, and the funny thing is that the part of Edinburgh it's in is called New Town, which was built in the Enlightenment, so all of the streets have very kind of modern names as it were, there's no old names like Saint whatever, except the street that he's in which is Saint David's Street. So what the council did, because they didn't like him because he was an athiest, when he moved into the street, they renamed the street Saint David's Street after him, as in Saint David Hume, so every time he had to give the address he had to write Saint David. So they actually renamed the whole street just to annoy him. I think that's great!

(laughter)

E: A badge of honour.

RW: Yeah. How annoyed would you be though if you moved in as an athiest and so on and they rename the whole street after you but give you a sainthood. So there we are. That's my little bit of trivia, it's not much but it's something.

E: Fascinating.

S: All right, well the first news item we're going to talk about is...

RW: I've got a dead dog in my garden.

(laughter)

RW: I've got a dead dog in my garden. I moved into this house...

(laughter)

S: Now you're just f-ing with us.

(laughter)

RW: No! I'm not! I haven't got my... I haven't got my iPhone with me, otherwise I'd show you, well not the dog. So I moved into this house, we moved into this house, we had to move out of the old house because Caroline wasn't sleeping very well there...

(laughter)

E: Something to do with an iPhone app or something.

RW: Every single morning! So, and it comes with a little bit of garden which is very unusual right in the middle of town, and it's covered in ivy. So I go out to cut down the ivy, being the manly chap that I am, and it's very difficult, have you ever tried to cut ivy and get rid of it?

S: No.

E: You need a machete or something.

RW: It's hard work, it grows into the ground and everything. So I'm working away and I hit my foot on something, I look down and it's a gravestone for a dog! I've got a dead dog in my garden.

E: Wait, how did you know it was a gravestone for a dog and not something else?

RW: So it said on it.

E: "This is a gravestone for a dog"

RW: Yeah.

E: Well there you go.

RW: Yeah.

J: So did you dig it up?

RW: I'm not going to dig up a dead dog!

E: Why not?

RW: It's 200 years old.

S: Oh that's cool.

RW: The gravestone's 200 years old.

J&S: Oh that's awesome.

RW: So I've got a dead dog that is 200 years old in my garden.

J: That is so English.

(laughter)

RW: It's Scottish. Believe me...

(laughter)

J: It is? OK.

RW: You don't want to make that mistake. Yeah, it's very Scottish, so yes. So I've got a dead dog in my garden.

S: I have a dead dog story too. So I was visiting my wife's mother with my two daughters for some holiday a few years ago and we were exploring in the back yard because they have lots of shale and every now and then you can find a little fossil leaf or something in the shale, and we came across a skull of some kind of animal, and then over there was a rib, and over here was something else, so we gathered all of the bones, it took us like an hour to find as many bones as we can, we laid them all out together and I started going through pictures to figure out what it was and I eventually figured out that it was a dog, then I...

RW: You laid out the bones.

S: Well I put them into the position, you know.

RW: How old are your daughters?

S: She was like 10 at the time, 9 or 10. They're good with that.

(laughter)

S: My daughters have had...

E: They're palaeontologists, right?

S: They're all nerded out and they're good with that whole macabre thing.

RW: It's not nerded up, it's strange.

S: My younger daughter loves her uncle Bob, loves Halloween, her favourite colours are orange and black.

B: Awesome.

S: She already has picked out her favourite weapon for in case of a zombie apocalypse, she's good.

B: (laughs)

RW: It's like living in another world.

(laughter)

S: Love it. So anyway, we figured out it was a dog, and it was the exact size of a dog that my mother-in-law owned.

RW: Oh!

S: That had died, like twenty years previously, fifteen years previously.

J: So you dug up your family's dead dog.

S: I didn't dig it up, this is what happened. The dog just vanished one night and they never found it, and it was sick. I think the thing just went away to die, but it was like right over the hill in the back yard, so they didn't realise that the dog had died like 50 feet from the house.

J: Oh my god, talk about lazy, like they didn't explore the woods right around the house?

S: It was in the woods right outside the house.

J: That's pathetic.

S: So I solved that mystery for them, I solved that twenty year old lost-dog mystery.

RW: So your daughters would have gone to school and they would say "what did you do at the weekend" and they'd say "daddy reassembled a dead dog."

(laughter)

S: Yes.

E: They didn't reanimate it or anything, you know, just...

RW: Well this brings me to one of the biggest mysteries. There are two things, my dead dog joke, this won't work except here. So a man's driving along and he knocks over a dog and he thinks "well that's terrible" so he goes and knocks on a house nearby and he says "I think I've just knocked over your dog" and they said "well what did it look like?" and the guy goes "well it's kind of"...

(laughter)

RW: And the person said "no I meant before you knocked it over" and so so the guy goes "well I think it was kind of"...

(laughter)

RW: So anyway, what I'm wondering...

S: Those are great visual jokes for a podcast.

(laughter)

RW: I realise now the error of my ways. Yes.

(laughter)

RW: But you can tell from the laughter in the room just how good that joke was.

E: It's playing well.

RW: So, I occasionally go into the countryside, I don't really like the countryside but I occasionally go out there. It's full of animals. Where are all their bones? Where are all the cow bones, the fox bones? Where? They're big boned animals.

S: They're there.

RW: They're not!

J: They get eaten?

E: Dragged away?

RW: No it's a genuine question, I haven't got an answer. Like you take a horse, that's a big boned animal, it would take years for that thing to degrade or whatever it does.

S: Scavengers do break up the bones and eat the bones.

B: Marrow, the bone marrow.

RW: Scavengers, you mean people like Steve who goes along and assembles...

(laughter)

RW: "Hey kids, stop! There's a horse over there, it'll take some time but I'll put it all right!" Scavengers? Foxes?

S: I don't know if foxes are scavengers are they? Don't they hunt like...

RW: Well what's a scavenger then?

S: In England? What's a scavenger in England? Well, probably vultures...

J: Wolves...

RW: There aren't any vultures!

E: Wolves, Irishmen, I don't know.

(laughter)

RW: Oooooh! Don't come and visit! Not after that line! Irishmen! Fantastic.

E: The day I cracked Richard up.

J: No, it is a good question though.

RW: There aren't any vultures.

J: OK. But let's start with the logical idea that something is happening to them, because you're right, they're not piled up high, knee-high in the woods.

RW: I have never seen the skeleton of a cow or a horse in the countryside.

E: Yeah, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

S: I saw the skeleton of a deer once when I was walking through the woods, more than once.

RW: OK.

J: Yeah, but OK but.

S: For what it's worth.

RW: But not hundreds of them. You see hundreds of deer.

S: Not hundreds, yeah.

J: I've gone hiking in dozens and dozens of times in very heavily populated woods as far as animals are concerned, and very, very infrequently will I find a scull of something or whatever, you'd figure yeah there'd be a lot of bones kicking around. Nobody, I'm sure that people aren't picking them up.

S: Do you look? Do you like really make a concerted effort to look?

RW: It could be like your dog. Maybe they go and hide 50 meters from where they were last seen.

S: 20 years, 50 feet, not even meters, and they didn't find it.

RW: Feet. That's just weird.

S: Well it was kind of over a little hill, it was probably in the bushes.

J: Whatever Steve.

E: We measure things in feet.

S: I'm was surprised, I'm not defending it. But yeah, so I think it was partly, bones don't last for long in the wild.

RW: No they do, you can dig up a human skeleton a couple of hundred years later and it's still...

S: Yeah but that's not out in the open, that's under the ground, that's a big difference.

RW: No, if you put a horse skeleton in a field, it would be there for must be tens of years.

E: Many wild horses in England?

RW: Yeah, they're furious a lot of them.

B: Really?

RW: They are. Yeah. No we have horses, we have deer, we have cattle, I have never seen like, you know a skeleton of one. Something odd is happening.

S: You're saying this is a genuine mystery.

E: What fallacy is that, Steve?

RW: It's a genuine mystery which we need... it could be the Irishmen, that's the only...

E: See?

S: The conventional answer that I'm familiar with is that it's scavengers. I don't know what scavengers are in England, we could look that up.

RW: Crows?

S: Crows... yeah.

E: Birds.

RW: A horse is a big thing.

S: Some scavengers eat bones, I mean they actually break up the bones and get the marrow and destroy it but I don't know again which ones would still be extant in England.

B: Maybe animals bury their dead and we're just not aware of it?

S: No.

B: Is that possible?

J: Maybe invisible, psychic, teleporting bigfoot take care of the bones.

S: Yeah.

E: That's an explanation, all right.

S: But that argument comes up with bigfoot because then we say "well why don't we find any bigfoot remains?" And people say "well you don't find remains of animals out in the wilderness." And to an extent that's correct.

E: Yeah.

J: OK, well why don't we do some research and we'll revisit this one.

S: OK, well we are going to move on to some news items.

RW: What?

E: Any other non sequeters Richard you'd like?

S: Yeah, any other interjections or ejaculations you want to get out?

J: Well the other application that Richard was developing that he didn't want to mention is called the Porn Catcher.

S: The Porn Catcher?

E: Yes.

S: He's working on that with you is he?

E: What it is, it's an app that asks people to send him the link to their favourite porn.

S: Yeah.

E: And he analyses all of this. Psychologist.

B: Over and over.

RW: I'm just chatting.

(laughter)

RW: If you don't want me to chat...

News Items

Aspartame Study (26:30)

• Harvard hospital admits it promoted weak science on aspartame

S: So there was a, there was a recent study published on aspertame. Aspertame is an artificial sweetener. It's been very controversial, since the internet, because people believe that aspertame is to blame for all sorts of horrible things because it ain't natural, right? But it's been widely studied, hundreds of published studies about it, and, in fact, it's perfectly safe. Not just the FDA, but multiple organizations, the WHO, and certainly in the UK and in Europe, have reviewed the data on aspertame and have concluded that there are no health risks when the product is consumed as intended, they always say. Which means, I guess, you're not eating buckets and buckets of it, but you're just using it as a sweetener. But there was a recent study looking at the incidence of lymphoma and leukemia in men and women drinking sugary sodas versus artificially sweetened drinks, and the study concluded that it was a slightly increased risk, risk in men only but not women who drank soft drinks sweetened with aspertame for leukemia and lymphoma. The Brigham and Women's Hospital put out a press release, the title of the press release was "The Truth Isn't Sweet When It Comes to Artificial Sweeteners" (an irresistible pun, right?), promoting the study. Just a couple days later they retracted their press release. They essentially said to the media, this is actually a rather weak study; we apologize for wasting your time. Please ignore our previous press release.

B: Is that unprecedented?

S: I don't know if it's unprecedented. It's good that they did it.

E: It's good that they retracted it.

B: Surprisingly good.

E: Had the damage been done, though?

S: Yeah, the damage is done. But it's, I mean, what happened was the press office was looking for news to put out and, so, one of their researchers was involved with this study and they put out the press release. But, we've talked about this before, the notion that there's always a lot of this research going on in the background, biomedical research and every field, most of it's crap, or preliminary, or the kind of data that's only interesting to other researchers in terms of an area perhaps of further research. And really, you have no business promoting the results of this study to the public. Not that you're trying to hide it from the public, but it does not rise to that level of public interest. It's just too preliminary. And essentially, they were called on this and they acknowledged that, yup, this is not the kind of study that should be getting a press release to the public, because the data was exceedingly weak. And I looked over it, and it is an extremely weak study. The correlation was very small. Easily the kind of thing that could be due to chance alone. It is not in line with other research which shows that there is no increased risk from any of these things, from consuming diet soda. It was only in certain subgroups, only when you're looking at the data in a certain way. So it was not robust at all.

RW: You've also got a correlation-causation issue, even if it is. . .

S: Yeah. Even if the correlation is true, it doesn't show you that there's a causation there. But it's interesting, because this is the kind of thing that often, like we do all the time, is you get either a press release or something that's in the news cycle, but it's a really preliminary, crappy study, and it is getting blown out of proportion or over-hyped, or scare mongering, in this case. So it's interesting that they did it to themselves. Where they sort of withdraw and say, whoops, we really shouldn't have done that, sorry. This was not an appropriate . . . I wonder, I wonder what the back story is on that. How that really happened.

E: Yeah, yeah.

J: Like, you mean, that they didn't do it with good intentions; maybe they were forced to do it?

S: I bet , I think, I don't know, I'm just inferring, you know, something, it's possible that the researcher himself contacted the press office and said "What the hell are you doing? This is not the kind of study that we wanna go shouting around to the public. This is a preliminary study with very soft findings. It's not worth it. Maybe he was worried that he would get embarrassed by it or something. But, it's interesting. I wonder how much of this kind of things is due to the internet. The web. Because there's this news cycle, and then there's often a blogging cycle immediately after that where you have a lot of science bloggers who know what they're talking about criticizing the media for misrepresenting studies. And the media's paying attention to that. I get contacted all the time by journalists or outlets who are responding to the backlash to the original horrible reporting about stories.

J: If that's true, Steve, then why aren't things getting better?

S: Yeah, well, you know, it, certainly subjectively it seems that way. I mean, I don't know if we're actually tracking it in any kind of objective way, but I think there are bright spots. But overall, the media reporting is getting worse it seems. And I think the conventional wisdom is that it's the, essentially the collapse of the business model of journalism because of the internet.

J: Um hmm.

S: But there are good reporters out there, and I do think that they're increasingly getting onto the idea that scientists can directly bypass them and write to the public and write blogs, et cetera. And that if they want to be relevant, remain relevant, they've gotta stay on board with that. Otherwise they're just gonna be blog fodder, you know, for scientists who are blogging directly.

J: Um hmm.

S: Interesting, but you know, the asptertame thing comes up frequently. I don't think we've really tackled it thoroughly on the show before, but still it's one of those urban legends, the idea that aspertame causes all of these horrible things. The primary thing they claim about aspertame now is the whole formaldehyde angle. Have you ever heard about this, Richard? One of the breakdown products of aspertame is formaldehyde and they sort of link formaldehyde to all kinds of horrible diseases and outcomes. But . . .

J: So wait, Steve, to clarify, when you digest aspertame, part of the digestion process converts it to formaldehyde, or parts of it to formaldehyde.

S: Yes.

E: Part of it.

S: Yeah, it's one of the metabolic breakdown products. But it just, like a lot of things, you know, a lot of foods that we eat, it gets broken down in to formaldehyde along the way to its ultimate breakdown products. But it insignificantly contributes to the amount of formaldehyde in your body and doesn't have any harm associated with it.

B: It's normal and natural.

S: Yeah, it's part of normal metabolism. But you tell people, aspertame gets broken down into this horrible, dangerous, scary sounding chemical, then the fear mongering goes from there.

Being a Psychopath (32:57)

• The Benefits of Being a Psychopath

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Type Ia Supernova (45:19)

• White Widow Theory Could Explain Type Ia Supernovae Birth

Fecal Transplants (55:56)

• Targeted Restoration of the Intestinal Microbiota with a Simple, Defined Bacteriotherapy Resolves Relapsing Clostridium difficile Disease in Mice

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Science or Fiction (1:03:30)

Item number one. Some sharks can change their shape by inflating their body with water or air. Item number two. Some shark's poop comes out in a spiral pattern. Item number three. Some sharks can vomit out their own stomachs. Item number four. Sharks do not get cancer which is why cancer researchers frequently study them. And item number five. Sharks are affected by the Moon, leading them to kill more people.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:14)

S: Jay, do you have a quote this week?

J: I have a quote sent in by a listener named Joseph Miñones, he basically gave me how to pronounce his name and I can't pronounce it. Miñones. Check out this quote: "The aim of science..."

B: He wrote it phonetically for Jay and he still can't say it, I love it.

J: He did, and I still can't read it.

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.

E: Hear, hear.

RW: Yeah, I agree with that.

B: You'd agree with anything.

J: And this was a quote written by Bertold Brech? Bertold Brecht? Brech?

E: Brecht?

J: Why don't you come here and yell his name?

S: Bertold...

Audience member: Bertolt Brecht!

(laughter)

B: There you go.

J: Awesome. Thank you!

S: Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show.

RW: A pleasure! Thank you guys!

S: and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

References