Today's Materialism Enforcement Is Like Yesteryear's Heterosexuality Enforcement

I have seen many very surprising things in my life. One of the most surprising things occurred shortly after I arrived about 7:00 AM on September 11, 2001 at my desk on a high floor of one of the two towers of the World Trade Center. I never in a million years would have guessed that by noon both towers of the World Trade Center would be reduced to piles of smoking rubbish. Luckily I escaped using the stairways. Another extremely surprising thing I have seen in my life is a great change in public attitudes towards homosexuality in the United States. 

I seemed to have heard not a single word about homosexuality before I was about 13. There seemed to be no mention of it anywhere on TV or in the movies. No teacher at school said a word about it. During the 1950's and almost all of the 1960's there was a kind of a heterosexuality enforcement regime in place. In a variety of ways, society tried to depict homosexuals as people who were sick freaks. To understand how successfully society had stigmatized homosexuality, you can consider how infrequently people used the "easy out" of avoiding the Vietnam War draft by declaring themselves to be homosexuals. 

During the 1960's the US drafted young adults into service into the military. Around 1965 the Vietnam War began to become very unpopular among young men. People realized that many thousands of young men were being forced to serve in a dirty, dubious war on the other side of the globe, and opposition to the draft was massive. If you were a young man in those days it was hard to get out of the draft by claiming to be a conscientious objector, particularly if your family had no background with such a tradition. You could avoid the draft by fleeing to Canada or Sweden, and staying there for many years. Or you could take the "easy out" of just declaring yourself publicly to be a homosexual, which would allow you to stay in the US near your friends or family. The US Army at this time was treating homosexuality as a reason for rejecting a draftee. At this time society had so stigmatized homosexuality that few men avoided the draft by publicly declaring themselves to be homosexual. Society had whipped up so many anti-gay feelings among the populace that many a young man thought that he would rather flee to some other country (presumably never to return to the US) than declare himself to be a homosexual. 

Part of the shaming effect was achieved by the "Bible of psychiatry" (the DSM) listing homosexuality as a mental disorder, something it did until the early 1970's. Both the DSM-I published in 1952 and the DSM-2 published in 1968 had classified homosexuality as a mental problem. Throughout the 1960's gay sex was prohibited by law in 48 out of 50 of the US states.  

Finally in the 1970's things began to slowly change. During the 1970's about half of the 50 US states dropped their laws against gay sex. You can see the change in the laws in the diagram on the page here.  A key weakening of the heterosexuality enforcement regime came around 1974 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In the 1970's we finally began to occasionally see a few positive depictions of gays, such as in an episode of "All in the Family" which was considered daring in its time. 

But the lessening of the heterosexuality enforcement regime proceeded quite gradually. During the 1990's gay sex was still illegal in more than a dozen US states, and it was not until 2003 that a US  Supreme Court decision (Lawrence vs. Texas) effectively deactivated all of the US laws against gay sex in private homes. In many US states there are still laws against homosexuality, but they are almost never enforced. I remember that in the 2004 US presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Howard Dean was widely considered to be too much of a radical largely because he had signed a law in Vermont merely allowing "civil unions" for gay people (which were like marriage in all but name). Finally in 2015 a Supreme Court decision allowed gay marriage throughout the United States. 

By now we have in the United States a collapse of the heterosexuality enforcement regime which prevailed for so long, and was still running very strong in the 1950's and 1960's. But such a heterosexuality enforcement regime still exists in some other countries. Now a Netflix user will occasionally see gay kissing occurring on regular TV shows, and there are annual public Gay Pride parades that are massively attended not just by gays but also by very many straight people eager to show their support for gay people. The degree of homosexuality acceptance we now see in the US would have seemed extremely shocking to someone in the mid 1960's, who never would have imagined that a tendency so despised and shamed in his time would be so accepted in our time. 

But there is another social conduct enforcement regime still in place, one that uses many tactics that allowed the heterosexuality enforcement regime to flourish for so long. This is the social conformity regime enforcing Darwinist materialism in academia and the US press. Just as the heterosexuality enforcement regime attempted for so long to depict a significant fraction of the population (perhaps 10% or more) as being shameful sinners or deviants to be despised,  the enforcers of Darwinist materialism attempt to depict a large fraction of the population as being rather like law-breakers to be despised.  That fraction of the population is the large fraction that rejects claims that there are material explanations for all the wonders of the mind and biology, or that reports observing or believing in paranormal phenomena. 

Heterosexuality enforcement was achieved largely through legalistic strategies and deviance-shaming strategies. The legalistic strategies involved passing laws against homosexuality, and by making dubious claims that homosexuality violates the law of God. This typically required quotations from the oldest books of the Old Testament, since Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. Equally dubious is the legalistic strategy of today's materialism enforcers. Such people attempt to persuade us that there are "rules of science" that allow only material explanations for natural phenomena. But there are no such rules of science. Unlike courts such as US federal courts which follow a formally written set of rules of evidence  such as the Federal Rules of Evidence, science has never followed formal rules of evidence or formal rules of procedure. The rules followed by different groups of scientists are hazy and vary from one field of study to another.  There is no formal rule in science that natural phenomena must be explained by material causes, nor has there been any tradition constantly followed by scientists of only explaining things through material causes. And if there was such a tradition, it would be merely habit, one that should be abandoned as soon as any evidence justified its abandonment.  The materialism enforcer pressuring people to follow the Way of Darwin (stated in some book written centuries ago) is like some heterosexuality enforcer pressuring people to follow the Way of Moses (stated in some book written centuries ago). 

In the US there was never any imprisonment of people for defying materialism, although in the period between 1920 and 1960 the Soviet Union engaged in very massive killing and imprisonment of people defying the ideology it called "dialectical materialism." Equally great persecution of those defying materialism occurred during the long reign of Chairman Mao in China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution period of the 1960's. 

Just as yesteryear's heterosexuality enforcer made a heavy use of derogatory deviance shaming, today's materialism enforcers make a heavy use of derogatory deviance shaming. Yesteryear's heterosexuality enforcer made a frequent merciless use of terms of abuse such as a six-letter term beginning with "f," a ten-letter term beginning with "c," and so forth to refer to gay people. Today's materialism enforcer makes frequent use of terms of contempt such as "creationist," "mystic" or "spiritualist." Often the terms are used inaccurately, in ways that mislead.  The term "creationist" will forever be entwined with the term "biblical creationist," so calling anyone a creationist is an attempt to insinuate that he is a fundamentalist. In fact, most of the people called "creationists" by materialism enforcers are not fundamentalists, and do not even appeal to scripture in their writings, but instead appeal to the facts involving stratospheric levels of systemic organization and fine-tuned complexity in biological organisms.  It is therefore misleading to refer to such people as "creationists." The term "mystic" has a technical meaning in religion or philosophy, and most of the people our materialists call mystics are not actually mystics. Similarly, most of the people called spiritualists by materialists are not believers in spiritualism, the belief that it is possible to communicate with the dead by use of mediums or seances.  

The shaming tactics of today's materialism enforcers continue full blast, and in a single article it is common to read a trifecta of mudslinging in which Darwinism defenders try to smear and shame their opponents by (1) inaccurately claiming or insinuating they are fundamentalists; (2) inaccurately linking them to vaccine opponents; and (3) attempting to compare them to cigarette manufacturers, about as groundless a comparison as you could make. "Shame, blame and defame" is the way materialists handle their critics.  Part of this program involves merciless attempts to gaslight observers of the paranormal by trying to paint them as people hallucinating. Then there are the endless attempts of materialists to try to paint those documenting the paranormal as frauds or cheats. 

A key element of heterosexuality enforcement was misrepresenting the degree of diversity in human sexuality. For very many years in the very rare instances when homosexuality was mentioned, people were told that only the tiniest fraction of humans were homosexual (1% was a commonly stated estimate). We continued to be told  this for many years after the Kinsey surveys had reported data suggesting that more than 10% of the population was homosexual or bisexual.  Something extremely similar occurs in regard to materialism enforcement. Materialism enforcers constantly make misleading claims that there is a "scientific consensus" in favor of the tenets of materialism. The term "consensus" is defined in different ways, including "unanimity of opinion" or "general agreement." There is no robust evidence that there exists any unanimity of opinion or any "general agreement" in favor of the tenets of materialism or Darwinism, either within the scientist population as a whole, or within the population of all biologists and psychologists. 

The only way to reliably determine the degree of belief by scientists in some doctrine is to do a fairly-designed secret ballot of scientists, but such ballots are virtually never done. Almost all attempts to poll scientists on their beliefs are guilty of procedural problems, such as failing to provide a secret ballot, or offering too limited a series of choices in an opinion poll, one of which should always be a best version of an alternative to a prevailing tenet, and one of which should always be the equivalent of "I don't know" or "I am not sure."  Rare opinion polls of scientists fail to meet such minimal standards, and will typically offer poll choices that include some "straw man" version of an alternative to dominant ideas, rather than some more credible alternative. Therefore all claims of anything like a consensus (either in terms of a unanimity of opinion or even a strong majority of opinion) in regard to the key claims of materialism or Darwinism are unfounded.  Any well-designed international secret ballot poll of a large branch of scientists (such as all biologists or all psychologists) would probably reveal that no such consensus exists, if you define "consensus" as either unanimity or near-unanimity of opinion. 

The heterosexuality enforcers of yesteryear did not want people to know that there were large thriving communities of gay people in places such as San Francisco or the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. So I never heard or read a word about such communities until I was maybe 17 years old. Similarly, today's materialism enforcers do not want you to know facts such as that significant fractions of the population report out-of-body experiences, that large fractions of dying people or widows (and perhaps even a majority) report seeing apparitions of deceased family members or hearing their voices,  and that the reporting of dramatic paranormal experiences was incredibly common around the time Darwin was writing, being well documented by many a distinguished scientist such as Sir William Crookes and Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution. So we hear of no such things in their writings. Today's materialism enforcers do not want you to know about the very large number of scientists who have expressed doubt or lack of confidence in claims that are claimed to be part of a mainstream consensus, so they avoid quoting statements like the scientist confessions I list in my post here. Such enforcers try to keep doubt about their dogmas "hidden in the closet." 

The heterosexuality enforcers of yesteryear frequently appealed to naturality, saying that you must follow "the natural way" of heterosexuality and not engage in "unnatural acts" such as homosexuality. The force of this reasoning started to diminish as people realized that gay people act in a way that is perfectly natural for them. Today's materialism enforcer also appeals to naturality, often calling his position "naturalism," which he defines as the belief that only nature exists. But strangely he tries to push you  towards some of the most unnatural conclusions a person could make. It is a natural human response to respond to examples of gigantic organization and vast fine-tuned complexity (such as we see everywhere throughout biological organisms) by assuming that they must be the result (directly or indirectly) of some purposeful intelligence rather than unguided accidental processes. It is the person wanting you to believe that such things are accidents of chance who is luring you to draw some conclusion that is extremely unnatural, in the sense of being against all of your common sense instincts.  As the evidence for very precise cosmic fine-tuning and stratospheric levels of information and well-arranged molecular machinery in living things grows greater and greater, it seems to become more and more apt to suspect there's nothing more unnatural than naturalism. 

Now we see our naturalists attempting to explain the very precise fine-tuning of the laws and fundamental constants of our universe by appealing to some notion that there exists some multiverse, described as an infinity or near infinity of other universes, having an infinite variety of conditions. Nothing could be more unnatural than this desperate maneuver. 

Heterosexuality enforcement often involved creating kind of "zones of exclusion" in which homosexuals were for all practical purposes forbidden. The heterosexuality enforcers would sometimes admit that quite a few people are homosexual, but would create zones of exclusion in which homosexuals were effectively told they were not allowed. Such zones might be the US Army (before it changed its policy to allow gay people), a church, a club, an office or a sports team. Similar "zones of exclusion" are nowadays created by the enforcers of materialism while having a "keep it in the closet" attitude. A person may tell you that it's your right to believe that the processes of biology are thoroughly purposeful (the blessings of some power greater than man), or that humans have immortal souls, but may tell you (by word or deed) that you can't express such views within his science class or can't express such views and expect to be hired or promoted or published as a biology teacher or professor. The heterosexuality enforcer effectively would say things like this about homosexuals:

• "Not in my office!"
• "Not in my parish!"
• "Not in my family!"
• "Not on my team!"
• "Not in my club!"

And today's materialism enforcer effectively says things like this  (while thinking of contrarian thinkers and embarrassing evidence to be excluded):

• "Not in my class!"
• "Not in my journal!"
• "Not in my staff!"
• "Not on my committee!"
• "Not on my panel!"
• "Not on my web site!"
• "Not in my conference!" 

The current state in regard to the enforcement of materialism in academia and the science press resembles the 1950's state regarding the enforcement of heterosexuality. Our universities and mainstream science publications are constantly painting a portrait of a purely materialist world, just as in the 1950's we were led to believe the US was a purely heterosexual country. Our mainstream science publications continue to try to shame, smear and defame reasonable critics of materialist claims as well as witnesses of paranormal phenomena. But yesteryear's heterosexuality enforcement regime has collapsed in the United States. And within a few decades the same thing may happen to today's materialism enforcement regime. 

We can imagine how things might be after such an enforcement regime collapses. It might be like this:

• Around 2050 it might be that no longer will high school and college students be instructed so that the staggering wonders of hierarchical systemic organization in the human body known to 21st century science are described as being due to explanations drafted in the 19th century by people who knew nothing about such epitomes of fine-tuned complexity and didn't even present theories of physical organization. 
• Around 2050 it might no longer be that mainstream science publications keep always writing that scientists will one day understand how a brain stores memories, an empty promise they have now been making for 75 years after the invention of the electron microscope which should have been sufficient to discover such a thing around 1950 if it was occurring.
• Around 2050 it might actually be that in university psychology courses and in high school psychology courses people will be taught fairly about the very large fraction of normal, honest human beings who have witnessed paranormal phenomena, without such people being depicted as crazy people or silly people, and without teachers trying to shame such people and make them objects of hate and scorn. 
• Around 2050 it might be that in biology textbooks and in mainstream science articles we will get a discussion of the many brain physical shortfalls that suggest the brain cannot be the source of phenomena such as instant memory creation, instant memory recall and the remembering of facts learned fifty years ago and experiences had decades ago, things such as the lack of any addressing or indexing in the brain, the very heavy signal noise in brains, the relatively slow average transmission speed of signals in the cortex, the unreliability of signal transmission across synapses, and the short lifetimes of synaptic proteins (1000 times shorter than the longest length of times humans can remember things). 
• Around 2050 it might be that in school classes people learn about the many respectable scientists who very carefully studied paranormal phenomena and reported observing things that defy the explanations of materialists.  Teachers might stop following a "nothing spooky allowed" rule, and might stop following a "shame the witnesses" rule in dealing with those report observing spooky things.  

If it seems unthinkable that such changes could occur, just consider how extremely dramatic have been the changes in the past 50 years in regard to the treatment by the press and academia of homosexuality. It is not possible to keep basic facts of human existence and human experience and human biology and human belief forever hidden in some closet. 

Psychiatrists Have No Credible Explanation for Apparition Sightings

Psychiatrists are famous for pretending to know things that they don't actually know. For many decades psychiatrists peddled at high prices extremely dubious Freudian speculations about the causes of human behavior, such as the idea that a son's inner conflicts stem from his repressed lust for his mother. Around 1960 such explanations were all the rage, and Park Avenue psychoanalyst followers of Freud were raking in fortunes. Within a few decades such explanations fell out of favor, and now Freud's theories are mainly regarded as pseudoscience. Psychiatrists replaced their misguided Freud enthusiasm with neural explanation enthusiasms, mostly misguided ones. Supported by a pharmaceutical industry that stood to take in countless millions or billions from such stories, our psychiatrists told us for at least two decades (1990-2010) that diseases such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain or shortages of serotonin. Recently there has been widespread discussion of a meta-analysis claiming that such claims lack any sound scientific basis. A regular reader of the illuminating Mad in America web site (www.madinamerica.com) will read very many other cases of psychiatrists pretending to know things they do not actually know. 

Once again, we have in the press a case of a psychiatrist trying to make us think that he knows something that he does not actually know. The psychiatrist is Max Pemberton, who tries to make us think (in a Daily Mail article he wrote) that he knows what causes apparition sightings.  I am unable to find any previous writings he has made on this topic (in particular, using Google Scholar I cannot find any paper he has written on this topic). 

Pemberton starts out by making the claim that the brain is the most complex object in the universe, which is a perfect example of authorities making claims they should not make, given that humans are ignorant about what exists on 99.99999999% of all planets in the universe, and given that human bodies are objects far more complex than human brains. Pemberton then states this: "I was fascinated to read in the Mail Santa Montefiore's account of seeing the spirit of her late sister, Tara Palmer Tomkinson, sitting on her bed, and the subsequent flurry of reports last week from readers who had also 'encountered' a loved one after they had died." Pemberton then immediately begins to call such reports "hallucinations," even though he does not mention interviewing Ms. Montefiore. We may wonder whether he has forgotten the principle of, "Don't point a psychiatric finger at someone until you have interviewed that person at length."  

Continuing to make an unjustified use of the word "hallucination" or "hallucinatory" Pemberton says this: "Studies show that between 30 and 50 per cent of people who have lost their spouse experience at least one hallucinatory episode in which they see their loved one." No, studies do not show that large fractions of those who have lost their spouse have hallucinations of seeing their loves ones. Studies merely indicate that large numbers of spouses report seeing their loved ones after death, and such studies do nothing to tell us about the cause of such reports. 

Pemberton cites a 90% figure from Japan, saying "Research in Japan showed that 90 per cent of widows there experienced them." Pemberton then attempts an explanation:

"Of course, some look for a spiritual explanation, but from a psychological perspective, it seems to me fairly clear-cut. Seeing a dead person is a form of wish-fulfilment, the brain's way of giving the bereaved person what they so desperately want, which is just a little longer with the person they've lost."

This explanation is nonsensical. People don't have hallucinations just because they want to see something.  A lonely sex-craving young man alone on a Saturday night in his apartment will never see a hallucination of a naked buxom blonde in front of him. Needy people with little money don't have hallucinations of stacks of money on their table. The long-suffering fans of poorly performing sports teams don't see hallucinations in which their beloved team wins the game despite actually losing. And when US mothers and fathers saw their children go away for years to distant lands to fight in wars such as World War II or the Vietnam War, none of such parents saw an apparition of the child they longed to see, unless their offspring had died. There is no tendency of healthy human beings to hallucinate seeing things that they long for.  And in a large fraction of the cases in which people report seeing an apparition of a deceased human, the person was not longing to see such a person. 

Pemberton has just contrived a "you hallucinate what you long for" explanation that does not correspond to the way human minds work, and does not correspond to the facts about apparition sightings (which often involve two or more people seeing the same apparition).  Faced with ambiguous or hazy data that can be interpreted in many ways, humans often interpret such data in a way that fits their desires. But that common type of "seeing what you want to see" interpretation doesn't involve having hallucinations of something you wanted to see.   

Pemberton then tells us that ghost sightings are caused by "the power of love."  No, love doesn't have any power to make you see a person in your house who isn't there. There's no love greater than the love of a parent for a child, but parents with runaway or missing children never see apparitions of the missing child in their home unless the child has died. If Pemberton were a scholar of apparition sightings, he would know that a large fraction of apparition sightings are reported by people who had either no great love for the ghostly figure seen, or were not at all wishing to see any apparition of such a person.  Follow the links in my post here, and you can read of hundreds of such cases, most of which involve cases in which people saw an apparition of someone who they did not even know was dead, someone who died about the same time. 

The fires of passionate youthful love typically wane by the time a couple reaches old age, and bodies turn ugly; and a large fraction of old married couples quarrel or have mixed feelings toward each other. There is no sense in an idea that 50% (or as many as 90%) of widows might hallucinate a ghost because of some overwhelming passionate desire to see their deceased love one again. I would imagine that fewer than 15% of old widows or old widowers have any such overwhelming desire. 

Later Pemberton reports a case of a man who claimed to see repeated apparitions of his deceased wife. Pemberton says, "His visions may well have been a clever trick played on him by his brain, and easily explained by neurochemical interactions." When psychiatrists or neuroscientists don't have explanations, their last-resort fallback is to make vague brief empty hand-waving references to things such as "neurochemical interactions." 

Pemberton provides no actual evidence for these explanations, citing no scientific studies in favor of any of them. He sounds like someone just  coming up with whatever guesses might pop into his head.   Something weightier than Pemberton's vacuous speculations is the article "Ghosts, visions and voices," written by a psychiatrist (Frances Klemperer) who actually includes a few references to scientific papers. But none of the references are to compelling studies that support any of Klemperer's explanations.  

Klemperer makes the following attempts to explain apparitions, in this order:

(1) Undigested food (an absurd explanation, since people constantly have undigested food in their stomachs).

(2) Demons or jinn deceiving humans. 

(3) Vitamin deficiency from fasting, obviously a poor explanation since 98% of people reporting apparitions were not fasting enough to have vitamin deficiencies, and there is no reason why a vitamin deficiency would cause you to see a ghost.

(4) A transient psychosis produced by self-flagellation, obviously a poor explanation since 99.9% of people reporting apparitions were not flagellating themselves before seeing the apparition. 

(5) "Prolonged vigils" in which people see apparitions because of very long sleep deprivation, obviously a poor explanation since 99% of people reporting apparitions had not very long gone without sleep.

(6) "Prolonged introspection" which causes hallucinations, a bad explanation because there in no evidence that introspection causes people to see sights of deceased relatives, and 99% of the time people who report such things were not previously engaging in prolonged introspection. 

(7) Head injuries, a bad explanation because of a lack of any evidence head injuries cause people to see apparitions of deceased people, and a lack of such injuries preceding sightings of apparitions. 

(8) Misinterpretations of real objects, an explanation useful only for people claiming to see some ghost at a far distance, not any of the far more common cases of people reporting an apparition right in front of them.

(9) Waking dreams, in which someone reports his dream as something he saw when awake, an explanation useless for explaining 95% of apparition sightings, which do not occur when someone has just awaken from a dream, or which involve claims of clear perception of deceased people seen after someone has awoken, such as a case of someone saying, "I awoke, and there was my dead mother, sitting right on the edge of my bed." 

(10) Misidentification of a sound, such as someone hearing something on TV and misidentifying it as his name being called, an explanation useless for explaining reports of visual ghost sightings. 

(11) "Severe stress may precipitate transient, complex hallucinations, which the subject recognises as arising from his or her imagination." The claim is a dubious one, and is useless for explaining 95% of apparition sightings, which either do not occur under severe stress, or are not recognized by the observer as being due to his or her imagination. 

(12) "Dissociative mechanisms," an appeal to a type of severe mental disorder, an explanation useless for explaining apparition sightings by ordinary healthy people who do not have split personalities or dissociative mental disorders. 

Klemperer has used one of the main strategies of people trying to explain the paranormal: attempt a kind of "smorgasbord" or "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" approach in which you drag out a dozen little explanations. When this is done, typically none of the explanations is a good one. But there's a chance the reader may be impressed, given so many things offered.  What's going on is similar to when someone tries to explain the sightings of large UFOs in the sky by saying "it must have been dust in your eye or Venus or a meteor or a jet or a drone or a satellite launch or swamp gas or a Chinese lantern or some hallucination or a camera malfunction." 

Pemberton's article seems like a featherweight bit of fluff compared to the "deep dive" article on spiritually transformative experiences (STE) published earlier this year by Robert Davis PhD. But the article by Davis has its own severe problems.  One is the attempt to lump together very diverse experiences (some produced by drugs, and others such as NDE and OBE and UFO sightings not produced by drugs) under a too-broad umbrella of "spiritually transformative experiences." We may wonder whether what is going on is another case of trying to shame and stigmatize people who report out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences or UFO sightings by lumping them together with users of illegal psychedelics. Davis seems to have the goal of pathologizing the millions who have such experiences, because he repeatedly talks of aspects of their experiences as "symptoms," and his article has a large-font boldface statement suggesting that spiritually transformative experiences are things that "psychiatrists and psychologists" need to "diagnose and treat." 

Referring to all the cases of people reporting seeing or telepathically communicating with anomalous or mysterious entities, Davis unwisely tells us that "entity encounters cannot be dismissed as non-sensical hallucinations without meaning nor accepted as true alternate and transcendent realities," making it rather clear that he seems to prefer a "meaningful hallucination" explanation.  He provides nothing of substance to back up such a speculation, and he follows it only with empty or preposterous suggestions as to why so many would be seeing entities that are not there.  First he claims that we are "wired to detect sentient others…a predisposition that would have a significant survival value in hostile environments (Winkelman & James, 2018, p. 14)." No, if people were in danger in the wild it would not have any survival value for people to see ghosts or extraterrestrials or a Being of light or any other beings that were not there.  On the basis of a vague weak-sounding insinuation that some brain regions have merely been "potentially associated with spiritual development and behavior," Davis asks us to choose between believing that spiritually transformative experiences are "a normal part of the physical evolutionary experience, or an innate physiological coping mechanism to manage times of crisis to help maintain the survival of humanity." Both of these alternatives are preposterous. People don't see deceased relatives during near-death experiences as any part of a "physical evolutionary experience," and individual human beings have neither physical evolutionary experiences nor mental evolutionary experiences (unless you want to stretch "evolutionary" far beyond any "natural selection" meaning). And it is extremely ridiculous to suggest that people see deceased relatives or a "Being of light" or what may look like extraterrestrials to "help maintain the survival of humanity."

The article by Davis clearly involved much more work than the article by Pemberton. But from the standpoint of explaining the paranormal  Davis seems just as empty-handed as Pemberton, and neither offer any credible explanations of substance. 

Psychiatrists have long acted partially as kind of social conformity policemen, acting to make sure that people act according to the prevailing norms and conventions of some society. Before 1970 psychiatrists acted as part of the enforcement of heterosexuality, acting to stigmatize and marginalize homosexuals by branding them as mentally ill. In the Soviet Union psychiatrists were a key part of the suppression of dissidents, and under that regime many a political dissident was put in a psychiatric institution after being wrongly classified with "sluggish schizophrenia" mostly because of statements denouncing the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union. When those with psychic experiences very widespread among healthy people are branded as having hallucinations, what is going on seems like a similar attempt of stigmatizing phenomena not approved by our ruling class of authorities, based on arbitrary, dubious or socially constructed ideas of what proper people should or should not report seeing, thinking or doing. When psychiatrists tell people that meaningful apparition-sighting experiences they have are hallucinations, the very real therapeutic value of such experiences is trashed, and the potential help is senselessly replaced with potential harm, as witnesses are stigmatized and shamed. 

The paper "Psychiatry and Fads: Why Is This Field Different From All Other Fields?" by psychiatry professor Edward Shorter tells us this:

"Gripped in the turbulence of changing paradigms, psychiatry has taken a couple of colossally wrong turns over the years. The whole DSM concept and the ditching of effective but out-of-patent drug classes in favour of blockbusters would be 2 good examples...However, fads as well seem to drive much of psychiatry...In psychiatry, the basic problem is that, from the early 20th century to the present, the field has lurched back and forth among paradigms in a way that has happened in no other discipline. Each lurch has sprayed off its own accumulation of fads and bad ideas."

In the recent Counterpunch.org article "Once Radical Critiques of Psychiatry are Now Mainstream, So What Remains Taboo?" by Bruce E. Levine we have a very broad and slashing critique of today's psychiatry, one that is well worth reading.  The article laments what it calls psychiatry's "poor treatment outcomes." A very serious question that must be asked is: are many psychiatrists doing more harm than good? No doubt very many are helped by psychiatrists. But many think that harmful side effects of medications prescribed by psychiatrists are being swept under the rug or insufficiently studied, and that for very many people who did not need to see psychiatrists, long-term psychiatric treatment can often do more harm than good. The very long document here (written by an MD) gives very many specific complaints along these lines.  Some think that psychiatrists have entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry which constitute financial conflicts of interest that cloud their judgment in evaluating the pros and cons of the pills psychiatrists so heavily prescribe. Others think that incalculable harm is done when psychiatrists label people with diagnostic categories that are often arbitrary social constructs of a psychiatrist belief community or some too-powerful committee, perhaps unnecessarily causing people to think for the rest of their lives that are sick or sub-standard. The weak theoretical basis of psychiatric assumptions is discussed here and here. 

Whenever a psychiatrist attempts to gaslight people by branding as hallucinations mental experiences that large fractions of the population have, experiences psychiatrists cannot credibly explain, then we seem to be in the very dark and harmful territory of "mass pathologization," in which psychiatrists speak in a way that tends to make very many who are not mentally ill feel or think that they suffer from some mental problem or brain glitch.  Whenever we read a psychiatrist who may be improperly causing very many healthy people to think that they have some mental problem they do not actually have, some "glitch in the brain" they do not actually have, we should ask such a psychiatrist:  is your overall activity recently doing more to harm people than to help people? We should also ask: how much better results would psychiatrists get if they were to treat people as souls in crisis rather than malfunctioning brains?

More Reports of Paranormal Abilities of Chinese Children:

In my 2020 post "EHF: Reports of Chinese Kids With Paranormal Powers," I discussed many reports of paranormal phenomena involving children in China. Let me now discuss some additional reports I have since discovered,  also involving children in China. 

In the 1983 book Parapsychology and Self Deception in Science edited by R.A. McConnell, we have a Chapter 2 entitled "Some Demonstrations of Extraocular Image in China" by C. K. Jen. C. K. Jen had very distinguished credentials, having received a PhD in physics from Harvard, before serving for years as a physics professor in China, and then serving many years as a university science researcher in the United States, eventually being appointed in 1967 as a Professor of Chemical Physics at Johns Hopkins University.  

The observations reported by C. K. Jen (dating from the early 1980's) are very noteworthy. Jen reports an example of a type of phenomenon that has been widely reported, a phenomenon known as transposition of the senses. Transposition of the senses is when some person seems to have sensory capabilities associated with some part of the body normally not associated with such capabilities. For example, a person reporting transposition of the senses may report being able to read with his fingertips while blindfolded. Or he may report being able to see (when blindfolded) some object that is placed on the middle of his stomach. Or he may report being able to see the characteristics of an object when the object is placed near his ear.  Reports such as these appear again and again in the literature of parapsychology. By using the link here (and continuing to press the Older Posts button at the bottom right), you can read seven previous posts I wrote that discussed evidence for transposition of the senses. 

C. K. Jen reports what he calls "extraocular image," involving people getting images from something other than use of their eyes. He states, "In late 1980 and early 1981 when we were there [in China], both the interest and activity in extraocular image had already grown to large proportions on a nationwide scale." Jen reports on page 10 that he was surprised to see that a nine-year-old Chinese boy could apparently identify words hidden from his sight that had been written on well-folded or crumpled paper. 

On page 11 Jen reports an experiment or demonstration at the University of Science and Technology on November 30, 1980.  We read this report of a test of four "demonstrators" consisting of three young girls and one young boy, between age 9 and 11:

"Mr. Jia had his aides  prepare over one hundred samples, each consisting of a piece of paper, on which either a Chinese word or an English letter was written in color (red, blue or black). Each sample was folded many times into a small pad, either sealed at the folding edge with a touch of glue or completely sealed. In any case, the writing inside each sample was not visible to the eye....Mr. Jia asked me to be the chief referee, with my wife and one friend as assistant referees, all sitting in the front row directly facing the demonstraters. We saw an usher carrying a big place of randomly placed samples up to the demonstrators and let each of them take a sample at will. Each demonstrator put the picked sample between his or her palms. In less than a minute or two the three girls indicated that they already got their answers. Mr. Jia announced to them each of the should write on the sample envelope the word and its color they 'saw.' These unopened samples were handed over to me and I then let them be opened one-by-one in front of us (three referees) and have the contents be compared between the inside and the outside."

Jen reports that three of the four answered correctly, naming the right word, with only one failing.  On a second round under the same conditions, the same three children correctly named each of the concealed words.  In addition, several novice volunteers added to the round's participants gave answers that were mostly limited (such as naming a first letter), but which were all correct, with one of the novices correctly naming the word. Interviewing the three children who seemed to be so successful, Jen was told by them that after holding the wrapped up paper for a minute or so, an image of the answer appeared in their "mind's eye."

On pages 13-14 Jen reports of tests of a ten-year-old student named Yu Po. Twice Jen's wife prepared a sealed wax ball or container with a word hidden inside it. Within about 30 seconds Yu Po correctly named the letter. The third time a colleague of Jen prepared a wax ball with a word hidden inside. Yu Po quickly named the word correctly. 

On pages 14-15, after reviewing various far-fetched possibilities involving fraud, and after considering the very young ages of the children apparently displaying such skills, Jen says this:

"Having gone over all the imagined possibilities of fraud on a specific EOI [extraocular image or ESP] demonstration we witnessed, we found none of the suspicions well founded. I am left with no better alternative than to assume the observed phenomena were indeed real.  In a broad sense, I have no reason at all to suppose any of the three demonstrations we eye-witnessed was in any way fraudulent. In the same vein, we heard that virtually hundreds of demonstrations or experiments on EOI [extraocular image or ESP] involving young children have been conducted all over China during the past two years and, in general, the results were about the same as ours. If most, if not all, of these acts are fraudulent, then one would have to assume that multitudes of Chinese people are freely joined in a widespread act of conspiracy and deception. Such an assumption would be utterly unthinkable." 

Jen made such a conclusion apparently with no knowledge of previous reports of this type in other lands. A thorough study of parapsychology would have revealed countless cases of very similar successes stretching back nearly two centuries, such as the countless public exhibitions in which Alexis Didier or Adolphe Didier displayed similar successes in clairvoyance (as discussed here, here   and here). (For an interesting discussion of Alexis Didier read pages 234-238 of Jeffrey Kripal's Authors of the Impossible, in which he discusses a 500-page 2003 work by Meheust exhaustively documenting the evidence for Didier's clairvoyance.) The abilities described in Jen's paper were very similar to other reports I mention below, which come from various countries during the past two centuries. 

In a postscript to Jen's paper, McConnell states that "in August 1980, Dr. Lee C. Teng of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory at Batavia, Illinois, made a lecture stop at the Institute for Modern Physics" in China, and that he and his son "were invited by his hosts to participate in an ESP experiment with the 12-year-old son of an Institute librarian." The boy successfully identified a word written in a folded up piece of paper inserted in his ear, and "successfully reproduced both Chinese characters and physics terminology in English, although he could speak no English." Reading this account in a letter to a parapsychology journal, McConnell phoned Teng and confirmed that Teng was its author. 

In a CIA archive there was an undated British newspaper report which can be read here. Matching the reports given above, we read, "The Chinese say that more than 80 children and one adult have shown this power in tests by reading messages folded and concealed in containers of various materials." For example, we are told that nine-year-old Jiang Yan "correctly described a drawing on a piece of paper which had been folded and inserted into a glove which was then wrapped around her wrist." We are also told that 11-year-old Zheng Hong "could read words on a paper slipped under his foot."

In another document in a CIA archive, dating from about 1979, American physicist H. E. Puthoff states this:

 "Recent widespread interest was triggered by a report in the March 11, 1979 Sichuan Daily. In that report it was claimed that a young boy, 12-year-old Tang Ye, was able to read written material placed in physical contact with his ears...In May, 1970, reports began to surface from all over China that children elsewhere were duplicating this feat."

Later in the same document we read this:

"A 12-year-old boy, Tang Yu, in Dazu County, Sichuan Province, had been discovered to be able to 'recognize the characters (Chinese ideograms) with his ears...Subsequently, more than ten teenagers who also had had this kind of function were discovered one after another."

A bit later in the document we read a list of stringent test conditions, and then read this:

"Under these experimental conditions, some subjects whose functions were stronger were tested with dozens of specimens. The rate of absolutely correct identification was more than 80 percent, which indicated that one of the special inductive functions, the so called 'recognizing characters with the ears,' existed objectively. Scientists in Beijing University further found  in experiments that among over 70 children, approximately 10 old, there was a considerable proportion of subjects who had the special inductive function of 'recognizing characters with the ears.'  " 

The researcher Si-Chen Lee long studied Taiwanese children who might have an ability to read with their fingers, and he reported very substantial success. He reports this:

"Some people are able to read images by using their fingers rather than their eyes. After nine years of investigation, we confirmed that children between 6 and 13 years old can be trained in finger-reading. An earlier report suggested that finger reading can be developed in a high percent of children (~40%) with training (S. L. Chen et al 1989). More than 21% of the children in our studies developed statistically significant finger-reading capability (p < 0.05) after attending finger-reading training classes for two hours daily over four days."

We read of this technique to test children:

"During each finger-reading trial, children placed a hand in a cloth sleeve, as shown in Figure 1. These are standard, light-proof sleeves that are used to handle photographic negatives. The children had the two cuffs tightly tied around their forearms. The samples were randomly chosen by the experimenter, clenched in his fist, and put into the bag through the zipper on the other side. Since all of the two-digit numbers were printed by laser printer, there were no palpable depressions on either side of the paper."

Children and the cloth sleeves used for the tests

Lee reports that of 27 children test in the year 2000, 5 were able to score at a high statistical significance of p < .001, and that of 37 children tested in the year 2001, 6 were able to score at  high statistical significance of p < .001. On page 17 of the document here, Lee reports an interesting effect in which children reported highly unusual "mind's eye" activity when touching unseen pieces of paper with religious meaning. 

Below are similar accounts from outside of China. On page 170 the book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder has a chapter on the topic of "Eyeless Sight." We read of Rosa Kuleshova, who developed an ability to read or detect colors while blindfolded, merely by touching reading material or objects with her hands. Kuleshova held up very well to a long series of scientific tests. The same phenomenon was reported decades earlier in France, by Jules Romains in his book Eyeless Sight (discussed here). A 19th-century work states this: " Although  blind,  this  girl  can  read  by  passing  her  fingers  over  the  printed or  written  page,  and  can  describe  persons  whose  pictures  were  handed  to  her."

An edition of the EdgeScience magazine (#47) published by the Society for Scientific Exploration has an article "Seeing Without Eyes" (page 9) which discusses evidence for clairvoyance like that gathered by Romains. It mentions work by Carol Ann Liaros in the 1970's, saying, "Liaros discovered that blind people could see the images on black-and-white photos (and could see the photos when they were turned over, face-down, and even their reallife colors)."  We read about many other examples of ESP and clairvoyance similar to that reported by Romains, most occurring in recent decades. 

A long article in the June 12, 1964 Life magazine was entitled "Seeing Color With the Fingers." It reported a great number of observations very similar to those reported by Romains.  You can read the article here, by scrolling down to page 102.  In 1964 Life magazine was as mainstream and respectable as the New York Times, and had been a trusted mainstream source for decades.  Just as there is now a gigantic New York Times building in New York City, an equal-sized skyscraper was once called the Time-Life building.  

In the Life magazine article of June 12, 1964, we read a very long account of Rosa Kuleshova's paranormal ability and how it was demonstrated in a long series of tests with different Soviet scientists. Below is an excerpt:

"Rosa, securely blindfolded, could read headlines in newspaper and magazines, and the large type in children's books, just as rapidly as if her eyes were open. She could read ordinary newspaper type, too - more slowly, but still correctly. She was able to describe illustrations in popular publications like Ogonyok and Krokodil as well as on cigaret packages and postage stamps. And she had no trouble at all singling out black, white, red, orange, yellow, blue and green samples of colored papers, colored pencils, aniline dyes, as well as cotton threads and fabrics."

The phenomenon has sometimes been called dermo-optical perception. The 19th-century literature on hypnosis contains many similar accounts of such an ability occurring during hypnosis. The term "transposition of the senses" was often used to describe the ability. A nineteenth century work by William Gregory (a chemistry professor at the very prestigious University of Edinburgh) describes this phenomenon on page 148:

"I have not hitherto noticed, save in passing, a phenomenon which occasionally presents itself, but which is not by any means uniformly present in a marked form; I mean, transference of the senses to some special part of the body.... But it sometimes happens, that the power of seeing, not the ordinary sense of sight, but the clairvoyant power, is located in some special part. It has been observed to be located in the pit of the stomach, in the tips of the fingers, in the occiput as well as in the forehead, or on the top of the head, and in one case which I heard of from a scientific gentleman who tested it, in the soles of the feet. The books and journals which treat of Animal Magnetism teem with similar facts; and the head, hand, and epigastrium, seem to be the usually selected parts, probably from the proximity to the brain in the first, the great development of the nerves of touch in the second, and the presence of the great sympathetic plexus of nerves in the third. The fact itself is beyond all doubt, and it is quite unnecessary to accumulate cases. In one form or other, the power of dispensing with the eyes, and yet perceiving color, &c. quite plainly, is found in every good subject. The same thing frequently happens with hearing. Thus E.  when on her travelling state or stage, is utterly deaf to all sounds, save those which are addressed to her by speaking with the mouth in contact with the tips of her fingers. This fact I have myself verified. I believe she would not hear a pistol fired at her ear, in that state."

On the page here an author quotes a press report of him separating while blindfolded face-down cards held by someone else into two packs, one with only black cards (clubs and spades) and the other pack with only red cards (diamonds and hearts).  The author then goes on to a long description of far more remarkable feats performed at a public exhibition by an Eastern mystic. 

A paper in the April 1991 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research discusses parapsychology research in China between 1979 and 1989, and discusses three periods: a period between 1979 and 1982 of excited interest in paranormal abilities; a period in the years after 1982 of dampened activity caused by a May 1982 Communist party ruling discouraging research into paranormal abilities; then  renewed research activity between 1987 and 1989, with much of the research taking place under an umbrella of qigong research that involves studying a mysterious bodily energy source that might be applicable to health. 

A long paper "The Rise and Fall of Qigong" picks up the narrative into the 1990's. We hear of  years of qigong research in China around 1988 that seemed to include very many reports of dramatic paranormal activity in China, with the research being presented as part of way of thinking claimed to be consistent with the ruling party's ideology.  According to the paper there then arose in China in the early 1990's a Falun Gong movement which had a more religious approach, one that was very interested in qigong, but  less interested in scientific parapsychology. After the Falun Gong movement gained a very massive following in China, the Chinese government started to discourage it and eventually tried to suppress it beginning around 1999.  This may have resulted in a downturn in study of parapsychology in China. It seems that documenting the paranormal within China has been rather an on/off affair, with activity levels largely dependent on approval signals from the government, which have varied from year to year.  In the paper the "fall of qigong" is depicted as a kind of political and social affair, rather than anyone disproving claims about qigong. 

Despite such ups and downs, it seems that parapsychology research involving children is still occurring in China. In the paper "21 Century Some Real Testable Phenomena of Parapsychology in China," Yi-Fang Chang of the Department of Physics, Yunnan University, Kunming, China discusses some noteworthy research, stating this:

"In the summers of 2012 to 2017, we trained the potential of fifty-two blind children in Kunming. We mainly combine traditional Chinese culture and adopt the method of guiding blind children into a quiet and focused state, then these trained blind children have some effect. A blind child X-N Jin of these children is particularly prominent. He can not only accurately recognize the dozens of poker points and colors in a kraft paper envelope, and identify all cards, but also accurately identify single-sided graphics, even double-sided multi-color graphics. Sometimes he can conduct successful PK [psychokinesis]."

In the paper we read this:

"In 1982, the China Somatic Science Society (CSSS), an organization Zhang Zhenhuan had founded to study extraordinary powers, invited a charismatic qigong healer named Zhang Baosheng (1960-2018) to Beijing. Zhang Baosheng was one of the first healers to propose the idea of a 'cosmic field'—a network of energy in which participation (usually through qigong practice) brought about extraordinary powers or even miracles. Zhang Zhenhuan had Zhang Baosheng demonstrate his extraordinary powers to the group, which included passing cigarettes through solid objects and making objects disappear. The CSSS also confirmed his extraordinary power  through experiments. Yet neither side stopped there. In fact, Zhang Baosheng actually travelled  into the Zhongnanhai compound, where all the top Party officials lived, and healed the Party members themselves." 

One of the authors of a paper makes this startling report of observing Zhang Baosheng (1960-2018):

"In his early personal experience with Zhang Baosheng, gained over months of close observation, the senior author found that, as with other major psychics under loose control, Zhang was able to perform numerous incredible feats. Most of these involved apparent PK [psychokinesis], and many were done in the way the senior author or others requested, with the targets seemingly chosen at random. For example, Zhang caused objects, such as someone’s photo identification card or personal name stamp, to move to another room which Zhang had not entered, or caused a torn personal letter to be restored to a single piece."

An article in the Psi Encylopedia says this about Zhang Baosheng:

"Beginning in the mid 1970s, Zhang Baosheng began demonstrating ostensibly paranormal abilities such as movement of objects and telepathy. In 1982, a local group of scientists brought him to the attention of Beijing scientists at the Institute of Space-Medico Engineering (ISME) where he was heavily investigated: Zhang’s main experiment involved moving small objects in and out of glass tubes. In one well-controlled demonstration, specially marked pieces of paper were treated with a chemical and placed inside a tube. The tube was melted in order to constrict it midway. Cotton buds were placed in the top half having been soaked in a chemical that reacts with the chemical on the treated paper. After five minutes of close scrutiny by four investigators, the paper was found to be lying outside the tube, which nevertheless remained intact. There was evidence of a chemical reaction on the cotton buds, suggesting that the papers had passed through the cotton. In other experiments, Zhang psychokinetically extracted live insects out of the tubes, and on one occasion, a pill was filmed exiting the tube."

In a 2007 paper a Russian scientist reports quite a few specific details about observations of similar abilities in the famed mind-over-matter wonder Ninel Kulagina (the same as Nina Kulagina).

Postscript: An article in Edge Science discusses evidence for anomalous qigong energy effects.

The Clickbait Hype-Heavy World of Scitainment

 In my post "Why the Academia Cyberspace Profit Complex Keeps Giving Misleading Brain Research Reports" I discussed the economic reasons why we keep getting misleading research about brains, and misleading headlines about brain research. The analysis in that post holds true not just for brain research, but for scientific research in general. We live in an economy in which misleading stories about scientific research and groundless but interesting-sounding scientific speculation are highly incentivized. To give a short synopsis of what I discussed at much greater length in that post, the economic motivations are like this:

(1) Scientists are judged by how many papers they publish and how many citations such papers get.

(2) Because of publication bias (in which papers reporting positive results and particularly interesting-sounding positive results are more likely to be published), scientists are strongly motivated to publish papers claiming positive results and also claiming interesting-sounding results.

(3) Wishing to make themselves appear like sources of important research breakthroughs to help justify their exorbitant tuition, universities are motivated to produce press releases exaggerating the importance of research papers published by their professors.

(4) Since science news is published on web pages with ads that generate revenue for the people running or funding the web pages, with revenue proportional to how interesting-sounding a story is, those running science news web sites or science analysis web sites have an enormous economic motivation to create clickbait headlines that generate higher numbers of page views, and more advertising revenue. Science news sites these days are almost always built in the form of headlines that you must click to read the story, and each time this causes a web page with ads to appear, the people running or funding the site get money from views of the ads displayed on the page you opened up.

The result of all of this is a very wacky world we might call the world of scitainment, to coin a word that combines the words "science" and "entertainment." Scitainment is a part of the internet that blends science and entertainment. Very much of what we read in this strange world of scitainment is true, and very much of it is false. The world of scitainment blends fact and fantasy, always trying its best to produce entertaining stories and clickbait headlines. It's all about luring you in to click on the stories, so that you go to pages that generate ad revenue for the people running the web sites. 

To show you how lies and fantasy are all mixed up with truth and hard facts in this strange world of scitainment, let us look at the "science news" offered on recent days.

• On the Livescience site we have the utterly untrue headline "Building blocks of life' discovered on Mars in 10 different rock samples." The story discusses some observations of biologically irrelevant chemicals on Mars, none of which are ingredients of life or building blocks on life.  
• The same Livescience site has an article claiming a woman was hit by a meteorite while drinking coffee outside, although a space.com story tells us no such thing happened. 
• ScitechDaily.com has the phony baloney headline "Tracing the Origin of Life – Researchers Uncover How Primordial Proteins Formed on Prebiotic Earth." The paper in question "Boron-assisted abiotic polypeptide synthesis" did not report any experiment producing a protein molecule. The paper reported the formation of something very much simpler (a polypeptide chain) after 200 hours of heating at 130 degrees centigrade, a temperature of 266 degrees Fahrenheit, unlike any that ever would have existed on the early Earth. The "Materials and Methods" section reveals that the paper did not involve any experiment simulating early Earth conditions. We read about glass vials that were baked at 500 degrees centigrade for five hours before use, and how the amino acids were purchased from a chemical supply corporation. The difference between a functional protein and a mere polypeptide chain is like the difference between 500 carefully arranged letters to make a functional instruction paragraph, and some row of a few scrabble letters or Alpha Bits accidentally arising on the floor. 
• The Science Daily site (www.sciencedaily.com) which so often uncritically passes on untrue and clickbait science press releases has an article entitled "Genes for learning and memory are 650 million years old." No one has ever discovered genes for learning or memory in any organism. Scientists lack any credible explanation for how learning occurs in any organism. The genes mentioned are for mere mood or stimulation chemicals such as serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline, which do not at all explain learning or memory.
• Another story on the clickbait-heavy scitechdaily.com site has a headline claiming "Scientists Shed New Light on Dark Energy." No such thing has happened, and dark energy (still never observed) is as mysterious as ever, with its very existence still being dubious. It seems that nowadays a major rule of science journalists is this: "When all else fails, and you can't think of a headline, just claim that new light was shed on some topic."  So we have endless science stories about dubious research and groundless speculation with titles claiming that "new light" has been "shed." 
• We have another case of an unwarranted use of "shed light" in a MedicalXPress.com story entitled "Study sheds light on where conscious experience resides in brain." No such light was shed, and the paper seems to be another case of neuroscientists showing us one of their worst habits: trying to make heavy insinuations about "neural representations" when no representations were found in the brain (where can never be found any actual representations of what we see or remember). The study may be another case of neuroscientists causing risks for the poor or the sick for the sake of shoddy science results, because the study seems to have the usual Questionable Research Practices so abundant in today's experimental neuroscience, such as way too-small study group sizes (often as small as three subjects), lack of pre-registration, lack of a blinding protocol, and no sample size calculation to determine how big the study groups should be. In this case ten very sick people with intractable epilepsy apparently had 64-128 electrodes  implanted under their skulls, which raises the question: was it really necessary for these sick people to have all of these electrodes implanted, or did the desire to make these suffering patients part of this poorly-designed experiment factor into the decision to implant so many electrodes in their skulls? Making a point about fMRI studies that applies just as well to electrode brain studies, a scientific paper says, "It is established that in fMRI studies, small studies (n=16) fail to reliably distinguish small and medium-large effect sizes from random noise as do larger studies (n=100)." But in the paper I just referred to, we see study group sizes such as merely n=3. 
• A story on the clickbait heavy site www.sciencealert.com has a headline of "Physicists Just Figured Out How Wormholes Could Enable Time Travel." No, they sure didn't. It's just a vaporous speculation about a "ring wormhole."
• A story with the headline "How the brain enables consciousness" is inexplicably included on today's Google page of science news. The link takes us to a story that merely says that "science has not yet explained how the brain functions to enable consciousness." It's the old "story completely different from the clickbait headline" deal. 
• At the Business Insider site, we have the headline "Harvard scientists unveil anti-aging drug combination to reverse aging in record time." That claim seems to be mere baloney. No drugs have been invented to reverse aging. The related new stories refer to a paper authored by David A. Sinclair and others, a paper talking about "cell reprogramming." It provides no evidence that any human's age has been reversed, or that anything like age reversal in a human has occurred.  "Cell reprogramming" is typically some deal where you use some chemicals to get rid of epigenetic marks that cells may accumulate, which in some cases can be signs of aging. A rough analogy might be that "cell reprogramming" is a little like wrinkle removal, something that merely gets rids of one sign of aging. There is no evidence that anything discussed in the paper would turn back the clock on a human and give him more years of life or vitality.  The Conflict of Interest section of the paper tells us that Sinclair is "a consultant, inventor, board member, and in some cases a founder and investor in Life Biosciences (a reprogramming company), EdenRoc Sciences/Cantata/Dovetail/Metrobiotech, InsideTracker, Fully Aligned, Zymo, Athletic Greens, Levels Health, Galilei, Immetas, Animal Biosciences, Tally Health, and others." We should be wary about the reliability of statements in Sinclair's paper, because he has a strong financial interest in reporting results that will increase the value of his biotechnology investments. The paper's title is "Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging." But the phrase "cellular aging" only appears twice in the paper: one being a mention of screening for signs of cellular aging, and the other being a sentence asking "Is it possible to reverse cellular aging in vivo without causing uncontrolled cell growth and tumorigenesis?" Why has the title referred to reversing cellular aging, when the body of the paper has no substantive statements using the phrase "cellular aging"? The paper includes the very false claim that the genome and epigenome "work interdependently to coordinate the production and operation of life’s molecular machinery." All kinds of fantastically complex molecular machines (mainly protein complexes) arise in the body, but neither the genome nor the epigenome specify which proteins make up the teams of proteins that are protein complexes, and it is an unsolved mystery as to how such protein complexes arise. As two scientists said in 2019, "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking."

While examining the recent science news, I found one encouraging glimmer, some candor. One of the sites mentioned above has an article entitled "Life Didn't Arise as Described in Textbooks." We are told that a nonsense story that science authorities have told for 70 years is just plain false. It isn't true that an increase in oxygen can help explain the appearance of multicellular organisms about 650 million years ago. There was no such increase in oxygen. We read this:

"Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth's oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest. 'Our measurements provide a good picture of what average oxygen concentrations were in the world's oceans at the time. And it's apparent to us that there was no major increase in the amount of oxygen when more advanced fauna began to evolve and dominate Earth. In fact, there was somewhat of a slight decrease,' says Associate Professor Christian J. Bjerrum, who has been quantifying the conditions surrounding the origin of life for the past 20 years. The new result puts to rest a 70-year research story that advances the centrality of higher oxygen concentrations in the development of more advanced life on our plane."

But why did it take 70 years for scientists to realize the invalidity of the crazy idea that an increase in oxygen might have caused miracles of complex biological innovation and information-rich systemic organization, which has always been as nutty as the idea that an empty factory could produce jet aircraft if you simply squirted the right gas into the empty factory?