It’s interesting to think about why this kind of decoration is so seductive, and to people who should know better. Firstly, the very presence of neuroscience information might be seen as a surrogate marker of a ‘good’ explanation, regardless of what is actually said. As the researchers say, ‘Something about seeing neuroscience information may encourage people to believe they have received a scientific explanation when they have not.’
But more clues can be found in the extensive literature on irrationality. People tend, for example, to rate longer explanations as being more similar to ‘experts’ explanations’. There is also the ‘seductive details’ effect: if you present related (but logically irrelevant) details to people as part of an argument, this seems to make it more difficult for them to encode, and later recall, the main argument of a text, because their attention is diverted.
More than this, perhaps we all have a rather Victorian fetish for reductionist explanations about the world. They just feel neat, somehow. When we read the neurosciencey language in the ‘bogus neuroscience explanations’ experiment—and in the Brain Gym literature—we feel as if we have been given a physical explanation for a behavioural phenomenon (‘an exercise break in class is refreshing’). We have somehow made behavioural phenomena feel connected to a larger explanatory system, the physical sciences, a world of certainty, graphs and unambiguous data. It feels like progress. In fact, as is often the case with spurious certainty, it’s the very opposite.
Again, we should focus for a moment on what is good about Brain Gym, because when you strip away the nonsense, it advocates regular breaks, intermittent light exercise, and drinking plenty of water. This is all entirely sensible.
But Brain Gym perfectly illustrates two more recurring themes from the industry of pseudoscience. The first is this: you can use hocus pocus—or what Plato euphemistically called a ‘noble myth’—to make people do something fairly sensible like drink some water and have an exercise break. You will have your own view on when this is justified and proportionate (perhaps factoring in issues like whether it’s necessary, and the side-effects of pandering to nonsense), but it strikes me that in the case of Brain Gym, this is not a close call: children are predisposed to learn about the world from adults, and specifically from teachers; they are sponges for information, for ways of seeing, and authority figures who fill their heads with nonsense are sowing the ground, I would say, for a lifetime of exploitation.
The second theme is perhaps more interesting: the proprietorialisation of common sense. You can take a perfectly sensible intervention, like a glass of water and an exercise break, but add nonsense, make it sound more technical, and make yourself sound clever. This will enhance the placebo effect, but you might also wonder whether the primary goal is something much more cynical and lucrative: to make common sense copyrightable, unique, patented, and owned.
We will see this time and again, on a grander scale, in the work of dubious healthcare practitioners, and specifically in the field of ‘nutritionism’, because scientific knowledge—and sensible dietary advice—is free and in the public domain. Anyone can use it, understand it, sell it, or simply give it away. Most people know what constitutes a healthy diet already. If you want to make money out of it, you have to make a space for yourself in the market: and to do this, you must overcomplicate it, attach your own dubious stamp.
Is there any harm in this process? Well, it’s certainly wasteful, and even in the decadent West, as we enter a probable recession, it does seem peculiar to give money away for basic diet advice, or exercise breaks at school. But there are other hidden dangers, which are far more corrosive. This process of professionalising the obvious fosters a sense of mystery around science, and health advice, which is unnecessary and destructive. More than anything, more than the unnecessary ownership of the obvious, it is disempowering. All too often this spurious privatisation of common sense is happening in areas where we could be taking control, doing it ourselves, feeling our own potency and our ability to make sensible decisions; instead we are fostering our dependence on expensive outside systems and people.
But what’s most frightening is the way that pseudoscience makes your head go soggy. Debunking Brain Gym, let me remind you, does not require high-end, specialist knowledge. We are talking about a programme which claims that ‘processed foods do not contain water’, possibly the single most rapidly falsifiable statement I’ve seen all week. What about soup? ‘All other liquids are processed in the body as food, and do not serve the body’s water needs.’
This is an organisation at the edges of reason, but it is operating in countless British schools. When I wrote about Brain Gym in my newspaper column in 2005, saying ‘exercise breaks good, pseudoscientific nonsense laughable’, while many teachers erupted with delight, many were outraged and ‘disgusted’ by what they decided was an attack on exercises which they experienced as helpful. One—an assistant head teacher, no less—demanded: ‘From what I can gather you have visited no classrooms, interviewed no teachers nor questioned any children, let alone had a conversation with any of a number of specialists in this field?’
Do I need to visit a classroom to find out if there is water in processed food? No. If I meet a ‘specialist’ who tells me that a child can massage both carotid arteries through the ribcage (without scissors), what will I say to them? If I meet a teacher who thinks that touching your fingers together will connect the electrical circuit of the body, where do we go from there?
I’d like to imagine that we live in a country where teachers might have the nous to spot this nonsense and stop it in its tracks. If I was a different kind of person I’d be angrily confronting the responsible government departments, and demanding to know what they were going to do about it, and reporting back to you with their mumbling and shamed defence. But I am not that kind of journalist, and Brain Gym is so obviously, transparently foolish that nothing they could say could possibly justify the claims made on its behalf. Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:
I’d like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that ‘Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.’ What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?
‘Anton’, 2006
Thank you Anton.
I have great respect for the manufacturers of cosmetics. They are at the other end of the spectrum from the detox industry: this is a tightly regulated industry, with big money to be made from nonsense, and so we find large, well-organised teams from international biotech firms generating elegant, distracting, suggestive, but utterly defensible pseudoscience. After the childishness of Brain Gym, we can now raise our game.
Before we start, it’s important to understand how cosmetics—and specifically moisturising creams—actually work, because there should be no mystery here. Firstly, you want your expensive cream to hydrate your skin. They all do that, and Vaseline does the job very well: in fact, much of the important early cosmetics research was about preserving the moisturising properties of Vaseline, while avoiding its greasiness, and this technical mountain was scaled several decades ago. Hydrobase, at around £10 for a half-litre tub from your chemist, will do the job excellently.
If