Nonsense congregates

In checking information for an upcoming post on this blog, I was once again struck by the way nonsense attracts nonsense.

Some trainers and consultants seem to be naturally drawn to pseudoscience bullshit. In fact, it seems that you can with a fair amount of certainty judge a specific approach (teaching, therapeutic, management) by the company it keeps. Some years ago I was requested to address an academic meeting at the Technicon Witwatersrand (now part of the University of Johannesburg) on scientific perspectives on cerebral hemispheric asymmetry and my views on the left brain right brain issue.

After my presentation I was confronted quite aggressively by some of the participants - they were worried that I had compromised their credibility in the technicon. They were attached to a recently established unit for professional development at the technicon. The approaches they pushed included a Pandora's box of nonsense, including Brain Gym, Neurolinguistic Programming, brain profiling and Suggestopedia. I debunked all of these on neuroscientific grounds and lack of evidence, but was hammered with quantum mechanics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, with subtle energies and mystical interpretations of the Hawthorne and placebo effects, with the Mozart effect and heaven knows what else. Eventually we agreed to disagree, we were clearly not of the same universe, let alone the same planet.

The unit was apparently disbanded not long after our meeting. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, so I can't be held responsible!

Since then I was involved in numerous similar discussions and I have found that where people were involved in one form of nonsense, you could quite accurately predict what else they would be involved in. Nonsense congregates.