Mind Myth 3: Energy and the brain

This is the third in my series on mind myths. I'm dealing with those myths mainly applicable to the educational arena and often found in alternative medicine and controversial therapies.

Some years ago a parent requested me to excuse her child from school as she was taking him to an enerologist. Because her child was attending our incontinence clinic, I initially thought she was referring to either a urologist or gastro-enterologist. It turned out that enerologist was a misleading term for a quack energy healer, in this case one who specifically claimed to be able to manipulate the brain by manipulating psychic energy. He no doubt believed that he could share in the status of mainstream medical science by using a term that sounded similar to that used by medical specialists.

References to energy and energy meridians (also known as acupuncture points or chakras) in any educational product or therapy that claims to affect the brain in some way, should immediately set the alarm bells ringing. What is referred to is psychic energy, sometimes also called chi, prana, etc. These are not scientific concepts and cannot be detected or measured by scientific means. This "energy" is referred to in practices such as homeopathy, some types of chiropractic and other forms of alternative medicine, but have no role to play in neuroscience.

Image from Scientific American.

















Practitioners of brain based pseudoscience sometimes deliberately or through ignorance confuse the scientific concept of energy and psychic energy. They may by design neglect to inform clients of the origin of some of their activities, i.e. have children press certain buttons (energy meridians) without informing them or the parents that the brain is supposed to be activated by the channelling of psychic energy. This reticence seemed to develop after parents of specific religious persuasions objected to psychic energy based activities.

Confusion through ignorance is often found where practitioners invoke Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 to prove the point of our "unlimited" capabilities. Fernando Sarav (see reference below) pointed out that they are confusing a simple combustion process occurring metabolically in the body with the transformation of matter into energy. The difference is staggering. One mole of glucose (180 g) would yield about 3,1 kJ through combustion, but 1,62 x 1013 kJ if transformed into energy. That amount of energy would power a mid-sized city for a year.

When these practitioners are honest about the origins of their techniques, they often invoke the "it can't be wrong, the Chinese have been using it for 5 000 years" argument. I quote Dr. Paul Dennison, the Brain Gym guru, from his embarrassing British television interview (see it here in a previous post):

"There are studies to show that we are electrical. Acupuncture and other procedures are based on the fact that there are electrical circuits in the body and we are building on the shoulders of these people have been doing this for thousands of years."

This is a fallacious argument, the so-called Argument from Age (Wisdom of the Ancients) fallacy.

In an excellent recent blog post on acupuncture, neurologist Steven Novella points out that Western societies had their own pre-scientific theory of disease:

"An example from Western culture of philosophy-based medicine was the humoral theory - the notion that health was the result of the four bodily humors being in proper balance while illness reflected one or more humors being out of balance. Treatments therefore sought to increase or decrease one or more of the humors (such as the practice of blood-letting) to re-establish balance. The humoral theory survived for several thousand years in Western societies, perpetuated by culture and the power of deception inherent in anecdotal evidence."

I would submit that the only reason for psychic energy based theories to be preferred to humoral theories (in the absence of evidence), would be another logical fallacy, the genetic fallacy. Could a reversed not made here bias be the only reason to prefer Eastern origin psychic energy theories to Western origin humoral theories?

For further reading, see:

Sarav, F.D. 1999. Energy and the brain: Facts and fantasies. In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Mind myths: Exploring popular assumptions about the mind and brain. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Also see Robert Todd Carroll's Energy Healing: Looking in All the Wrong Places

Other posts in the Mind Myth series:

The 10% myth
Left brain right brain

Schools' rugby concussion outrage

I have often been horrified by the lack of care shown by schools and parents when children are injured in school sport, especially in rugby. This, however, goes beyond even the worst that I've seen before.

A 16 year old school boy, playing rugby for his school, was assaulted after the game by two parents. The two adults hit and kicked him in the face and on the head. He suffered severe concussion, was hospitalized and treated with cortisone to prevent brain edema (swelling). A doctor quoted after the incident mentioned the danger of brainstem herniation.

Despite what was clearly a serious concussion, the boy was playing again a week later in the final match of the Beeld Trophy. That was three days after his discharge from hospital.

Read the newspaper reports here and here (the last in Afrikaans).

School boy, Lee-Jay Kotze, playing the rugby final a week after suffering severe concussion.

The parents and coach would have been advised by the neurologist of the dangers of concussion and the consequences that repeated concussions hold for the developing brain. The child wanted to play, but surely the adults should have exercised greater responsibility. Their actions to my mind border on criminal negligence.

Read more on concussion in childhood in Can we manage sport related concussion in children the same as in adults?

An excellent local (South African) resource on concussion in sport is Sports Concussion South South Africa.

School sport in many South African schools is very competitive. Schools' reputations and the future teaching careers of teacher coaches depend on the performance of their teams. This is especially the case in rugby, a national sport and for some almost a religion.

Rich schools buy often buy players with bursaries and other incentives, stripping poorer schools of their players and the opportunity to perform well. They also pay professional coaches and reward teacher coaches with incentives. This is one way in which less wealthy parents can get their children into top schools, but often at high cost to the children. They are removed from their circle of friends and often experience huge pressure to perform from the schools who paid to get them. Their parents, especially fathers, often also put pressure on them, vicariously achieving through their children what they could not when they were at school. The know-all, beer-bellied fathers who heckle referees and constantly admonish their sons, sometimes getting into fights with other parents and even players, are common sights next to South African school boy rugby games.

Silly season: The SCIO/QXCI

Ben Goldacre in Badscience, calls it the silly season - gullible journalists and others singing the praises of quack devices. Under discussion is a device I've recently blogged about, the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, or SCIO/QXCI (also known as the EPFX).

Goldacre and some of the commenters to his column, point out some significant facts about the originator of the QXCI, "Professor" Bill Nelson, aka Desiré Dubounet. Much of their information is from an exposé by The Seattle Times, entitled How one man's invention is part of a growing worldwide scam that snares the desperately ill. Other information comes from Bill Nelson's tranvestite alter ego's website Desiré Delicious Dubounet.

Here is what The Seattle Times had to say about Nelson:

"Nelson makes extraordinary claims about his life. He said he worked as a contractor for NASA, helping to save the troubled Apollo 13 mission as a teenager. He boasts that he was an alternate member of the 1968 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team. He says he has eight doctorates, including degrees in medicine and law.

None of it checks out. NASA has no record of his employment; he was not an Olympic athlete. And his "degrees" came from unaccredited schools and mail-order businesses."

The Seattle Times related several cases where cancer patients were deceived by QXCI practitioners into substituting their medical treatments for QXCI treatment, with inevitable painful deaths resulting. They may of course have died in any case, but the cruel deceit by QXCI charlatans removed all hope of survival.

The husband of one of the QXCI victims was a former Microsoft manager. He analysed the device's software source code and found it to generate results randomly. He concluded that it was a complete fraud.

I find it inconceivable that anyone in their right mind can look at Nelson's history and have any confidence in his invention. His Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface is so obviously bogus, designed to fool those gullible souls who believe that wherever the word "quantum" appears, anything is possible, especially making a lot of money out of other gullible souls.

While one can excuse those from the "alternative" fraternity falling for Nelson's scheme (it fits their model well), I cannot see that the same leniency can apply to registered medical practitioners, psychologists and therapists who knowingly or unknowingly bullshit their patients with the QXCI. They were exposed sufficiently to critical thinking and the scientific method during their training that they should have been able to see through the pseudoscience. They should surely have considered both ethical (bullshitting and potentially harming their patients) and financial (the QXCI costs 14 000 Euros or R150 000,00) issues before they acquired and used it; or did the potential income from it cloud their judgement?

A previous post on the QXCI in South Africa can be found at Quackery in South Africa: The SCIO/QXCI.

Mind myth 2: Left brain right brain

Practically all brain based pseudosciences encompass some version of the left brain right brain / whole brain myth. The myth is actually nothing new and dates back at least to Broca and Wernicke's findings in the 1860's about the role of the left hemisphere in language. This lead to a dichotomania, much as we have now, for the rest of the nineteenth century. It culminated in the Victorian educational ideal of ambidexterity, in order to promote two-brainedness. Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, was one of the supporters of the ambidexterity movement - in order to get more effective soldiers! This history was almost forgotten, but fortunately brought to light again in 1985in separate publications by Anne Harrington and Lauren Harris (see references at the end of this post). Also see my previous blog posting Whole-brain Half-wittedness.

Almost 60 years passed before the myth was resurrected again following on Roger Sperry's split brain research in the 1960’s. Sperry and colleagues bisected the corpus callosum and other cerebral commissures of patients in order to control intractable epilepsy. They then found the separated hemispheres of their patients to have different specialised abilities, the left’s mainly related to language comprehension and production, the right’s mainly related to spatial perception.

The myth-makers jumped into action and soon long lists of supposed left brain and right brain functions were generated. The left brain was associated with Western logic and the right brain with Eastern mysticism. Western education was supposed to neglect the right hemisphere and whole-brain learning became the goal. Children were classified as left brained or right brained on the basis of simple tests of undetermined validity and reliability. Predictably this lead to views that the right hemisphere was inactive and had to be activated by various simplistic means.


Neuroscience moved on and most of the above were soon proved wrong. It became clear that while differentiation of function occurred at a fine-grained level of analysis, the brain functioned mainly in an integrated fashion under all circumstances.

Hemispheric asymmetry related to language was especially revealing. The left hemisphere in almost all right handers and most left handers is dominant for language, including speech production, comprehension, semantics and syntax. The right hemisphere, however, simultaneously deals with contextual issues, such as intonation, metaphor and humour.

One must realise that the corpus callosum and other cerebral commissures (white matter connections between the hemispheres) have to play important roles in integrating the function of the two hemispheres. Both inhibitory and excitatory roles have been suggested for the corpus callosum. I have found the mind model of Norman Cook useful in order to explain the integrated functioning of the brain, especially as related to language lateralization. His model deals well with the left and right hemisphere language processing, as described above. In his theory of topographic callosal inhibition, excitation of columns of neurons in the left hemisphere inhibits equivalent columns in the right, but promotes surrounding context-associated processing. The diagram below demonstrates the proposed process. Dark circles represent columns of neurons that are firing. It is quite complex and one really needs to read Cook's paper, or the summary in Springer and Deutsch's book (see at the end of this post).




Cook's brain code, as he called it, is now somewhat dated. I shall welcome newer information that any reader of my blog be aware of.

To conclude, most of the popular left brain right brain ideas are myths - whole-brain half-wittery. The myth-makers, however, at most only pay lip service to that fact. The left brain right brain myth is good for business and they are not about to let science stand in the way of prosperity.

I cannot put it better than Michael Corballis:

"The main difficulty is that reference to the brain can be seen as a legitimizing force that gives scientific credence to dubious practices."

"The problems arise when we allow myth to escape from scientific scrutiny and become dogma, and when dogma creates financial opportunities for charlatans and false prophets. That is what I thinks has happened with the left brain and the right brain."

"Another secret that I can reveal is that lying on the left side enhances left-brain function, while lying on the right side tunes up the right hemisphere. Lying through the teeth is best left to the therapist."

Some useful references:

William CalvinThe throwing madonna: Essays on the brain.
Jeremy Dean Two brains for the price of one?
Cook, N.D. 1984. Callosal inhibition: The key to the brain code. In Behavioral Science. Vol. 29, pp. 98-110.
Harrington, A. 1985. Nineteenth-century ideas on hemisphere differences and "duality of mind". In Behavioral and Brain sciences. Vol. 8, no4, pp. 617-659.
Harris, L. 1985. Teaching the right brain: Historical perspective on a contemporary educational fad. In C.T. Best (Ed.), Hemispheric function and collaboration in the child. Orlando: Academic Press.
Springer, S.P., & Deutsch, G. 1998. Left brain right brain: Perspectives from cognitive neuroscience (5th Ed.). NewYork: W.H. Freeman.
Corballis, M.C. 1999. Are we in our right minds? In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Mind myths: Exploring popular assumptions about the mind and brain. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Mind myths: The 10% myth

This is the first of a series of posts on mind myths. Mind myths typically arise as a result of hucksters' attempts to use the allure of neuroscience to sell New Age type self-improvement products. I would place such mind myths in one of four categories:

Representing the originator's fantasy and bearing no resemblance to any neuroscience findings. The 10% myth would be one of these.

Misinterpretation or misrepresentation of actual neuroscience findings. The whole-brain craze comes to mind.

The inappropriate or premature application of actual neuroscience findings, for example attempts to implement neuroscience findings before they have been well replicated.

Using neuroscience explanations redundantly for well-known cognitive processes in order to sound more scientific. Much of so-called brain based education and brain based management would fall into this category.

I'm starting the series with the most common of the myths, the claim that we only use 10% of our brain. Hucksters commonly claim that their products can activate the other 90% and that we all could then become Einsteins! Barry Beyerstein indicated that the myth was already common early in the 20th century. This myth is typically encountered as “… scientists say we use only 10% of our brains”. Who these "scientists" are and how they determined this fact is never indicated.

Beyerstein and others exposed the myth on a number of grounds:

The brain comprises 2% of body weight, but accounts for 20% of the body’s oxygen consumption. There would no evolutionary advantage in maintaining such an extravagant organ that is only 10% functional.

If we used only 10% of our brain, damage to large areas of the brain should have no effect. There is, however, virtually no area of the brain that does not result in some deficit when it is damaged.

The principle of "use it or lose it" also applies to the brain. If we used only 10%, the remaining 90% would deteriorate permanently. That has never been found in histological examinations of normal brains at autopsy.

Modern brain imaging research has completely refuted the idea that large areas of the brain are inactive most of the time.

What we and our brains could have looked like if we used only 10% of it! (Image from Internet, origin unknown)

The 10% myth, however, is good for business and the myth-makers are not about to let it go. Under the premise that if 10% is good for business, less will be even better; there has been claims that we may use as little as half a percent (0,5%) of our brain! This claim, incidentally, was in a magazine called Insight and was by who else but a Brain Gym practitioner!

See more on this myth in or at:

Beyerstein, B.L. 1999. Whence cometh the myth that we use only 10% of our brains? In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Mind myths: Exploring popular assumptions about the mind and brain. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

See Beyerstein online at Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?

Jeremy Dean's PsyBlog:
Seriously, Would You Admit to Only Using 10% of Your Brain?

Also see Eric Chudler's excellect Neuroscience for Kids: Do we use only 10% of our brains?