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