Science & Pseudo Science

“You will literally meditate like a Zen monk at the touch of a button!!”

That’s one of the oft repeated sales pitches for the Holosync system, a set of binaural-beat brainwave entrainment CDs from Bill Harris’s CenterPointe Research Institute. According to the rest of the sales material, it slices, it dices, enlightens and happifies, fixes you buttered toast, and offers you fresh squeezed orange juice. Organic, I’m sure.

Ok, I made a lot of that up.

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OOPS. You missed the deadline for the extra special price offer, but I *did* get to attend Havi’s call (and it was way cool. more later) Still, I’m leaving this post here because, well… I love the image of the duck with antlers too much to take it down.

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Here’s the thing. I have a new bloggy web crush. Her name is Havi Brooks. No, she doesn’t know I exist, and yes, that is a rubber duck on her shoulder.

More on the duck, later.

I have a crush on her because Havi does things on the web the way I used to do them before I started learning how I’m supposed to do things on the web, got all self conscious and mucked it all up. See, her marketing approach is to be shamelessly, unrelentingly, and blatantly herself, wearing her issues and quirks on her sleeve.

She also has a wicked sense of intuition, humor, and creativity. Sound familiar? [click to continue...]

Well, I do!

Sometimes I speak in a self conscious, half silenced and stammering voice. Other times, I speak with confidence, humor and certainty. Occasionally, I speak in images, lines and colors, messages formed with paintbrushes rather than vocal cords. And when I speak to God, it may be in syllables of untrained dance rhythms and motion. [click to continue...]

Tuesday night, my amateur astronomer husband dragged me to what I thought was going to be a dull university lecture on astronomy or advanced cosmic theory and such.

As it turned out, the talk was given by an Astrophysicist, but the Astrophysicist in question is the incredibly entertaining Neil deGrasse Tyson (who you may know from Nova’s Science NOW, various Discovery Channel programs). And the topic wasn’t Astronomy, or even Astrophysics… it was something far more dear to my own heart: Scientific Literacy.

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As most of you know by now, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities of brainwave entrainment. Oh, I know it sounds a bit flaky, and yes, sure, my first exposure to it was in new age music during the 90s.

And although the core theory behind entrainment (exposure to specifically applied frequencies of sound and light can temporarily shift the state of most people’s brainwaves - and thereby temporarily affect their state of awareness - ie, awake, daydreamy, or sleepy) is pretty well accepted, a lot of the claims out there are not so… um.. accepted.

But like hypnosis, meditation, brain-games and other mind-training techniques, the loose definitions and early stages of applied research leaves it open to a lot of marketing hoopla and woo.

Here are a few of my favorites:

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