‘Brain Power Miracle’ will make you an Einstein-level genius

There’s a hell of a lot of bullshit self-help brain-training, memory-boosting, whatever products out there and most of them I don’t even bother looking at in any detail, because I value my emotional stability and life’s just too short. Brain Power Miracle  though is worth a mention, purely because of the hilarity of their claims.

The start off with the old canard that we only use a part of our brain – but they go one better than the normal jokers – they say we may only use 2% (but that it ‘isn’t conclusive’). Then:

“Just think about it: what if you could turn your brain into an unstoppable success machine—bringing you all the wealth, success and happiness that you had previously never thought possible?”

And if that wasn’t enough:

“We will show you how to become a genius like Einstein, Mozart, Da Vinci…”

It’s a shame they didn’t employ one of their genius-level users to copy-edit their webpage and remove all the spelling mistakes.

And to finish off, some nice sciencey-looking pictures of frequency spectra:

Only $37.95 for seven CDs full of white-noise and synthesised dying-whale-noises! What are you waiting for people?! Go get it!

Tapping, or the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). What. The. Fuck.

OK, buckle up space-cadets, this is a weird one.  The Emotional Freedom Technique is a kind of psychotherapy, developed in the 90s, that draws on a variety of pseudoscientific bollocks, including accupressure, our old friend NLP, various kinds of laying-on-of-hands-type ‘energy’ therapies and a good dose of very confused neurobollocks.

Essentially, what happens in an EFT counselling session is that you discuss your problem, while stimulating the ‘end points of the body’s energy meridians’. This stimulation takes the form of tapping yourself; on the head, the face, wherever.

Here’s a demonstration video from this site. Forget the bullshit at the beginning and skip through from about 2 minutes in, where she starts literally hitting herself in the face:

She’s hitting herself in the face! What is she doing? If you saw someone doing this in the street you’d assume they were having some kind of psychotic episode.

There are lots of ‘tapping’ sites out there (like this one), but this one is by far the most egregious in terms of neurobollocks. Projecttapping.com appears to have some serious money behind it, and is chock-to-the-brim with teeth-grinding neurobollocks:

“According to Neuroscience, every memory you have is encoded in your brain with an emotional charge. This charge then creates a neural pathway to signal an appropriate physiological response every time you’re reminded of an experience relevant to that memory. For instance, you might start trembling every time you’re faced with the possibility of public speaking. Tapping helps you rewire these neural pathways, so you can eliminate both the subconscious and conscious fears that cause negative reactions in you. After just a few sessions you’ll already notice the difference: fears that once caused you to doubt yourself, reject wealth or avoid change will begin to melt away.”

Also, apologies for the extensive quotes, but this one is just too good not to share too:

Tapping positively modifies your DNA
A study conducted by the Heartmath Institute showed that when a study participant evoked strong positive emotions like love and appreciation through practices like Tapping, their DNA unwound and increased in length. Negative emotions, on the other hand, caused strands of their DNA to shorten and in some cases disappear. In other words, working with your emotions allows you to change your genetic make-up and your life.

There you have it folks, positive emotions unwind your DNA, negative ones make it disappear! There’s also a weird undercurrent on that site about money and wealth – apparently if you’re poor, it’s probably because you’re ‘afraid’ of being wealthy and pushing money away. Riiiight.

There’s plenty of ridiculous stuff on the internet of course, so this is nothing too remarkable. What’s slightly weird about this particular site is that projecttapping.com is published by a company called Mindvalley, who describe themselves as ‘Pushing humanity forward through innovations in education and culture-hacking’. They seem to be a really weird blend of very up-to-date marketing and some really hackneyed new-age bullshit. The kind of company that California just seems to be so good at producing for some reason. Take a look at their ‘about’ page, if you have a chance. Have you ever seen a more self-satisfied bunch of touchy-feely hipster twats? Piss off with your bullshit ‘culture-hacking’ and ‘online meditation portals’. Do some real work.

Telegraph article on neuromarketing – dreadful stuff

I’ve so far resisted talking about a) neuromarketing, and b) how neuroscience is portrayed in the popular press, because I honestly felt that if I started in on either of those topics I would probably never be able to stop and there would just not be enough words on the entire internetz. Fortunately, an opportunity has come along for me to save valuable time and effort and heap derision on both targets at once.

Molly Crockett pointed me towards this article in the Telegraph, which is an uncritically fawning act of fellatio performed on Steven Sands and his Sands Research company. There are plenty of wince-inducing quotes in there, but by far my favourite is this little gem:

“It’s all very Minority Report,” Steve Sands says, referring to the Tom Cruise film in which a special police department known as “PreCrime” tracks down criminals based on knowledge provided by psychics. “But we’re not too far from that now.”

We’re not too far from having mutant humans linked together in a hive-mind predicting future events using psychic pre-cognitive abilities? Good to know, Steve.*

*Unless he meant the computer interfaces of course, which is generally what people mean when they talk about Minority Report. In the movie, Tom Cruise had to put on a pair of special gloves to do whizzy hand-wavy things with his computer; we’re already way beyond that.

 

Some excellent articles on the neurobollocks of brain training

Another short post just to link to a couple of articles on the brain-training trend, and why it’s all highly suspicious.

First up is a really good piece in the New Yorker titled ‘Brain games are bogus’. The piece mostly focuses on CogMed (who are currently launching programs in American schools) and has some good, and damning, quotes from independent researchers who work in the area of working memory.

This post on the Computing for Psychologists blog mentions another company called LearningRX who are also making a play for a slice of the lucrative education sector.

Finally, this blog post focuses on Lumosity, which is perhaps the most well-known (and well-marketed) online brain-training service.

All three articles make very good points, which I won’t bother to repeat here, but the upshot is that brain training is (very likely) bogus. The science behind it is shaky at best, and these companies cannot possibly deliver on the promises they make in their slick marketing videos, like this one:

*Uncontrollable projectile vomiting* Urgh. For God’s sake, just take the ten hours you’d spend pointlessly clicking buttons on the Lumosity website and use it to read a book instead. Science, history, fiction, anything… you’ll get more ‘brain training’ out of that than anything these jokers can produce with their ‘science of neuroplasticity’ and their self-consciously quirky hipster hand-drawn graphics and carefully selected not-too-hot-and-not-too-geeky-looking fresh-faced spokesmodel from central casting.

Except if it’s something by Stephanie Meyer. Seriously, don’t read those Twilight things. They’re adolescent fucking garbage.

A presentation on neurobollocks by Chris Atherton

Just a quickie to point you towards an ace set of slides by Chris Atherton (twitter: @finiteattention) available on SlideShare.net, detailing a presentation at the Cambridge Usability group meeting. Some really excellent points and examples in there.

See the slides on SlideShare.net  by clicking here.