“The IKEA catalogue is more practical,
colourful and easier to read” claims the editor, and of course
he’s right. But although only in black and white, this book is a
lot of fun and hugely informative.
If you’ve ever been accosted at a party
with a demand to “Explain why I only use 10% of my brain” or
“Tell me how your reductionist science can explain telepathy”;
if you are oppressed by emails from people who have solved the
mystery of consciousness, or know why the full moon causes
madness; if you are dubbed a “closed-minded scientist who won’t
even look at the evidence for NDEs, OBEs, clairvoyance, spirit
communication, dowsing …..” (and I’m familiar with them all)
then you need this book.
A readable introduction explores the
inconsistency of dualists who use drugs to alter their state of
mind while declaring that the mind is a spiritual entity, and
the blind spots of such great scientists as Linus Pauling who
went to his grave believing that massive doses of vitamin C
could alleviate cancer. The personal growth industry makes a
fortune out of untested methods when the only known reliable
routes to success are skills training, hard work and practice;
and subliminal tapes are widely sold when the sleeping brain
cannot absorb their advice. And if you ever wondered where that
10% myth came from, I had always thought that it began in the
1950s with EEG machines that could not detect activity deep
inside the brain, but apparently it started with William James
who said he doubted that many people used more than 10% of their
potential. (Although that, of course, could be a tall
tale too).
The rest of the book consists of nearly
thirty chapters by many well known authors, covering such topics
paranormal belief; myths about learning, memory and
intelligence; language and communication; and strange brain
states and experiences. Some of the “tall tales” are quirky or
relatively harmless such as the Mozart effect (Yes, listening to
Mozart may have a small effect on one spatial-temporal task but
no, it won’t turn your child into a genius) or the widespread
belief that the full moon causes accidents or madness (No it
doesn’t, and lots of studies have failed to find an effect, but
people go on believing just the same). Others concern such big
political controversies as race and IQ (Yes, IQ is highly
heritable but group differences could still be cultural) and the
‘gay gene’ (there’s no such thing, nor can you reliably tell
sexual orientation from finger length, but sexual orientation
probably does have a heritable component).
Some of the “myths” didn’t seem to me to be
myths at all. One example is the “legend of the magical number
seven”. This began with Miller’s famous 1956 paper showing that,
by and large, people have a digit span of seven. That is, given
unrelated items such as digits of a phone number or meaningless
syllables, seven is about the average recalled. I learned about
this as a psychology student in the early 1970s and always
assumed it was true. So I turned to this chapter with special
excitement. Has this simple, foundational fact of cognitive
psychology been overthrown while I wasn’t looking? Well it turns
out that it hasn’t. Like many other over-simplifications, it has
been worked on, challenged, added to, and adapted. The truth
about short term memory capacity is far more complex than Miller
could have guessed – but that’s just science, and the basic
finding remains. To be fair the authors explain all this but
they still conclude that Miller’s discovery is not a general
rule and is therefore a legend. But if this is a legend then so
is nearly everything we know in every branch of science.
For readers of JCS, few of the topics
directly concern consciousness, but several are at least
obliquely relevant. There are many myths surrounding Freud’s
theory of the meaning of dreams. Then there are exaggerated
claims that the blind can not only have powerful imagery (which
is true) but better visual imagery than the sighted (which is
not). The psychology of magic involves misdirection and
manipulation, with clever magicians twisting their observer’s
suspicions, exploiting ambiguity and change blindness, inducing
false expectations and tampering with spectators’ memory of what
they have just seen.
Stage magic is at least honest in its
deception but other ways of playing with memory or inducing
false memories are not, as is explored in a study of memory
myths. Nor is the whole left-brain/right-brain myth harmless,
according to an amusingly illustrated account of a whole variety
of left/right myths. The trouble happens when such ideas escape
from scientific scrutiny and make big money for false prophets
and charlatans.
The ideo-motor effect is another gift to
the unscrupulous. For example chiropractors use gadgets that
detect small movements of the fingers, and quacks use pendulums
to diagnose disease when the movements observed are caused
entirely by the person using the apparatus. It is sad to reflect
that Michael Faraday exposed the basic principle involved in his
classic studies of table turning in the 1850s, yet these myths
are alive and well, and the fraudsters are still getting rich.
Rather different are the myths that turn
out to be real phenomena wrongly described. Out-of-body
experiences were once described as the spirit or astral body
leaving its physical home, but now we know they occur with
disruptions of body image processing in the right temporo-parietal
junction; where once inducing them meant years of meditation,
weird multisensory training techniques or powerful drugs, now
they can be induced by direct brain stimulation. Sleep paralysis
has even more myths associated with it, from the Kanashibari of
Japan to the Kokma of the West Indies and the original incubus
and succubus. To my mind this is the most satisfying form of
myth busting; when science can show why peoples all over the
world have invented similar stories, not because they are
fanciful or mad, but because they have been struggling to
explain genuinely strange experiences.
Tall Tales is long and rich in detail, and
would have benefited greatly from abstracts or chapter
summaries. Their absence makes it far less useful as a resource
for research, but it still provides terrific ammunition against
those troublesome party poopers.
