NZ Skeptics Articles

Sometimes these titles are the hardest thing to write

7th June 2022

I apologise for my lack of inspiration in the title, but at least we have some interesting articles for you:

I take another look at Counterspin, and see what they’ve been whingeing about this week. Also my email’s spam folder continues to be a valuable source of nonsense, and it’s worrying to see just how smart the advertising is becoming for ineffective products - like the one I found in my spam and wrote about this week, Exipure weight loss pills.

Bronwyn continues her evisceration of MLMs, and looks into one of the weirder ones - Norwex. Bronwyn and I had a chat last week about the possibility of putting together an informational website that details how much (or, rather, how little) money you are likely to make when you work for these MLMs. If we are able to find enough data on enough MLMs that this idea will work, we’ll be sure to let you know once it goes live.

Finally Alistair, a regular at our online Skeptics in Cyberspace meetings, has been kind enough to write an interesting article about Out of Body Experiences - after I put out a call for articles at our last meeting.

Don’t forget that this call for articles is an open offer! If you have something you would like to write about - a piece of pseudoscience that’s been bugging you for ages that you want to rant about, an alternative medicine modality you’ve delved into deeply that would make for an educational read, or a heartless scam that everyone should be warned about - we’d love to receive your submissions. Don’t worry if your grammar’s not great, or your spelling is a bit iffy; we’re happy to clean that up for you before we publish.

Mark Honeychurch

The Boundaries of Delusion

Al Blenney - 7 June 2022

There are two theories about the nature of hypnosis – one that it is an altered state of consciousness (ASC) and the other that it isn't. Prof. Charles Spanos of Carlton University (Canada) conducted a large number of hypnotic regressions – the induction of an experience of an apparent previous lifetime – on students at Carlton. He would subtly prime a subject on what to expect in such an experience. For example, he might suggest to subjects that children were generally mistreated in the old days, and that was what a significant number of his subjects found, For another group of subjects he would suggest that children were well-treated and this is what was reported. He'd ask his hypnotised subject simple questions about where and when they found themselves, what the currency looked like, who the country's leader was and whether the country was at war. These answers – as any sceptic might expect – were usually wrong. He also primed one group to expect past-life experiences under hypnosis and another that such experiences were rare. And the two groups largely delivered what they had been primed to expect. On the basis of his work Spanos concluded (agreeing with previous academics) that his subjects were involved in a kind of play-acting and that hypnosis was, indeed, not an altered state of consciousness. From Wikipedia: