Tue 13 Sep 2011
Mainlining Maths
Posted by anaglyph under Gadgets, Hokum, Idiots, Skeptical Thinking, SmashItWithAHammer, Stupidity, WooWoo
[17] Comments
You will remember, Faithful Acowlytes, that some months back I brought you news of the mirth-inducing Trinfinity8, a miraculous new technology that fixes every complaint known to humankind ((This is only mild hyperbole on my part – you should read the claims!)) by mainlining mathematics straight into your brain. Well, Trinfinity8 seems to have done a superb job at sucking people in since we last examined them. In the following YouTube clip you can see nitwits by the dozen clutching ‘crystal’ hand grips and sitting hypnotized in front of screens of extremely ordinary fractal animations while listening to New Age drones, all the while convincing themselves that they ‘feel energized’.
And the thought strikes me for, oh, the twelve BILLIONTH time today: Why are people so FUCKING STUPID?
For those of you who couldn’t be bothered sitting through the video (and truly, I wouldn’t blame you for a nanosecond) let me synopsize:
• Dr Kathy Forti, inventor of Trinfinity8 (and producer of execrable science fiction web movies) tells us how she noticed the following wonderful results being delivered by her gadget: a renewed sense of energy; a sense of peace; a sense of being connected; dissipation of anxiety. I get all that from a small glass of Ardbeg, and it doesn’t cost me anything like the $8000 you pay for a Trinfinity8 system. These are the kinds of diffuse and meaningless claims made by snake oil peddlers since before recorded history. The ‘inventor’ of Trinfinity8 is not promising you anything more than you’d get from half an hour of meditative relaxation. Which, needless to say, would cost you absolutely nothing.
•A woman who has been hanging onto the plastic crystal handles tell us: ‘I kinda felt a tingling and I kinda almost felt like I was having an out of body experience’. Well, that’s definitive.
•Ms Forti earnestly tells us ‘We’ve used this on people who’ve said “I don’t feel any hope to live anymore” and we’ve said “Well, why don’t you just try this.” (which is a masterful way of implying that there was a result, without actually claiming one).
•A homeopathist named Dr Malcolm Smith tells an amazing story about a guy whose life was empty of all meaning, and then uses the Trinfinity8… and guess what? It turns this guy’s white hair back to its normal colour! And then Dr Smith bursts into tears. What. The. Fuck.
•An optometrist named Dr Jon E. Fitzpatrick tells an amazing story about how the Trinfinity8 cured a patient’s blindness! Well, kinda, sorta, maybe… just don’t press him on the details.
•An acupuncturist named Laurie Schneider tells an amazing story about how the Trinfinity8 fixed the libido of a housebound patient.
•A surgeon named Dr Thom E. Lobe ((I really hoped he was a brain surgeon or an ear surgeon, but he isn’t either. He appears to be one of those perplexing very highly qualified people who has no critical thinking capability.)) tells us that “Trinfinity8 is a new kind of medicine that you’re not going to find in very many medical practices”. And, Dr Lobe, I would suggest that there’s an excellent reason for that.
Dr Lobe claims, as if it’s fact, that “…everything from the air we breath, to the people we’re around, to the food we eat, to the music we listen to actually changed (sic) the expression of our DNA.” Not to be daunted by a point of view shared by exactly NOBODY who knows anything about DNA, he goes on to bury himself even deeper by ‘explaining’ how DNA works. Hand me a fork, someone, I want to plunge it into my brain. This guy is a surgeon? It’s enough to turn me religious and plead that God keeps me from ever going under his knife. ((Dr Lobe reminds me of the painter who did our house. Except the painter knew more about DNA.))
•A whole lot of people say a whole lot more stupid things about ‘energy’, vibrations, “finding themself (sic) with a capital ‘S'” and so forth. The stupid is so bad that it hurts.
•Kathy Forti says: “I am the first one to be astounded by these hundreds of reports that I get and hear each month of the changes made in someone’s life.” Yeah, I just bet you’re astounded. Astounded by the utter gullibility of people and their capacity to swallow your horseshit. And astounded by how the sale of the $8000 Trinfinity8 machines are filling up your bank account, I bet. You should truly be ashamed of yourself Ms Forti. You are nothing more than a snake-oil seller trading on the insecurities of damaged, ignorant, lonely and insecure people. Sometimes I really wish there was a Hell, because I know there’d be a special place reserved there for morally bankrupt people such as yourself.
Well, all the comments on the YouTube video are falling over themselves to tell us that the Trinfinity8 is the most wonderful thing to come our way since the invention of the Turbo Encabulator, so I thought I’d best redress the balance somewhat.
Ah, of course. Moderated comments. What’s the best way to make sure everybody believes whatever you tell them? Silence anyone who disagrees! A tried and true modus operandi of pseudoscience.
Well, Trinfinity8 is well and truly in my radar. We will not be letting them off that lightly.
It should surprise no one that Kathy Forti has a little of the L. Ron Hubbard in her.
Yes, you might have missed the link in the text. I watched some of them. They are truly awful.
Yeah, you’re right: I completely overlooked that link. I just found myself wondering about this chick and started doing a little googling.
As you do. Looks like she’s on the ‘Get Rich Quick’ wagon to me.
I wonder, if I have no soul, and sold it for all the money this lady now has, would I have sold homeopathy to the imaginary devil?
It depends on how dilute your soul was.
I am feeling SO SORRY for Kathi. Watch out lady. Here comes the Reverend of the sane and sensible.
I feel very sorry for Kathy too – it must be awful not to be able to tell the difference between good science fiction and the mind-frying dreck that she’s producing.
oh shit…
You better believe it.
I don’t think Dr. Lobe said anything directly wrong about DNA, he just tried to mystify it and act like it anything to do with this nonsense procedure. This seems to be a common technique for woo practitioners. They throw in some science that people may remember from high school (like how creationists always talk about the 2nd law of thermodynamics), and then mix in some of their woo beliefs as if the science supports it. In this case, it is true that the gene expression program of a cell can be altered in response to an environmental stimulus. Of course, this change has nothing to do with their ridiculous algorithm. Any change would be due to a mix of the person taking the time to relax and the placebo effect.
Oh, Lobe certainly says things that are wrong about DNA. Or, let me qualify: he makes DNA seem like it behaves in ways that it just doesn’t. Here are his words:
Aside from the egregious horseshit about Trinfinity being able to use mathematics to tell the DNA what to do (WTF?) the basic premise of what he’s telling us is just plain wrong. As you say, like many peddlers of pseudoscience, he’s happily conflating some real ideas with woo. Except his real science is only half accurate. Yes, there are a lot of proteins in a human being (more like something in the order of a couple of million rather than 120k though) and yes, they are coded for by around 25k genes. But his idea that genes can ‘go in one of four to six directions’ and that explains all the biological outcomes of human life is just plain hogwash (as a moment’s thought will tell you). He makes it sound like some kind of push-button science: you push A and then B results. The current understanding of how DNA functions says it’s not anything like that simple. In all likelihood, hugely complicated orchestrations of gene expression account for a particular effect like eye colour or predisposition to obesity, say. So his simplistic ‘explanation’ of how Trinfinity could affect gene expression is bollocks even if it actually did something chemical, like squirt enzymes directly into your cells.
But that’s not even what Trinfinity does! Instead, what he’s invoking here is the idea that Trinfinity somehow exploits epigenetics: the influence of environment on gene expression. The problem is that epigenetics is still a very fledgling field and although some very simple genetic responses can be demonstrated in relation to environmental influences, it’s terribly unclear what kinds of effects a complex environment has on a complex gene expression system (and, needless to say, no-one ANYWHERE has any science that says mathematical algorithms would do anything at all – even if there was a mechanism to explain how you could get genes to be affected by maths. Ow. My brain fucking hurts when I even try to understand how these people think.). So even if the placebo effect is at work, which is what you suggest, it’s much more easily explained in some way other than at a genetic level: you sit down in front of this machine for half an hour, watch some interesting fractal patterns, have a sound played into your ears that masks outside distractions and you come away feeling ‘energised’. Big deal – a million people who practice meditation will tell you how that works! It’s nothing ‘genetic’ – it’s simply relaxation, something which most people respond to very well. Meditation lowers your blood pressure and heart rate and helps you feel good – a purely physiological response that can last well into the day. And you don’t need some stupid machine, a belief system based on crap and an empty wallet to get those benefits!
Ok. First, I want to point out that we agree on more than we disagree. We both agree that a mathematical algorithm has no effect on the human body, and that any positive reaction is simply due to the person relaxing for a half hour. Also, I agree that his description of gene expression is an oversimplification (the “high school” version, shall we say).
I would like to address your comment:
“It’s nothing ‘genetic’ – it’s simply relaxation…”
I don’t understand your point here. If a person is stressed out: heart pounding, muscles tense, etc. And then the person relaxes for a half hour and is no longer stressed out, then his/her gene expression in particular cells will have changed. If not, the person would still have the same symptoms because his/her physiology could not have changed.
Basically, our bodies constantly respond to environmental stimuli by changes in our gene expression. This is not a mystical process. But neither is it a rare phenomenon as you present it. When one relaxes, the expression level of specific genes in specific cells change, and then one feels better.
Am I making sense?
Yes, you’re making sense and I agree completely. What I’m trying to get at here, though, is that gene expression is not how Dr Lobe paints it. His picture is that you have ‘a code’ that somehow is ‘in your body’ and that the mathematics coming through your ears somehow ‘reprograms’ that code. This is a very different prospect from a cell-based gene-controlled protein expression caused by the general chemical state of your body. Of course cells work at a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to infer they don’t. It’s just that this has nothing at all to do with the programming of your DNA. In relaxation, for instance, it’s the chemical environment of your body that causes the cells to do whatever they do. There’s nothing at all mystical about this.
And I’m not trying to say that gene control is rare – just that it’s not a simple ‘push button A, get result B’ process. We know that in some cases certain genes seem directly responsible for certain outcomes, but in other cases it’s far more complicated than that. And as I mentioned, epigenetic gene expression is really complicated and not at all understood at this point in time.
My main thrust is basically that Dr Lobes has made a cartoon version of the way DNA and genes work and it bears little relationship to reality.
Alright, sounds good. I’d say we are on the same page. I hope I wasn’t too much of a bother. I don’t know anything about fractal geometry or how information is stored in magnetic strips, but I do know genetics and wanted to contribute. Keep up the good work!
Never a bother! Always contribute – I am very happy that people take the time to think about these things and contribute to the conversation.