SKEPTICS SOCIETY CONFAB WAS A DELIGHT - NO FOOLIN'

Date: Saturday, May 21, 2005

Other people go to Cancun or Disneyland for vacations. Me, I go to academic conferences like the one the Skeptics Society put on at Caltech last weekend. Odd, I suppose, but everybody needs a hobby. And some 700 people agreed with me that the best thing to be doing on a beautiful spring Saturday in Pasadena, Calif., was listening to a full day of lectures on "Mind, Brain and Consciousness."

It started with a continental breakfast at 7 a.m. and wrapped up at 10:30 p.m. with Skeptics Society President Michael Shermer chatting onstage with magician James "The Amazing" Randi. They talked about why Randi is so passionately committed to exposing all kinds of anti-intellectual obscurantism, especially when it is deliberate fakery.

Of course Randi does deliberate fakery too -- he's a magician -- but he tells you that, and challenges you to figure out how he's fooled you. Not the same thing as pretending you're speaking with dead people to con their loved ones into giving you money. Dead people don't communicate.

Friday evening opened with Roy Zimmerman, a songwriter and guitarist who does political satire. His politics are not mine, but then neither are Tom Lehrer's. I'd have bought the CDs, but every time a fresh batch appeared they sold out within minutes. There was a magician, Bob Friedhoffer, the "Madman Of Magic," who showed just how easy it is to fool the person called up from the audience to help. We could see what was happening; he couldn't. And a "mentalist," Mark Edward, who clearly and convincingly demonstrated "paranormal" powers, which of course he disavows. But if you're more than a little credulous, and in a situation not framed so it is clear that someone is trying to trick you, it would be easy to become a believer.

Saturday. I couldn't do justice to one speaker in this space, let alone 11 of them. Do I choose Richard McNally of Harvard, who studies memory and uses as subjects people who believe they've been abducted by space aliens? Actually, he and his colleagues wanted to study false, recovered or repressed memories of women who believed they had been sexually abused as children. The trouble was, they couldn't account for whether what the women believed was true. With aliens, they figured they were safe.

The brain's physical reactions to such demonstrably false memories are the same, and as powerful, as memories of real events.

But then, you never know about those aliens. The Web site www.skeptics.com has a great aerial view of a crop-circle rendition of the society's logo.

Or take Susan Blackmore, who demonstrated "change blindness," the inability to perceive clearly visible objects. She switched rapidly between two photos of a crowd milling around a huge plane, and asked the audience to raise their hands when they saw a difference between the two. It took a long time before a few tentative hands began to go up.

What was the difference? In one photo, there was a jet engine suspended from the wing. In the other, it was missing. And once you saw it, it dominated the picture.

She also showed -- at least, I'm pretty sure it was she but I was so enthralled I forgot to write it down -- a notorious video of six kids tossing a basketball among themselves. Subjects in the experiment are asked to count how many passes are completed between the kids in white shirts.

See, in the middle of the video, a guy in a gorilla suit strolls into the middle of the scene from stage right, stands there for maybe 30 seconds while the kids pass the ball around him, and then strolls off, stage left. I'd read about this, so I was watching for him. But Blackmore didn't warn the audience about what they were going to be seeing and when she asked for a show of hands from people who had noticed "something unusual," it was barely half the audience. Amazing.

A smaller group who stayed on until Sunday attended Julia Sweeney's one-woman play, Letting Go of God, about her religious upbringing and her gradual spiritual journey away from it. Very, very beautifully done, and free of the animus toward religion often displayed by the formerly religious.

I've been through the religion on/off cycle a couple of times, but for me it wasn't nearly as dramatic and funny as Sweeney's search. She tried Nature for a while, until she went to the Galapagos Islands and found out what blue-footed booby chicks do to their weaker nestmates. She tried Deepak Chopra for a while, until she actually took a course in quantum mechanics.

After the play, Sweeney graciously opened her home for a fundraising dinner, to benefit the Skeptics Society. Randi came, and he just happened to have a deck of cards with him, so the evening ended with the Amazing Randi doing card tricks for Sweeney's beautiful 4-year-old daughter.

Truly memorable. Who needs "it's a small world"?