Skeptoid 4: Astronauts, Aliens, and Ape-Men

by Brian Dunning

  Those are the major components, but believe me, I’ve just given you an oversimplified 30,000-foot view of the immune system. Both halves, the innate and the adaptive, are comprised of many different components. Some act in concert, some act independently. There are many, many different ways in which parts of your immune system can be compromised, and addressing each of these deficiencies requires a different strategy. The notion that a single juice drink or supplement pill can “boost your immune system” is — to borrow a phrase — “so wrong it’s not even wrong”.

  Since the function of the adaptive immune system is to react to challenges and develop new defenses, it can indeed be improved. Every time you catch a cold or get vaccinated, your adaptive immune system builds a new army of killer T cells ready to fight off a future recurrence of the same pathogen. There is no nutritional supplement, superfood, or mind/body/spirit technique that will do this for you. Those B cells only know which proteins to express by being attacked by specific disease agents.

  The usual response that I hear to these arguments is that “immune boosting” products are simply trying to restore healthy immune function, since we’re all walking around with compromised immune systems, because we eat badly and are obese and live in a toxic world. This is a familiar argument, and it’s also easy to sell. It sounds like it makes sense. People do overeat, we love our prepared foods, and few of us take any special interest in the chemicals making up the objects in our daily lives. Has this truly resulted in compromised immune systems?

  In fact, the opposite is true. Obese people generally have inflammation, which is an immune response. We catch colds and have no difficulty in producing symptoms. When we’re exposed to irritating substances, we react with hives or itching or asthma, all of which are immune responses. Practically every one of us has some immune system response going on right now. The claim that living in our modern world has compromised our immune systems is measurably, and unambiguously, untrue.

  There are real conditions in which immune systems can be compromised. These include primary immunodeficiencies, which are usually genetic and exist from birth, and require complex medical intervention; and acquired immunodeficiencies, usually resulting from disease, like AIDS, some cancers, even chemotherapy. A specific component of the immune system is affected and requires a specific treatment. Acquired immunodeficiency can result from malnutrition, but you have to be practically starving to death. It’s the opposite problem from eating too many cheeseburgers.

  Supplements, juices, or any products that claim to “boost your immune system” are frauds. They are for-profit solutions to a problem that does not exist and was invented by clever marketers to scare you into buying the products. Don’t stand for anyone telling you that your balanced teeter totter can be brought into better balance by piling sandbags on one end.

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  Brain, M. “How Your Immune System Works.” Discovery Health. Discovery Communications Inc., 1 Apr. 2000. Web. 8 Oct. 2010.

  Crislip, M. “Boost Your Immune System?” Science-Based Medicine. Science-Based Medicine, 25 Sep. 2009. Web. 7 Oct. 2010.

  Goldacre, B. “When it comes to a cold, you might as well try goat entrails.” The Guardian. 22 Nov. 2008, Newspaper.

  Hall, H. “Boost My Immune System? No Thanks!” Skeptic. 22 Mar. 2010, Volume 15, Number 4: 4-6.

  Schindler, L. Understanding the Immune System. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, 1988.

  Singh, S., Ernst, E. Trick or Treatment. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

  Wallace, A. “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.” Wired. 1 Nov. 2009, Volume 17, Number 11.

  40. SPEED READING

  Speed reading classes claim to be able to turbocharge your words per minute. Is this really possible?

  We’ve all seen films of speed readers going through books nearly as fast as they can physically turn the pages. It’s enough to make anyone envious. Who among us wouldn’t love the ability to pick up any book, flip through its pages in just a few minutes, and then put it down in record time with nearly 100% retention? When I look at my vast stacks of unread books, the idea is certainly a compelling one. Fortunately for slow readers like myself, our demand-driven economy has responded with a product we can buy: Classes and techniques purporting to be able to turbocharge our reading speeds to thousands of words per minute.

  The most often cited speed reader is the late Kim Peek, the famous savant upon whom the Rain Man character was based. His mental abilities were so vast and varied that speed reading was hardly the most remarkable, yet it was still really something. He read two pages at a time, the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye. Estimates of his speed vary, but 10,000 words a minute is the number I found most often. Peek had a unique hardware arrangement driving this ability, though. He was born without a corpus callosum (the connection between the two brain hemispheres), and it’s possible that his two hemispheres were able to process the pages he read in parallel. Kids, don’t try this at home.

  The most famous speed reader is probably John F. Kennedy, who spoke about it often and is said to have had his staff take Evelyn Wood speed reading classes. 1,200 words per minute is the number cited for Kennedy, however we’ll look a little more closely at this in a few moments.

  The Guinness Book of World Records does list a fastest reader, Howard Berg, who claimed 25,000 words a minute, nearly as fast as one can fan the pages of a book. Berg is best known for amazing stunts of speed reading and comprehension on television shows, including one with Kevin Trudeau who sold his speed reading course Mega Reading. But his claims were not without controversy. First, his TV stunts were incredible, but they never came near approaching 25,000 words a minute. Second, The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against him in 1990 for false and misleading advertising, after a blinded study found that none of his customers gained anywhere near as much as he said they would. Still, the fastest of those tested had quadrupled their speed to 800 words per minute.

  How fast is 800 words per minute? It doesn’t sound all that great compared to some of these other speeds. But apparently, 800 would be extremely fast for anyone without Kim Peek’s hardware. Fast speeds require skimming, and comprehension drops off dramatically. It’s always a trade-off. At 800, there’s a massive loss of comprehension. To truly measure reading speed, we’d have to draw a line at some minimum acceptable level of comprehension.

  Ronald Carver, author of the 1990 book The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement, is one researcher who has done extensive testing of readers and reading speed, and thoroughly examined the various speed reading techniques and the actual improvement likely to be gained. One notable test he did pitted four groups of the fastest readers he could find against each other. The groups consisted of champion speed readers, fast college readers, successful professionals whose jobs required a lot of reading, and students who had scored highest on speed reading tests. Carver found that of his superstars, none could read faster than 600 words per minute with more than 75% retention of information.

  Keith Rayner is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and has studied this for a long time too. In fact, one of his papers is titled Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research, and he published that in 1993. Rayner has found that 95% of college level readers test between 200 and 400 words per minute, with the average right around 300. Very few people can read faster than 400 words per minute, and any gain would likely come with an unacceptable loss of comprehension.

  So before you embark on a speed reading course, understand that knowledgeable professionals have devoted their careers to studying this, and have conclusively found that any gains you’re likely to achieve are probably nowhere near the numbers printed in your class�
��s marketing brochure, at least not without massive loss of retention. But let’s take a look at the strategies that speed reading courses teach.

  One of the basic goals is the elimination of subvocalization, claimed to be the thing that slows readers down the most. Subvocalization is the imagined pronunciation of every word we read. I do this a lot, and it limits my reading speed to virtually the same as my talking speed. Subvocalization is even accompanied by minute movements of the tongue and throat muscles. Nearly every speed reading class promises the elimination of subvocalization.

  Here’s the problem with that. You can’t read without subvocalization. Carver and Rayner have both found that even the fastest readers all subvocalize. Even skimmers subvocalize key words. This is detectable, even among speed readers who think they don’t do it, by the placement of electromagnetic sensors on the throat which pick up the faint nerve impulses sent to the muscles. Our brains just don’t seem to be able to completely divorce reading from speaking. NASA has even built systems to pick up these impulses, using them to browse the web or potentially even control a spacecraft. Chuck Jorgensen, who ran a team at NASA in 2004 developing this system, said:

  “Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement. A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly, it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal chords do receive speech signals from the brain.”

  In fact, scientists have a term for reading in this way. They call it rauding, a combination of the words read and audio. To truly comprehend what your brain is seeing, nearly all of us must raud the words, fastest speed readers included. Fast readers need not be fast speakers; they simply have what’s called a larger “recognition vocabulary”. Rauding an unfamiliar word is subvocalized more slowly than a word already stored in our recognition vocabulary. We’ve learned that your recognition vocabulary, and thus your reading speed, can actually be improved; but the real technique is the opposite of what’s taught in speed reading courses. Focus instead on reading comprehension. This will improve your recognition vocabulary, and you will probably begin to read faster.

  Thus, elimination of subvocalization is a gimmicky claim. It sounds logical, and it’s an easy sell. By skimming a text, you can subvocalize less of it, and you will comprehend less of it. Rauding the complete text is the only way to actually read it.

  Another strategy taught in speed reading is special eye movements. These are usually things like reading lines backwards and forwards, and taking in several lines of text at a time. Again, this gimmick sounds like an attractive superpower to have, but it’s counterintuitive to the way our brains actually process text. Those of us who aren’t Kim Peek need serial input. Here’s what’s happening when you read. First, your eye lands on a point in a printed sentence. This is called a fixation, and it lasts (on average) a quarter of a second. Your eye then moves to the next fixation, and this movement is called a saccade, and takes a tenth of a second. After several saccades, your brain needs time to catch up and comprehend. This takes anywhere from a quarter to half a second. Half a second is a long time, and that’s the rauding catching up with the saccades.

  Is it possible to fixate once in a group of ten lines of text, and actually take it all in? Maybe, but only with a sufficient pause to comprehend before moving on. Speed reading teaches you to skip this pause, and thus your brain will not process the majority of what your eyes pass.

  If we look back at the test that found Howard Berg’s students improved to as much as 800 words a minute, we have to keep in mind that speed and comprehension are a trade-off. Whether 800 words a minute constitutes a passing score depends on what kind of comprehension threshold is set, and also what kind of text it was. When The Straight Dope administered its own speed reading tests, they found that people who had not read the texts at all often scored nearly as well on comprehension questions as the speed readers — when the text was general enough. In other words, it’s very easy for professionals like Evelyn Wood or Howard Berg to control the conditions of the test to produce amazing results, good enough to impress television hosts, and to sell classes to laypeople.

  So what about John F. Kennedy and his 1,200 words per minute? Kennedy biographer Richard Reeves looked into this. The 1,200 number comes from an off-the-cuff guess made to Time magazine’s White House reporter. The reporter called the Evelyn Wood school where Kennedy had taken his speed reading class, but found that he had no score, as he’d never completed the class and actually been timed. But in what the reporter figured was a bit a PR posturing, the school told him that Kennedy “probably” read 700-800 words per minute. Carver’s educated guess is that Kennedy likely read 500-600 words per minute, but may have been able to skim as fast as 1,000. So take the Kennedy claims with a grain of salt.

  Test yourself at your normal reading speed, and you’ll probably be surprised to learn that what you thought was slow is actually right in that normal range of around 300 words a minute. If you’re much faster than that, you’re among the few people with a highly developed recognition vocabulary. To improve this, stay away from gimmicky techniques that ignore the way the brain processes printed text, and focus on your comprehension. To read faster, concentrate on reading slower, and read more often.

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  Carroll, R. “Speed Reading.” The Skeptic’s Dictionary. Robert T. Carroll, 11 May 2000. Web. 14 Oct. 2010.

  Carver, R. The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement. Mahway: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

  Just, M., Carpenter, P. The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1987.

  Noah, T. “The 1,000-Word Dash.” Slate. Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC, 18 Feb. 2000. Web. 15 Oct. 2010.

  Rayner, K. “Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research.” Psychological Bulletin. 1 Nov. 1998, Volume 124, Number 3: 372-422.

  Reeves, R. President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

  41. DDT: SECRET LIFE OF A PESTICIDE

  Is DDT a killer of birds, a savior against malaria, or a little of each?

  Put on your respirator and hazmat suit, because in this chapter we’re pointing the skeptical eye at the claims on both sides of the DDT question. DDT is an insecticide in use since the 1930’s. At first, its basic use was to kill mosquitos that transmit malaria, lice that transmit typhus, and other insect disease vectors like tsetse flies, at which DDT is extremely effective. It was so successful in World War II that its discoverer was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1948. Subsequently it was used in agriculture to protect crops from a variety of pests, and once again, it’s highly effective in doing so. But a few decades later, DDT became a two-sided issue, with detractors pointing to health effects on humans and animals; most notably, eggshell thinning in various bird species, and a number of potentially severe health effects in humans. In response to these concerns, DDT has now been banned for the most part in many countries. But the controversy continues. While the ban has been credited with the rebound of bird species, it has also been criticized as overzealous, with many now saying the detrimental effects were overblown and did not outweigh the many lives saved from malaria in the third world. It is in fact making a comeback, with production increasing today in India, China, and North Korea, for both agricultural and anti-malaria uses.

  And so we ask the question: Is one side completely wrong and one side completely right, or do we equivocate and conclude that DDT has its place, albeit a limited one?

  DDT is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. It’s a completely synthetic compound that does not exist in nature. It’s a white, powdery, waxy substance that’s hydrophobic: It doesn’t dissolve in water and so does not contaminate it, but readily dissolves in solvents and oils. It’s applied as a white smoky mist. DDT kills insects by chemically enhancing the electrical connections between their
neurons, short-circuiting them into spasms and death. DDT’s hydrophobic nature is both a blessing and a curse. It can’t contaminate water sources, which is good; but it also doesn’t get dissolved away by them and diluted into virtual nothingness, so it hangs around for a long time.

  A worker spraying DDT

  DDT probably never would have been banned if it were not for the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, the title of which alluded to dead birds. Author Rachel Carson was a much beloved nature writer who died only two years after the book came out. She’d been a marine biologist for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (then called the Bureau of Fisheries), but was able to retire with the publication of a trilogy of books about the sea. All became bestsellers in the 1950s, with the public enamored by her poetic presentation of all things pertaining to beaches, islands, the deep sea, and the creatures living there. Following this trilogy, her writing turned toward environmental issues and became increasingly critical of industry, government, and the effect of humans on the planet. Silent Spring was serialized in The New Yorker before its publication, and it was probably the most scathing of her works, though beautifully written. It charged DDT with being a health hazard and with widespread environmental destruction, particularly to bird populations, and was unquestionably the turning point which resulted in DDT’s bans in the United States and other countries. In fact, as one Environmental Protection Agency writer put it:

  “Silent Spring played in the history of environmentalism roughly the same role that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played in the abolitionist movement.”

  Rachel Carson’s list of posthumous honors is a long one, showing what deep roots Silent Spring thrust not only into the environmental movement, but also into the public psyche. President Jimmy Carter awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She appeared on postage stamps in several countries. A bridge in Pittsburgh is named after her, as is a government building in Harrisburg. The number of schools, parks, nature refuges, scholarships and scholarly prizes named for Rachel Carson would fill a page.