NeXus #0007

We live in the most information-saturated era in human history, and yet a growing number of people feel like the answers to their questions have never been farther away. We are drowning in content but starving for truth. It feels impossible to know where to turn for our information, what to believe and when to make up our minds. And of course we have trust issues! There is little mystery surrounding the answer to the question of why. We have politicians who run on platforms promising to lower the cost of living and improve life for ordinary citizens, who then funnel billions in taxpayer money into bombing campaigns abroad, and when the press reports on the words that came out of their own mouths, on the record, suddenly they are the “fake news media”. Politicians aside (because when have we ever been able to fully trust them anyways), we need not look farther than the comment section on any internet chiropractor or wellness influencer to locate the seeds of doubt towards the scientific establishment being sewn. What’s more is the people who might have held power to account; journalists, scientists, public health officials, find themselves cast as the villains in a story written by the very forces they were meant to scrutinize. The predictable result of all of this is a population that has decided to take matters into its own hands. To cut out the middleman. To do their own research and find the capital T Truth. And here’s the thing: that instinct is not wrong, inherently. Healthy skepticism of power is a civic virtue, some would even argue a duty. Productive criticism of scientific institutions has driven some of the most important advances in human knowledge. The problem is that “doing your own research” without the tools to evaluate evidence: without training in identifying bias, without an understanding of how to assess quality of evidence and most critically, without the humility to follow evidence wherever it leads rather than wherever you hoped it would, doesn’t produce truth. It produces a more confidently held version of whatever you already believed. There is a reason we shouldn’t be trying to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch. Getting to where we are as a species that can (somewhat) reliably understand the world around us has been a journey human beings have been on since the beginning of time. A long, unglamorous, often ethically dubious and posthumously ridiculous one at that. Allow me to take you on part of it, by way of the history of how we came to understand the human brain. Because in my opinion, nothing illustrates what happens when we don’t know anything quite like what we used to do to people’s heads. Science Didn’t Just Happen Modern science requires a staggering number of ingredients to function. You need humans of course, but specifically humans who are settled enough to form communities (we can thank the Neolithic era and the invention of farming for that). You need language, writing, art, mathematics, measurement tools, systems of understanding, a functioning scientific method, and a social system wealthy enough and willing to pay for all of it. Every single one of these things took thousands of years to develop, combined with a healthy dose of luck to bring them together in the name of innovation. What We Got Wrong About the Brain (A Non-Exhaustive List) Few areas of science illustrate the cost of ignorance as vividly as neuroscience, and few examples are as darkly fascinating as trepanation: the practice of carving a hole in a living person’s skull. Roughly 5% of Neolithic-era skulls show evidence of this procedure, some of them multiple times. Some skulls show bone regrowth around the opening, which means patients survived long enough for their bodies to try to heal. So why were they doing it? We don’t entirely know. Some cases were quasi-medical; attempts to relieve pain from head trauma, while others appear ritualistic. And lest you assume this is purely ancient history: in 1970, British artist Amanda Feilding filmed herself drilling a hole in her own skull with an electric drill, believing it would permanently elevate her consciousness. So convinced of the merits of this procedure, she later ran for Parliament (twice) on a platform of making it available under the National Health Plan. Fielding is not alone in her convictions; a small but persistent community of advocates continues to promote trepanation today, convinced that unsealing the skull restores a kind of mental vitality lost when we grew up and our cranial bones fused shut. Their conviction, strange as it sounds, aligns with one of the longest-running misunderstandings in human history: we have almost never known what the brain actually does. Ancient Egyptians considered the heart the seat of the soul, intelligence, and memory; the brain was scooped out through the nostrils during mummification and discarded. Aristotle, widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity, agreed: the heart was the organ of the mind. The brain, he thought, was basically a radiator for cooling the blood. It wasn’t until Galen (130-200 CE), who conducted vivisections (public dissections of various animals) and keenly observed decomposing human bodies he stumbled upon, that a more accurate picture of the nervous system began to emerge. And it would take another thousand years before Paul Broca, in 1861, provided the first hard evidence of functional localization in the human brain (mapping speech to a specific region) using the case of a patient nicknamed “Tan,” who could only ever say that one syllable. The ethics problem illustrated by Galen (and many, lesser-known predecessors) didn’t resolve itself over the centuries. Another example that springs to mind is the foundational work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s and 70s, who together conducted a landmark series of experiments at Harvard that gave us an extraordinarily precise map of how the visual system is wired, and how the brain processes what the eyes see. The way they did it was by sewing newborn kittens’ eyelids shut, thus depriving one or both eyes of visual input during the critical developmental window, and then examining what happened to the visual cortex as a result. What they found was remarkable: the brain’s wiring is not fixed at birth but shaped by experience in ways that are both time-sensitive and largely irreversible. The foundations of everything we now understand about neural plasticity and critical periods in development traces back to those experiments. This work is also, by modern standards, something no ethics board would approve in a thousand years. Both things are true simultaneously, a tension that illustrates the kind of discomfort that serious engagement with scientific history tends to produce. Wrapping it up So, what does all of this have to do with fake news, affiliate-link riddled influencers and politicians who bomb countries while ignoring the cost-of-living crisis at home? Everything, I think. The scientific establishment is not a monolith of objective truth handed down from high above. It is a human system built by flawed people, funded by imperfect institutions, capable of spectacular error, subject to the same pressures of power and money that distort everything else. The cynical response to this, the one being actively sold to us by people who have a great deal to gain from our confusion, is to conclude that because scientific institutions are imperfect, they are all equally untrustworthy, and therefore your gut feeling is just as good as the evidence. That is not skepticism. Quite the opposite. It is an invitation to be manipulated by whoever tells the most compelling story, unchecked by any standard of proof whatsoever. In contrast, the healthy response is exactly what the pattern of history suggests: rigorous criticism, better methodology, more transparency, and the kind of relentless self-correction that turned trepanation into neurosurgery and humoural theory into modern medicine. The next time someone tells you to do your own research, I’d encourage you to take them up on it. Really do it. Learn what a primary source looks like. Understand the difference between a preprint and a peer-reviewed study. Find out who funded the research and whether that funding creates a conflict of interest. Sit with the discomfort of not knowing, rather than reaching for the nearest answer that confirms what you already believed. Do what scientists have been painfully, slowly learning to do for thousands of years. @‌SophieTsengPellar Sophie Tseng Pellar is a Masters Student in the Surgical and Interventional Sciences program at McGill. Her research interests include exercise physiology, biomechanics and sports nutrition. Part of the OSS mandate is to foster science communication and critical thinking in our students and the public. We hope you enjoy these pieces from our Student Contributors and welcome any feedback you may have!

Praying to heal from illness is possibly the oldest form of alternative medicine. When that prayer is made to a divine being on behalf of someone else—like asking a god to heal an ailing relative—it is known as an intercessory prayer, from the word that means “to intercede.” Prayers may seem to lay outside of the scope of science. If the being at the other end eludes the laws of our universe, how can science test the value of a prayer? The classic counterargument is to say that, since the prayer asks for a measurable improvement in someone’s health, its effectiveness can be studied. We may not be able to explain how, scientifically, prayers work, but we should be able to detect that people prayed for survive an illness longer, don’t require as many medical interventions, and are cured much more frequently that those not prayed for. This has been the justification behind a trickle of studies of intercessory prayers for health outcomes—we can’t test for a god but we can test for health improvements. Many of these studies show that intercessory prayers do not work, but some studies report a slight benefit. One even shows that prayers uttered now can travel back in time and improve the health of a person years into their past. Are you scratching your head yet? Because studying how effective a prayer is at improving someone’s health is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. Pray for pregnancy There is no shortage of anecdotes on the power of prayer, and some have even been inducted into the medical literature. A woman miraculously recovered from Parkinson’s disease—a diagnosis which had been backed up by a dopamine scan of her brain—after being prayed for during a Christian conference. Her neurologist was stunned; the paper which relates this story notes, however, that nine years later, the disease relapsed. There’s also the historical case of a teenage girl who lost her sight, was blind for 12 years, then regained her vision in an instant when her husband prayed with her. Short of a thorough investigation, it’s hard to parse these miraculous tales; it’s also worth wondering if prayer had not been involved, would these cases have received the attention they got. Spontaneous remission is surprising, but a spontaneous remission following prayer certainly has that extra mass appeal. Can our sight really be improved by someone praying for us? A single case won’t be enough, but what about 11? A study was conducted in rural Mozambique where a dozen patients reported having an impaired vision. They were given an eye chart test, then were hugged and prayed for by an evangelizing member of a Pentecostal ministry and took the test again. Using the same eye chart. Vision improved thanks to prayer... or maybe the patients simply habituated to the chart and were able to read an extra line the second time around. Without a control group, we can’t know. Every study on praying is flawed in some way, which means you can cherry-pick the ones you like. Do you believe in the healing powers of Christ? You can cite this 2000 study reporting that six hours of in-person intercessory prayer and six months of distant prayer significantly improved the lives of people living with rheumatoid arthritis. Are you an atheist? Then you can cite a study that came out the year after that shows that praying for people with cardiovascular disease after they leave the hospital makes no difference in their outcome. But these experiments are small potatoes. What about the keystone studies, the ones that get cited over and over again? Get ready to parse through a long list of criticisms and allegations of fraud. There’s the infamous Cha trial, linked to Columbia University, which stunned the world by showing that women undergoing in vitro fertilization were twice as likely to get pregnant if they were prayed for at a distance. Cue the Facebook ads telling you that fertility experts hate this one simple trick. Unfortunately for anyone looking for an easy way out of a difficult conception, the study appears to have been bogus. Of its three authors, the last one, a department head, later claimed he was told of the study’s existence at least six months after it had been completed. And the second author has a history of false identities, fraudulent charges, and an interest in proving that the paranormal exists. I don’t think would-be parents should put any stock in this study. Then there’s the notorious paper by Professor Leonard Leibovici where he showed that praying now can improve the health of people in the past. After all, we should not assume that time’s arrow only points in one direction or that a god would be unable to go back into the past. This study of “retroactive prayer” was, believe it or not, taken so seriously it was included in some meta-analyses of studies looking into the power of prayers. But the point Leibovici was making—in the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, no less, a special issue dedicated to real science of zany topics—was that you could do a study that looked rigorous but that tested something completely bonkers, and some people would take you at your word. That strict adherence to methodology plagued the Cochrane review of prayer for ill health. Cochrane reviews are widely regarded as one of the best summaries of what works and what doesn’t in healthcare, but they are not flawless. An early version of this particular review came under fire for adding the Leibovici study of praying backwards in time to the pile, as if it had been a serious experiment. Its authors also threw prior plausibility out the window when they called for more studies of prayer to figure out if it really worked. Ask any atheist if prayer works when you’re in the hospital and they will remind you that we have yet to see an amputee whose limb miraculously grew back through divine intervention. Now, that’s a study I’d like to see. The rare studies of intercessory prayers with large effects have come under suspicion—too good to be true—while the ones with much smaller effects can be explained quite simply. It’s not that prayer works; it’s that when you are testing small groups of people and comparing them in multiple ways—how long they stayed in the intensive care unit, how long they stayed in the hospital, how long they had this symptom or that one—you’re bound to find differences by chance alone. This is the pitfall of any scientific study, and it should be kept top of mind, especially when extraordinary claims are tested in a group of only 11 people. And the scientists behind these experiments should not escape our scrutiny, either. One of the first major trials of intercessory prayer (this one for patients in a coronary care unit) was performed by Dr. Randolph Byrd, who ended his paper by thanking “God for responding to the many prayers made on behalf of the patients.” Because religion is such a hot-button issue, believers are highly incentivized to prove prayer works and atheists, to show that it doesn’t. There’s also the funding issue. Many of these trials derive their money from the John Templeton Foundation—a philanthropic endeavour accused of using science to validate religious beliefs—or the Global Medical Research Institute—a nonprofit funding research into Christian Spiritual Healing. Somehow, I don’t think these benefactors are interested in studies showing that being prayed for does bupkis after a heart attack. When we leave the experimental details behind, much more important questions come into focus and we realize how absurd it is to ask scientists to test prayers the way they test aspirin. A moratorium on prayers for the control group In the simplest form of a human trial, a control group does not receive the intervention. It is given something that looks like it but that is inert. Now imagine what a control group for intercessory prayer looks like. Can you prove that no one in that control group was prayed for? No, and that’s one of the inherent problems with these studies. People are prayed for by hospital chaplains, by their relatives, their friends, by their congregation, by well-meaning people all over the world, and no scientist can put a stop to that. It’s impossible to have a control group. And it gets worse from here. The people praying in these studies are rarely given the patients’ full names because of medical data privacy. They may be given a surname, a pair of initials, a number code. That might explain why the prayer didn’t work, then: the deity called upon simply did not know whose help was requested. But isn’t the Christian god—and almost all of these studies are fundamentally anchored in Christianity—said to be all-knowing? And also all-powerful and all-good? Will this being let someone die in a hospital bed unless they are prayed for? There’s also the problem that if the patient dies after receiving a prayer, it could be seen as their god answering said prayer and delivering them from their suffering. Therefore, heads, I win; tails, you lose. Whatever the outcome, prayer comes out on top. Ethicists have also given this issue some thought, and while their questions may sound tongue-in-cheek, they’re not wrong to ask them. In some trials, the patients receiving a prayer are never informed of it: consent is waived. Why? Because the risk is seen as nonexistent. An ethicist would say, not so fast. There may be risks in attempting to communicate with an all-powerful divine entity and begging for a favour; since this entity can’t be known scientifically, how can you explain the risks of the procedure to a patient? At the end of this long line of interrogations, I fear there’s only one solution left: science needs to butt out. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah” One of the most illuminating articles I read on this topic was written by a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew—I swear, this is not the start of a joke. They tried to design an experiment to test the efficacy of intercessory prayer on people with major depression and they became, well, depressed. Prayer is not a drug, and yet if you are studying it in the context of a human trial, you must think of it like one. How much prayer would work? What kind of prayer, anyway? What are the magic words? How long should the prayer last? How many prayers in a week? How fervent should the people praying be? Is it important that they belong to a faith? If so, which faith? How many of them should be praying for a single patient? What if you pit Christian prayers against Jewish ones and the former shows efficacy but not the latter? Have you proven the existence of Jesus Christ? And what about that line in the Bible where the Judeo-Christian god proclaims that he should not be put to the test? Aren’t you testing a deity by relying on him for a clinical trial? The Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish academics never ran their trial. Maybe they drowned their sorrows at the local bar. It does not matter how many researchers defend their study by claiming that it didn’t actually test the existence of a god; prayer could work through some unknown physical mechanism, some sort of ectoplasm, perhaps, that moves invisibly from the intercessor and into the body of the sufferer. That argument does not pass the sniff test. Given that deities, if they exist, work in mysterious ways, as we keep being told, to constrain them to a scientific study is not going to work. Moreover, believers will not stop praying if enough studies show that it doesn’t work. Popping an analgesic when you have a headache is based on science and on past uses, and if new evidence convincingly shows it doesn’t work, many will stop taking it—but praying? That won’t be swayed by a Cochrane review. We have better things to research with the limited funds at our disposal. Let’s pray future scientists stop testing fickle divinities to see if they might deliver us from the intensive care unit one day early. Take-home message: - Scientific studies of intercessory prayer for better health usually show no effect. - Studying the efficacy of prayer arguably should not be done by scientists as it is impossible to prove that the control group was not prayed for by anyone, and it tests an alleged divinity that will not behave the way a medication does. @‌jonathanjarry.bsky.social

Steve Stewart-Williams addresses misconceptions about evolutionary psychology, refutes charges of pseudoscience, and discusses the political and ethical risks of denying biological sex differences, advocating for an honest, evidence-based approach to human nature.

The AI system makes genetically distant versions of a bacteria-killing virus.

A global constellation of neutrino detectors is creating a never-before-seen view of the radioactive elements that power Earth’s tectonic heat engine.

Miniaturisation of sensors and light sails for propulsion mean we could reach the stars within a person’s lifetime.

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

Given the state of our technology, it would take a spacecraft a ridiculously long time to reach even the nearest star in our galaxy. However, scientists continue to ponder ways in which we could achieve the dream of interstellar spaceflight. Here are a few of their best ideas.

During the Space Age and Cold War, fusion-powered spacecraft systems were investigated as a possible means of reaching another star system within a human lifetime. Many of the proposed ideas are still on the table today, waiting for future advancements to make them realizable.

A breathtaking view of the cosmos featuring more than half a million galaxies has been released by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

Your bones run on a 24-hour clock too and disrupting it with late nights and screens could be weakening your skeleton.

Study of ensemble perception in mice finds that the early visual cortex does more than just relay information

A 1.37-inch inscription could upend our understanding of the religion’s spread.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about peptides. That’s odd, because asking whether peptides are good or bad is like asking whether food is healthy. The question itself doesn’t make sense. Here’s why.

Read reviews and buy Dayanita Singh: Forget Me Knot - (Hardcover) at Target. Choose from contactless Same Day Delivery, Drive Up and more.

Published by Steidl. Hbk, 9.75 x 11.5 in. / 272 pgs / 26 color / 263 b&w.

Robert Adams’s photographs of the Western landscape are iconic reminders of nature’s resilience in the face of human development.

An exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery pairs Robert Adams’s photographs with their original contact sheets, revealing his thinking and process.

Excalidraw is a virtual collaborative whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them.

Photopea Online Photo Editor lets you edit photos, apply effects, filters, add text, crop or resize pictures. Do Online Photo Editing in your browser for free!

Free AI Writing, PDF, Image, and other Online Tools - TinyWow