The Complete Idiot’s Guide to New Millennium Predictions
by the New Age Collective and Lisa Lenard
Alpha Books, £13.99, ISBN 0028631129

There seems to be a trend in publishing towards insulting one’s readers: after the For Dummies series, the Complete Idiot’s Guides (are they guides for complete idiots or complete guides for idiots?). Formerly confining themselves to computing, they are now found elsewhere.
The cover of this one is not reassuring, promising ways to see the future with astrology, numerology, tarot, palmistry and psychic intuition, while the back says of course you’re no idiot – you’ve had your birth chart done, numbers calculated, cards analysed, palm read… Well, if you’ve done all those things – and paid – you are an idiot! True, it opens with one spot-on prediction: by the time it’s read Y2K may have come and gone without a whimper! But then it’s mainly downhill all the way.
There are small upturns at the beginning: Chapter 2 has some interesting discussion of our fascination with the future as shown by science fiction (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and 2001: A Space Odyssey), and when the new millennium began, with useful information of the history of the calendar, and Chapter 3 some interesting statistics. At the end it’s good too, with concrete predictions on science and economics – but in between it’s the above-mentioned hooey as listed on the cover. I’d say it’s like the curate’s egg, good in parts, except that joke is always misunderstood – the curate in that famous Punch cartoon who stammered that parts of his egg were excellent was desperate not to cause offence; an egg is either good or bad and obviously cannot be good in parts. This book is, however, good in some small parts and very bad in others.

Parapsychology: The Science of Unusual Experience
by R Roberts and D Groome (Editors)
Arnold, £12.99, ISBN 0340761687

Framed between introductory and summary chapters by Ron Roberts, ten British-based academics – including some, like Chris French and Richard Wiseman, well-known to readers of The Skeptic – present brief but well judged accounts of the state of current research on such topics as probability and coincidence, placebo effects, astrology, alien abductions, ESP, NDEs, meditation, and so on.
In this respect, the book clearly adopts a fairly wide interpretation of the term “Parapsychology” and, inevitably in a book of this length, the treatments of the individual topics cannot be comprehensive. Within these limitations, however, the discussions are reasonably detailed and the evidence (mostly) up-to-date.
It is the sort of book which I would happily recommend to a student seeking a way into the topic or to anyone wishing to get a flavour of modern, scientific, psychological analysis of paranormal phenomena. There is also a reasonable reference section to assist further study.
The emphasis is, obviously, on the role of psychological processes in these phenomena, and the stance of most of the writers could be characterised as “open-mindedly skeptical”. This means that even a “believer” friend of mine could read it through to the end and was moved to say that “at least it wasn’t just another debunking-fest” and that she had “learned a few things”. I imagine the authors would be well-pleased by this reaction. Veteran skeptics, however, may find much of the material familiar (although they will be surprised to discover on p.117 that Dr Johnson apparently wrote a three volume Life of Boswell!).

Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusion
by Robert E Bartholomew McFarland and Company, £28.45, ISBN 0786409975

What is happening when scores of women become convinced a phantom slasher is attacking them, or when scores of men are persuaded they are losing their penises?
In the past, the tendency has been to take an all-or-nothing approach: either it’s an event – these things are really happening – or it’s a non-event: they aren’t, it’s sheer fantasy.
This is the common-sense approach, and up to a point, it is a reasonable approach: either the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous or she didn’t; either Linda Napolitano was abducted by aliens or she wasn’t. But even when investigation reveals that a particular event did not take place in the literal sense, it is not good enough to say that nothing happened: because clearly something happened to make the individuals involved think it happened.
This is why the swing today is towards experience based studies, which start with what the witnesses report, whether or not it has a basis in consensus reality, and take it from there. We are coming to see that erratic and anomalous phenomena – poltergeists for example – can best be understood in terms of human behaviour, but this is not the same thing as saying that the phenomena have no existence apart from the human mind. Rather, it suggests that the human mind is the best place to start looking if we want to understand why these claims are made, and why they take the form they do.
For some time now, Robert Bartholomew has been offering us articles and books helping us to understand strange phenomena by approaching them in this way. His UFOs & Alien Contact (1998, with George S Howard) is of fundamental importance to our understanding of the UFO phenomenon, adopting a global approach to the subject and placing the individual experience in the wider context of psychosocial behaviour.
This new book brings together a number of his papers on specific examples of collective outbreaks which at one time or another have perplexed investigators and set the experts tilting one against another, each mounted on the hobby horse of his choice. He shows how both the popular label ‘mass hysteria’, and the scientific classification ‘mass psychogenic illness’, tend to be used in a careless manner which fails to take into account the social and psychological processes underlying the outbreak. Up to a point it is a thorough-going skeptical book. Was there ever a ‘Halifax Slasher’, did the ‘Mad Gasser of Mattoon’ have flesh-and-blood existence? Were the Swedes overflown by ‘Ghost Rockets’? If you are driving from Esher to Cobham do you risk having your windshield shattered by the ‘Phantom Sniper’? Bartholomew shows that in each of these cases, as in the many others he cites, the culprit was no more real than the devil who copulated with witches at medieval sabbats or the aliens whose flying saucer crashed at Roswell in 1947.
But debunking the myths is not Bartholomew’s primary purpose: he is concerned to lay bare the process whereby such myths come into being. Here he is on contested ground, for theories proliferate in the absence of hard fact. For some, those who subscribe to a collective belief that the aliens are coming to save us are hysterics: they are quite literally sick in their minds. For others, attempts to explain are meaningless, we should be looking for the inner truth which transcends reason and will lead us to a higher level of reality. The teachings of the Catholic Church allow for the possibility that a statue of the Virgin Mary would turn its head to gratify her worshippers. Folklorists and anthropologists interpret such outbreaks as sick-building syndrome or body-part-stealing in relation to their preferred agendas.
Unfortunately, the area is so incompletely mapped that these and other alternative theories are hard to refute; but Bartholomew makes out an overwhelming case for a psychosocial approach. That is, the individual experience takes place because the individual is the kind of person s/he is, and it takes the form it does because the individual lives in a particular cultural milieu which shapes it to conform with prevailing belief systems. For men to start panicking because they seem to be losing their penises may seem absurd to western Europeans, but in the context of Chinese folk-beliefs it is an ever-present threat, too real for comfort.
This is no mere academic study. These things happen – and Bartholomew shows us that they happen far more frequently than most of us imagine. Writing of Epidemic Hysteria in Schools, he writes: “This article is intended to be of practical value for school administrators, teachers, parents, and health professionals who may be summoned to intervene in such cases.” The author himself acted as consultant when such outbreaks occurred in Malaysia. The recent epidemic of Satanic abuse allegations is an alarming reminder that even our ostensibly sophisticated western culture is far from being immune to social delusions whose consequences can be tragically real. Current world events are a fearful warning of the divergence between the world’s belief-systems: vast populations are marching to a different drum than the one we take to be the norm. There is an overwhelming need for the different cultures of the world to understand one another’s viewpoint, and to recognise the fact that to judge events only from the perspective of our own experience can lead to serious misunderstanding. Bartholomew and his various co-authors offer us a timely book which can help us to see that only when bizarre happenings are placed in a psychosocial context – the cultural milieu of those who experience them – can we begin to see them for what they are.

Zeno and the Tortoise: How to Think Like a Philosopher
by Nicholas Fearn
Atlantic Books, £9.99, ISBN 1903809134

This is really a fun book. Fearn, a philosophy graduate of King’s College, tries to teach us some tricks of the philosophy trade. Each of twenty-five short chapters is identified with one well-known author and explains a basic thinking tool he (sorry, no she’s) invented or prominently used. The story begins with Thales of Miletus who introduces us to the principle of “reduction” of complicated issues to simpler questions. It ends with Jacques Derrida, whose “deconstruction” method finds contradictions inherent in most of our familiar and cherished ideas and beliefs.
The book is organized along a time-line covering some 2600 years of western thought, but it is not a history. Rather, it provides an introduction to the tools each philosopher used, together with a brief biographical sketch. Some of the ideas are widely known to educated persons. Socrates’ invention of “cross examination”, Plato’s reasoning by analogy between cave and reality, Aristotle and his teleology of immediate and ultimate purposes of things. Others are less eminent. Thomas Reid defended “common sense” – not something for which philosophers are famous. The concept of “emergent properties” is due to Gilbert Ryle. Not fame but innovative tools decide who made the cut. Popper and “falsification” made it, but Kuhn and Lakatos are missing. Neither Newton nor Leibniz are mentioned, but perhaps the calculus is not a philosophical idea. Even Bertrand Russell does not appear. Only Wittgenstein appears twice.
Many of the tools discussed are familiar, but their use is laid out plainly. We have heard of reductio ad absurdum, of Ockham’s razor, Bacon’s inductive reasoning, Decartes’ demon, and Rousseau’s social contract. Here these often loosely understood ideas are lined up, their meaning explained, their origin and use discussed, and each is set into a context of one philosopher’s thought.
All this, and in addition the book is well written, clear and straightforward.

Gods of the New Millennium
by Alan F Alford
Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99, ISBN 0340696133

The plot of the story is simple. Ancient civilisations report their gods were flesh and blood, who created humans in their own image. Alford is prepared to explain gods as ancient astronauts, and humans as a genetic engineering modification of Homo erectus. This is not exactly a new idea. A considerable literature on this pseudo-history exists, and Alford quotes liberally from von Däniken, Hapgood, Sitchin and others.
To pull ancient literature together a scholar ought to be able to read Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, biblical Hebrew, classical Greek, Maya pictographs, and Inca quipu. Alford gives no evidence of having mastered any of these, but relies on translations. It is bizarre to interpret gods, where the translators who can actually read the originals see mythology.
The author posits a world wide highly technological civilisation starting with the arrival of the gods in 270,183 BC (p. 595), that is. not during the last ice age, but three glacial advances back. The age of the gods lasted until around 200 BC. Alford’s time line (pp. 595-598; 662) includes star wars of the gods with map (Fig. 11), rebellion of lesser gods, nuclear explosions, Noah’s flood and just about every event mentioned in ancient history and archaeology. Yet, this activity has left no more than some heavy stone buildings, the pyramids, Stonehenge, Tiahuanacu, and of course the Nazca lines. Why can’t we find technologically unambiguous remains of this history?
To add weirdness to delusion, Alford added a foreword to this reprint of the 1996 edition, which informs us he no longer quite believes what he wrote. His thinking has taken a “dramatic U-turn” (p. xi). He now believes “a deeper level of meaning” is hidden behind the mystery of the ancient gods. He doesn’t inform us what that might be, and I’m unwilling to ask.

Mapping The Mind
by Rita Carter
Phoenix, ISBN 0735810190

This beautiful book can be unreservedly recommended to anyone who wants a non-technical guide to brain research. It is superbly illustrated with clear and colourful diagrams and brain-scan images, and, apart from the pictures that adorn the start of each chapter, eschews the page-padding artwork that clogs up the pages of New Scientist and other popular science publications.

Certainly it is a substantially better buy than Susan Greenfield’s The Human Brain: A Guided Tour, a work devoid of illustrations and often less than lucid.

Needless to say, this comprehensive round-up of scientific theories and findings will provide many useful items for those who find themselves arguing against dualist or mystical accounts of the mind. Concluding the book, Carter writes:

“As the studies in this book show, when we look inside the brain we see that our actions follow from our perceptions and our perceptions are constructed by brain activity. In turn, that activity is dictated by a neuronal structure that is formed by the interplay of our genes and the environment. There is no sign of some Cartesian antennae tuned into another world.” (p.331)

The sound combination of Ockhamite parsimony and open-minded awe is well expressed in the book’s final sentence: “There is no need for us to satisfy our sense of wonder by conjuring phantoms – the world within our heads is more marvellous than anything we can dream up.”

A very worthwhile addition to the library, and an ideal gift.

Paul Taylor

Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature
by Kenen Malik
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, ISBN 0297643053

On the shelf above me at this moment is a book entitled The Biological Bases of Behaviour. Nothing exceptional or controversial about this; science has long sought to reverse-engineer human and animal behaviour and explain it in terms of physiology, biochemistry and, latterly, genetics. Fundamental to this approach has been the rejection of dualism, the splitting of life into “mind stuff” and “body stuff”. While this materialist approach has been enormously productive, particularly over the last 50 years, it has brought with it profound and seemingly intractable philosophical questions. For example, is biology all that is needed to solve the riddles of human behaviour and personality? And are we on the verge of having to abandon any idea of uniqueness?
Are we simply living out a script already written in our genes, originating with our hunter-gatherer ancestors many thousands of years ago and with the sole objective of maximising our reproductive potential? Is free will simply a metaphysical abstraction? Man, Beast and Zombie is a bold and wide ranging attempt at discussing the attempts by contemporary scientists and philosophers to tackle these questions.
Malik, a former neurobiologist and research psychologist, examines the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as well as philosophers, cognitive psychologists and workers in artificial intelligence, and questions whether the differences between them are always as great as the fierceness of their quarrels over what it means to be human might suggest. To give a condensed but intelligent account of competing scientific ideas, place them firmly in their social and political context and supply a thoughtful commentary on a subject like human nature is a difficult trick to pull off but Kenen Malik manages it rather well.
The notes and references are comprehensive and the bibliography utterly daunting.

Time Storms: The Amazing Evidence of Time Warps, Space Rifts and Time Travel
by Jenny Randles
Piatkus , £17.99, ISBN 0749921595

When you make extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary evidence. So why is the introductory story of a “time storm” so vague? There is no specific “when”, just sometime after World War II; no “where”, just somewhere in the Himalayas; and no “what”, just a red cloud and a feeling that time stood still. All this as a recollection “decades later” by a lady with “failing eyesight and deteriorating health”. Her “sincerity” and “mesmerising recall” are praised, but whether such memory is accurate and precise is not considered (p. 1).
The first part of the book is devoted to brief case histories of strange clouds, glowing mists, tingling bodies, altered states, anti-gravity events, floating cars, jumps through space, trips through time, and disoriented people who are “not all there.” (p. 77) Most stories are sourced to UFO publications and archives, to interviews with and letters to the author. In other words, they are difficult to check.
In part two the author refers to quantum physics, Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, and chaos theory to show that “relativity, far from precluding time travel, in some ways almost makes it a certainty” (p. 106) and “perhaps this confirms mystical ideas that our consciousness must exist in a timeless, spaceless, realm and only our material bodies are locked into the permanent illusion that time flows in a linear way.” (p.110) Perhaps, maybe, it could, it might if I wish it to be… “conclusions must be tentative.” (p. 225) Among all the could-be’s and perhaps’s, the author doesn’t seem to know either.
Nevertheless, she tries to convince us that time warps and time travel not only are possible, but are everyday phenomena. It could be I don’t believe a word she says.