While I was working really late the other night, I heard a really bizarre interview with David Lynch on the BBC World Service. If you think his movies are weird, they’ve got nothing on his bizarre zealotry for Transcendental Meditation (I apologize in advance if my partial transcription is a little sloppy) :

(Lynch) Maharishi’s great gift to the world is a technique : transcendental meditation. It’s the key that opens the door to an ocean of bliss and that’s the secret to world peace.

The peace creating group – the “group” is the key word – and they can enliven this in collective consciousness and negativity, just like darkness and light, negativity disappears in the light of peace. And this group has been tested fifty-two times. Every time it reduces crime and violence in the area of the test. And every time it’s been successful.

They went in, they told the people in Washington D.C. they were going to start this peace creating process on a certain day, go for one month and stop. And you can all imagine people laughing at them, the police laughing at them. And they go and they start and they go for one month. Then they went back and they talked to the police and during that one month crime and violence was reduced I think at least thirty percent in Washington D.C. and the police said “This is an unbelievably beautiful crime prevention technique.”

(Interviewer) But this is a group of people that’s simply meditating all at one time in the same place?

(Lynch) Yes, and because they’re in a group, the individual brain waves begin to overlap and an exponentially greater single global wave emerges. It’s science! It’s really beautiful science, Heather.

I’m not a quantum physicist, but about 25 years ago modern science, after probing for hundreds of years into matter, discovered this level, this field, this ocean and they named it the unified field. It is at the base of all matter and all mind. And it is unity, it is oneness. It is unmanifest, but it’s there.

(Interviewer) Can I ask how’s it’s changed you, transcendental meditation?

(Lynch) What it does is if you have a golf ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book you get a golf ball-sized understanding. When you look out the window you get a golf ball-sized awareness and when you wake up you get a golf ball-sized wakefulness.

If you start transcendental meditation, that ball begins to grow and you therefore have more understanding, more awareness, more wakefulness.

(Interviewer) Do you do yogic flying? Can I ask you that?

(Lynch) Yes I do.

(Interviewer) Can you tell me a bit about that? I mean, like, the way I would describe it is people who do it are sort of sitting cross-legged and bumping along the floor. A little bit above the floor apparently.

(Lynch) Yeah. It’s something that looks very funny and it’s supposed to be flying but it looks like hopping. And inside these yogic fliers is this bubbling bliss. And this bubbling bliss, by the way, is the key to world peace, because it projects out so far and the whole environment is affected by this bliss. it might seem strange, but if you wait just a little while, you’ll see that it’s the most beautiful science that could ever be.

(Interviewer) Well, we could certainly do with a bit of world peace…

(Lynch) Not a bit! This is perpetual world peace, Heather!

(Interviewer) Well, TM has been around for quite a while…

(Lynch) No, no, no. This group practice, it’s like every individual who’s practicing TM is gaining more and more happiness, more and more consciousness each day. But it’s the group, Heather, that will bring peace to Earth.

The formula is the square root of one percent of the world’s population. That’s about eight thousand. That’s a little town. They have to have food, facilities, a place to do this program, and peace will be on earth.

Now Lynch’s weird religious preaching clouded with pseudo-scientific language reminded me of a few things.

The first (and most obvious) thought was about the whole “intelligent design” garbage that’s an ongoing struggle between people who understand science and those who have wrapped the Biblical creation story in scientific language that would be laughable if it didn’t pose such a threat to this country’s schools. In fact there’s a current battle going on in Texas right now that has the potential to make the “equal time” malarkey a national standard (Political State Report is all over this one). Since I’ve written about the evolution vs. retarded people creationists thing in the past, I’ll spare you another long diatribe and just show you this editorial cartoon that made me laugh :

The second thing that popped into my head was Dennis Kucinich. Specifically, I wondered if there was a connection between what Lynch later described in the interview as “Peace Palaces” (which was covered in this SF Gate article from May) and Kucinich’s plan for a Department of Peace? At first glance, the proposal from Kucinich’s website describes the Department in vaguely new age-y language that’s reminiscent of Lynch’s (“a higher evolution of human awareness”, “the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness”). After the first couple paragraphs though, the proposal gets into some actual policies that makes it look like the Department of Peace is more of a Homeland Security-type idea of reorganizing a bunch of different functions under the same umbrella as opposed to Lynch’s Tinkerbell-syndrome solution. I still think the Department of Peace is a pretty crappy idea, but it’s at least based on more than just a bunch of guys sitting around giving out “good vibes” and “positive energy”.

The third thing that popped into my head was this hilarious line from the film “A Mighty Wind” delivered by a folk-singing cult member :

“This is not an occult science. This is not one of those crazy systems of divination and astrology. That stuff is hooey and you’ve got to have a screw loose to go in for that. Humankind is simply materialized color operating on the 49th vibration. You’d make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store.”

Y’see? It’s simple, really. All it takes is the square root of one percent of the world’s population to create a global wave that will bring about a bubbling bliss of perpetual world peace. Duh!

Seriously though. This trend of religious balderdash disguised as science is a big deal and needs to be called for the bullshit that it is. All this talk of a “collective consciousness” is just another application of the thoroughly debunked “hundredth monkey phenomenon”, which was well-described by Michael Shermer in his classic book “why Do People Believe Weird Things?”

For many years I heard stories about the “Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon” and was fascinated with the possibility that there might be some sort of collective consciousness that we could tap into to decrease crime, eliminate wars, and generally unite as a single species. In the 1992 presidential election, in fact, one candidate- Dr. John Hagelin from the Natural Law Party-claimed that if elected he would implement a plan that would solve the problems of our inner cities: meditation. Hagelin and others (especially proponents of Transcendental Meditation, or TM) believed that thought can somehow be transferred between people, especially people in a meditative state; if enough people meditate at the same time, some sort of critical mass will be reached, thereby inducing significant planetary change. The Hundredth Monkey phenomenon is commonly cited as empirical proof of this astonishing theory. In the 1950’s, so the story goes, Japanese scientists gave monkeys on Koshima Island potatoes. One day one of the monkeys learned to wash potatoes and the taught the skill to others. When about one hundred monkeys had learned the skill-the so-called critical mass-suddenly all the monkeys knew it, even those on other islands hundreds of miles away. Books about the phenomenon have spread this theory widely in New Age circles.

An exercise in skepticism started by asking whether events really happened as reported. They did not. In 1952, primatologists began providing Japanese macaques with sweet potatoes to keep the monkeys from raiding local farms. One monkey did learn to wash dirt off the sweet potatoes in a stream or the ocean, and other monkeys did learn to imitate the behavior. Now let’s examine Watson’s book more carefully. He admits that “one has to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened. So I am forced to improvise the details.” Watson then speculates that “an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea” – hardly the level of precision one expects. He then makes this statement:”Let us say, for argument’s sake, that the number was 99 and that on 11:00 am on a Tuesday, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass.” At this point, says Watson, the habit “seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously on other islands” (1979, pp. 2-8).

Let’s stop right there. Scientists do not “improvise” details or make wild guesses from ‘anecdotes’ and ‘bits of folklore’. In fact, some scientists did record exactly what happened. The research began with a troop of twenty monkeys in 1952, and every monkey on the island was carefully observed. By 1962, the troop had increased to 59 and exactly 36 of the 59 monkeys were washing their sweet potatoes. The “sudden” acquisition of the behavior actually took 10 years, and the ‘hundred monkeys’ were actually only 36 in 1962. Furthermore, we can speculate endlessly about what the monkeys knew, but the fact remains that not all of the monkeys in the troop were exhibiting the washing behavior. The 36 monkeys were not a critical mass even at home. And while there are some reports of similar behavior on other islands, the observations were made between 1953 and 1967. It was not sudden, nor was it necessarily connected to Koshima. The monkeys on other islands could have discovered this simple skill themselves, for example, or inhabitants on other islands might have taught them. In any case, not only is there no evidence to support this extraordinary claim, there is not even a real phenomenon to explain.

You’d think with something as easily testable as “collective consciousness” that, if true, this would be universally accepted in scientific circles. Hell, all you’d have to do is get a couple hundred mice, teach all but one how to go through a maze, and then see if the last one was able to get through. So easy it could be a science fair project. Alas, for every crazy belief there’s going to be people dumb enough to believe it.