The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
An Instagram compilation, published in late June, pans across beautiful blue skies and pretty, fluffy little clouds – just like how the sky used to look like when we were children. The cause of such idyllic vistas? Each clip in the montage starts with the camera resting on a bucket on the ground, sometimes showing steam gently rising from it, or sometimes with a diffuser spraying light mists several inches high. This is the work of the chemtrail busters at VinegarIT, and those buckets of gentle, steaming mists contain warm vinegar – which conspiracy theory activists have come to believe can clear the skies of suspicious water vapour.
VinegarIT posted the Reel with a range of indicative hashtags: #whitevinegar #geoengineeredweather #geoengineering #chemtrails #chemtrailawareness #chemtrailspraying #chemtrailclouds #stopsprayingourskies #wedonotconsent #geoengineering (a second time) #weathermanipulation – and superimposed over the video is the text “Video from Vinegar Blue Sky Telegram group”.
Never one to turn down the opportunity to peek inside conspiracy circles, I took the group up on their Telegram invitation, becoming one of their 3,693 subscribers. The group acts as a clearing house for advice on how to simmer white wine vinegar to dispel chemtrails, DIY instructions on making your own vinegar, and a surprising number of Pepe the Frog memes (1. Small Pepe, ‘Do we have to do the vinegar today?’, large Pepe, ‘You want sunshine with that ice-cream don’t you?’ 2. [watching a sunrise] The fruit of your overnight vinegar labour 3. [going to sleep] ‘Well at least I did one good vinegar deed today’):
One YouTube video shared in the group shows two women using a fog machine to spit simmered vinegar fog into their garden, determined to fix the sky. Surprisingly, the sky they’re sitting under isn’t what I’d describe as a classic chemtrail sky – crisscrossed with trails left by planes; instead, it seems to be just a regular cloudy day. Nevertheless, after just half an hour of sitting in their garden spitting out vinegar vapour with a fog machine, the skies begin to clear.
Elsewhere in the channel, I come across “Clearing Geo Engineered Clouds Fact Sheet – How To do It” – which, despite it’s name, isn’t a fact sheet, but a YouTube video featuring a series of text slides.
In it, they explain that “White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]. It eats Alkaline Metals which is what they spray to create the geo engineered clouds”, and that while supermarket white wine vinegar is heavily watered down, you can turn it into a chemtrail-busting solution by simmering (but never boiling) it. Once you have your reduced, warmed vinegar, you merely need to decant it into some dark bowls – “dark bowls attract the sun’s heat” – and you’re ready to enter the “battle for our skies”. According to the video, vinegar solution in a humidifier is capable of clearing clouds in a 10-mile radius within a few hours… or a couple of days.
Notably, the video is watermarked with the name of the channel that created it: Divine Truth. We don’t know what other ideas Divine Truth promotes, because their channel has been banned by YouTube for some time. As a long-time chronicler of the flat-earth movement, it’s hard not to see some parallels – “now, but it’s fascinating to me that this odd belief – that you can bust clouds by simmering and releasing vinegar – has these red-flag details.
“Divine Truth” feels like exactly the kind of channel name that would publish flat-earth content in the 2018 heyday of the modern movement. Throw in Pepe The Frog memes – a cartoon whose image was adopted as an irony-shielded avatar of the alt-right – with a busy Telegram presence, and it all feels rather familiar. While I’ve seen no overt signs of worrying extremism in the Telegram channel, there are enough red-ish flags to suspect there could be something of concern simmering beneath that vinegar surface.
Chemtrails
Chemtrails, as readers are no doubt aware, are not real – they sit alongside tinfoil hats as quasi-cartoonish illustrations of pseudoscientific beliefs in popular culture. In reality, the trails that linger in the wakes of planes are contrails or vapour trails, produced by changes in air pressure when planes are cruising at high altitude. They’re not made up of sinister chemicals, they’re mostly ice crystals and water droplets. They’re essentially clouds, caused by evaporated air condensing following the intrusion of a metal tube, with a surface temperature of around -50°C, travelling at several hundred miles per hour.
Aeroplanes have always created contrails, despite the insistence of chemtrail conspiracy theorists that their childhood didn’t contain such trails in the sky. I even distinctly recall being a child, lying in the field behind my infant school one sunny playtime, and looking up at plane trails in the sky. I might have been five or six at the time, and I used to refer to them as skyscrapers; I’d heard the word before, but had never seen a particularly tall building, so I figured “skyscraper” obviously had to mean planes that go across the sky, scraping a line of cloud as they go. That would have been around 1989.
Perhaps for the generation older than me, who grew up in the 1970s, it may be true that they didn’t really see many trails in the sky – not because the high altitude physics worked differently, but simply because there were fewer flights back then. In 1950, there were 195,000 air transport movements (take offs or landings) in the UK. By 1970, that number had trebled to 607,000 and, by 1990, it was 1,369,000. In 2019 it reached 2,214,000.
On top of that, we have confirmation bias – I happened to remember specifically noticing aeroplane trails when I was a child but if you didn’t, your memory might instead be filled with the memorably sunshine-y days of your youth, which you compare not to the sunny days of today, but to the days that aren’t sunny. Why is it so cloudy today, when I remember a sunny day from 30 years ago? It must be chemtrails.
Similarly, when it comes to the vinegar simmerers, we’re almost certainly looking at a huge slice of confirmation bias – ‘Whenever I notice the clouds go away, it must have been because of my vinegar. And if they don’t, well I clearly haven’t vinegared for long enough’. There is also the action of time; clouds move, all the time. We don’t always notice it, because they’re big and high and comparatively slow but, over time, clouds will move and change significantly. That’s going to be especially the case for contrails, created by the movement of an airplane, noticeable for their non-naturally occurring shape. Activists spot a chemtrail as plane goes past, reaches for the vinegar, and when they check again 20 minutes later, hey presto they have cured the sky. Or… the cloud dissipated, as clouds eventually do.
Chemtrail conspiracies
Chemtrail fears are nothing new, of course. In the December 2014 episode of Be Reasonable I interviewed Harry Rhodes from Chemtrails Projects UK, whose fear at the time was that the UK government was spraying us with chemicals that would give us Alzheimer’s and shorten our lifespan. I pointed out that spraying the whole country means also spraying the government and their friends and families, but he explained that the people in charge had access to the cure. I asked him who in the government at the time knew about it, and he told me that Prime Minister David Cameron knew about it, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown knew about it and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was also in on it. Which I pointed out was a bit short sighted for Nick Clegg, given that he’d be out on his ear once the coalition crumbled, and so it proved.
But we can look back even earlier than that. One good way to see what people associated with a conspiracy theory over time is to see what people have asked about using the Freedom of Information laws. By going to the website What Do They Know, which logs FOI requests and their responses, I found one question posed to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2008:
For sometime now I, and many others, have observed trails left by low-ish flying aircraft. These trails do not disperse rapidly as do those ice-crystal vapour trails from high-flying jets.
Will you please be so kind as to tell me:
1) The chemical composition of these slowly-dispersing trails. 2) Who authorises them. 3) What know effects they may have on the population of the United Kingdom.
To which came a polite response: “Thank you for your email. Unfortunately Defra does not hold this information. We believe it is an issue for the Department for Transport.” The inquisitive correspondent, however, was not to be put off by a simple ‘this is nothing to do with us’:
Are you suggesting that the environment is not affected? That whatever is in these trails does not fall to the ground and enter the food/water chains?…
[I] would still like to know your reasoning as to how something man-made, that is falling from the sky, has been given the all-clear as far as earthbound living organism is concerned. (As far as the environment is concerned, if you wish to put it like that).
Is the air we breathe being continually monitored? If so, what are the results? Do the air, water, and food supplies contain any unusual substances, referenced back (say) to 30 years ago.
Again, DEFRA responded to explain that the request was a matter for the Department for Transport, but did confirm that air quality is continually monitored and assessed throughout the UK in accordance with EU air quality legislation. Unsurprisingly, this still wasn’t sufficiently reassuring:
Dear Defra UnHelp Line,
Thank you very much for your stone-walling, and attempts to divert this FoI request.
However I have (in the meanwhile) had the good fortune to be told, via a friend, to check up on “Chemtrails”. When I did that I saw many, many pictures, from all over the world, looking exactly like the sky markings I tried to describe.
And, guess what! The answers to my questions are already known!
These ‘trails’ contain such substances as barium (radio-active? Barium Meal given to X-Ray patients?), and aluminium.
I’m breathing, eating, and drinking barium & aluminium? And the Department of the Environment doesn’t mind? This is within ‘EU guidelines’?
Well, I certainly mind, even if you & the EU don’t.
But then apparently, it gets worse. This chemtrail soup also contains nano-technology-sized pathogens … and that these can accumulate, and link together to destroy the electro-chemical balance of any living creature.
Or, to put it another way “they are *very* not nice at all”…
Or, to put this another way “The EU Guidelines are obviously a very sick joke, devised by some very sick people”
Eventually, the Department for Transport does respond, explaining that the trails in the sky are ice particles and water vapour, and that the planes are commercial flights, and that there is no scientific evidence for any health concerns from contrails, though there is exploration as to their contribution to climate change. Which is all very reasonable and patiently explained… and inevitably ignored:
Than you for the documentation on Contrails, which is totally irrelevant because my question was about CHEMTRAILS … which have been analysed to contain barium and aluminium, etc, and also some for of nano-particles which (possibly) create Morgellon’s disease.
I am not in the slightest bit interested in Contrails left by high-flying aircraft … even where these ice crystals may contain a small amount of unburned kerosene (paraffin).
The ‘unusual markings’ of this FoI request relate to CHEMTRAILS (Google it!) left by LOW-FLYING aircraft, in various shapes … such as “V”s and “X”s, parallel lines, etc. Sometimes these cover the entire sky as they spread out.
According to independent Analysts these CHEMTRAILS comprise such substances as barium (which is, of course, radio-active), aluminium, and other materials. There is good information on the Internet to state that these CHEMTRAILS also contain nano-particles (Google it!) which cause Morgellon’s Disease (Google it!).
And so it goes on. That’s just the oldest FOI trail I could find on the website, but it’s by no means the only one. In 2009, John FOI’d the Ministry of Defence over “the chemical spraying of the public”. In 2011, “Freeman Kev” – who signed off his FOI “Kevin, as commonly called” – asked the Department for Transport:
“about the high altitude spraying which has been going on overhead in Britain, and other countries for some years now. I am NOT referring to contrails, please do not make the mistake of referring to any ‘ice crystals forming around unburned jet fuel’ or other such reference to contrails, which i am quite aware of and i understand just fine.”
The FOI requests to public bodies have continued, undeterred by factual information, for almost 20 years. One of the most recent was a Feb 2025 request from “John”, which included no fewer than eighteen exclamation marks, plus a bitchute video, and the final question “Don’t you care about humanities future do you have kids?” – which, in fairness, is somewhat beyond the scope of the Met Office.
Relatively harmless?
I suspect the chemtrail conspiracy theorists, and their vinegar-simmerer offshoots, are relatively harmless, posing no threat other than to the productivity of governmental Freedom of Information departments. However, the same could be said of the flat-earth movement, yet they undoubtedly kept the paranoiac fires burning and the conspiracy cauldrons bubbling, ready for a bigger crisis to exploit their fears and mobilise them into Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers.
It feels like there is a rise in geoengineering chemtrail conspiracy theories of late, particularly as the Covid ‘forever lockdowns’ didn’t happen, the 5G towers were forgotten about, and the vaccine didn’t kill us all.
This kind of rhetoric and fear can have serious effects. Recently, eight states in the US introduced legislation to outlaw chemtrails. Florida and Tennessee legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana ordered the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard. Despite chemtrails not existing. It’s unclear how much those legislators believe in the cause, and how much they just want to pander to the conspiracist base that got their team elected, while tainting by association any efforts to mitigate climate change that might be passably mischaracterised as chemtrail geoengineering.
Thankfully, we’re not seeing that in the UK just yet, but I do know there are people talking to their local MPs about it, at a time when those MPs have lots of more-pressing matters to attend to. I hope it stays that way, and the most we have to fear from these chemtrail cloudbusters is the whiff of warm vinegar on a cloudy afternoon.
When I was a wet-lab scientist, I always worked out molarity by hand. I didn’t use a molarity calculator online to make up my solutions, I went to the bottle, checked the molecular weight and calculated how to make up a solution at the molarity I wanted.
I did this because I’m not great at maths. I find when people ask me maths questions I freeze, panic, and fail to do even simple calculations. Once someone asked me how to multiply something by 10 but their phrasing caught me off guard, and in my panic I forgot that you could just add a zero to the end.
It’s easy, when something scares us, to avoid it entirely. But I knew doing so would only make it harder when I was caught in a situation where I had to calculate molarity by myself, and I’d be embarrassed that I couldn’t do it. So, I forced myself to do the calculation by hand every time I was making up solutions, so I could practise that skill and reinforce my ability. No shortcuts.
This is a useful approach for other weaknesses, too. I tend to think the brain is a muscle, and we need to work it to train the thoughts that are most healthy or helpful for us. When we first engage with skepticism, we can be quick to judge those who believe unusual things and we can reinforce the negative views. Many of us seek out ways to argue with people we disagree with – the “someone is wrong on the internet” idea – focusing entirely on the ways in which we believe we are right and the person we’re interacting with is wrong. We might even assume that they’re stupid, or that we’re just smarter than them. By challenging ourselves and practising compassion for people, we train the part of our brain that sees the humanity in the people we encounter, recognise our similarities and we become better at getting there naturally. We learn how to see the reasons that people believe unusual things and therefore get better at having nuanced discussions. We might even be better able to truly change someone’s mind by encouraging the negative thoughts to be quieter, and the positive ones to be louder. It’s easier to change someone’s mind if you’re working from a position of respect and shared experience.
Reinforcing the part of our brain that sees the humanity in the people we engage with is not just ideology. We know that while “the slippery slope” can be a fallacy, the reinforcement of some ideas can lead us down a path to significant and even dangerous change. Some call it boiling frog syndrome, or the Overton window, or creeping normality or gradualism – however we term it, it can lead us to be less resistant to a negative change if that change comes gradually over time, with several steps of adjusting to the ideas associated with that change along the way.
None of these ideas are particularly new, but they illustrate a concept that I think is important: self-talk. What happens when we turn these principles of slippery slopes and boiled frogs and creeping normality inwards, and target them at our brains?
Self-talk isn’t a new idea, researchers believe it was first discussed by Aristotle in Ancient Greece. It comes up all the time when we have discussions about our inner monologues, and how we think, and whether that process is different to others’. I first came across the idea of self-talk when I went to a GP to discuss my depression, which was at its worst at the end of my PhD. The doctor I saw was compassionate and talked to me about evidence. He told me that treatment for depression was patchy – that antidepressants work, but that they only worked in a percentage of people. He also told me that therapy or counselling worked, but it was slower, and again not for everyone. He was realistic with me – there are options, but it’s not straightforward.
He also touched on the concept of self-talk. He said there’s evidence that how we talk to ourselves about ourselves can influence how we feel about ourselves on a larger scale, and he gave me examples that, in the moment, helped me recognise that my self-talk patterns had changed; that the change in how I talk to myself is probably a symptom of the depression. He was offering a tool that I could implement while waiting for other things to help. At the time, it seemed like woo, but harmless woo – and crucially, because he’d talked about the evidence for and against other things, and been realistic with me, I didn’t just dismiss the idea.
Self-talk is simply how we talk to ourselves. It can be those completely organic and spontaneous thoughts we have that are barely even articulated, and sometimes entirely unconscious but bubbling under the surface. They often relate to our emotions in the moment, and might be things like “that’s a pretty flower”. Researchers call this spontaneous organic self-talk. But there’s also more to it than that. Self-talk can be more intentional, to help us engage with a process. That might be thinking to yourself, “I need to take the cat to the vet this afternoon”.
Researchers call this type of self-talk ‘goal-directed self-talk’. Some researchers believe that the interplay between goal-directed and spontaneous self-talk is a crucial part of our ability to self-monitor, and ultimately to self-regulate. It allows us to identify what we’re feeling and how it fits into the wider world, and therefore process our emotions. At its best, it can help us manage our emotions to better thrive.
This might sound wishy washy and, to some degree, it is. Self-talk is, understandably, incredibly difficult to research. It’s internal, private, and often something we engage with entirely unconsciously. But it can still have beneficial applications. Say you’ve got depression or anxiety. That’s the environment your brain lives in, and your depression constantly tells you you’re lazy, you’re a bad person, you’re a failure, everyone else is better than you. As a result, your spontaneous self-talk is going to start to change. Now, when you make a silly mistake, your gut reaction will be “ugh, what a terrible person I am for making that mistake”.
Now, every mistake becomes evidence that you’re a bad person, and it becomes this vicious cycle. You make more mistakes because you’re annoyed with yourself, you become more annoyed with yourself because you made a mistake. But you can’t help it, because you’re depressed, and it is shaping your thinking.
This is where researchers think we might be able to train our thinking and practice the self-talk skill to improve things.
There are self-talk interventions that some people believe can help with these negative effects, such as strategic self-talk and educational self-talk. Strategic self-talk is like practicing a conversation before you have it, and preparing yourself some responses to cues. That could be “if I make X mistake, I will do Y”. You could argue this is just learning from errors – like when I poured fat down my kitchen sink and clogged the P-trap, at least I learned what a P-trap was, and how to disconnect it from my sink to clear it.
Self-talk can also be about reinforcing the routes that help make those thoughts the default or spontaneous response, or at least options that come to you more naturally. These concepts are often used in sports psychology – so the strategic self-talk could be: “when the ball reaches this corner, I run to my mark”.
For me, when I’m sick and have to take time off work, it can be easy to think “I should be able to work through this, why am I such a failure?”; instead, I say to myself “I’m sick, I make mistakes when I’m sick, and it takes me longer to recover when I push through – taking a rest is good for my health and my work”. That wasn’t my natural response, it’s not anyone’s natural response. But it is a response I have worked on, and learnt – one I’ve had to work on and learn, because I’m disabled, and pushing through in the past has led to breakdowns which will ultimately lead to an inability to work at all if I’m not careful.
Some people will talk about this as talking to yourself as you would talk to a friend. Others will talk about manifesting or setting intention or using mantras. It’s woo, but maybe it is woo influenced by some nuggets of real psychology. For me, it’s just pragmatism: I’ve wasted enough time in my life beating myself up because I was sick or depressed or anxious, and I don’t need to add to that.
The other intervention is educational self-talk. This is about learning how to notice and recognise your spontaneous self-talk and practicing how to use goal-directed self-talk to make a positive difference in your thought-processes. Say tomorrow you sleep through your alarm, and you think to yourself: “I’m such a failure, why did I oversleep?”. The key is to then allow yourself to think: “Wait, that’s negative spontaneous self-talk, I wonder why I had such a strong reaction to that”. If you then think to yourself, “Tonight, I’m going to change my alarm tone to something that is a bit louder, so I don’t sleep through my alarm again,” then you’ve used that educational self-talk intervention to shift your goal-directed self-talk and modify your behaviour. Hopefully you’ll also have seen that “I’m such a failure” doesn’t lead to a solution, but “That’s interesting, I wonder why I slept through my alarm?” could.
That’s the pragmatic version – educational self-talk can, of course, be taken negatively, and your “I’m such a failure, why did I oversleep” could easily become, ”Oh, that’s negative self-talk – I’m such a failure why am I so mean to myself?”
So is this all really science?
Well, sort of. While self-talk has been studied for a long time, it is incredibly difficult to study accurately, and there is nowhere near enough research into whether the interventions work. Does that mean we should dismiss it as a tool until we have more evidence? I don’t think so.
Looking back to my appointment with a doctor about my depression, when he mentioned self-talk – that was eight years ago. I’ve spent eight years slowly reflecting on and incorporating ideas around self-talk. Sometimes this has been completely unconscious, but I’ve made other conscious changes in my life, too – I had therapy, I take antidepressants, I have processed the things that were integral in my depression, I have been diagnosed autistic and come to terms with the likelihood that I have ADHD. I have grown a lot in these eight years. But I have also quietly changed the way I talk to myself – and I notice it all the time, when people are processing their own feelings, when they express mean things about themselves, or tell me I’m kind to myself.
I sometimes say I can’t tell if walking is good for my mental health or not, because when my mental health is poor, I look at my pedometer stats and see that I didn’t do many steps in the past week. There’s clearly a link there, but it could be that I walk less when I’m sad, or it could just as easily be that I get sad when I walk less. Equally, it could be that my mental health is better, so my self-talk is more positive. Or, it could be that my self-talk has become more positive and that’s helped my mental health. The truth is, it’s probably both.
Self-talk is probably a helpful tool for a lot of people when used alongside other tools. But the research could take a long time to catch up, because this stuff is hard to research. So, in the meantime, maybe try a little bit to be kinder to yourself. It might make you a better skeptic.
The next paragraph is both an exercise in debunking and an exercise in producing good academic prose. One-sentence paragraphs of under 30 words, the norm in such exploits as tabloid journalism, are the antithesis of academic work. Those producing academic prose should feel free to let their paragraphs get long: expressing a complex idea can require lengthy sentences, and articulating the steps in logic that make up an overall point requires one to assemble multiple sentences into the ‘unit of sense’ that is a paragraph. If the overall point and its constituent steps in logic are complex, a paragraph can exceed 500 words and still do its job properly, and if that job is a complex one, that paragraph should be long; a norm in my own writing is to try to limit my paragraphs to about 700-800 words, but longer paragraphs are sometimes necessary. Skill is needed to get this right, though: doing a complex point justice requires good implicit sign-posting in the form of, for example, the humble adverbs ‘nonetheless’ and ‘however’, or well-judged colons and semi-colons, and the longer one’s paragraph, the clearer such sign-posts must be, to keep one’s weary reader to the path of one’s logic. To foster this skill (amongst others) in undergraduate students, in 2023 I designed an assessment which asked students to debunk a claim of their choosing in just one paragraph, limited to 800 words (with no minimum word-count). My colleagues and I applied this word limit only to manage the workload of the markers, and I fought for the limit to be this high, even though it struck some of my colleagues as much too high, and for several reasons: to do well at the debunking aspect of the assessment, students would have to work hard to fit their ideas into 800 words, which required them to practise re-drafting their work for brevity, while prohibiting the students from breaking their work into multiple paragraphs also required them to at least practise the skill of maintaining a clear line of logic across something like 10-20 sentences using implicit signposting alone. Such constraints stimulate creativity. I did not leave these students without help, though: at the beginning of the module, when I issued the instructions for the assessment, I also gave the students an example of a submission that would score a mark of over 90 according to our criteria of assessment (i.e. exceptional in all regards and of publishable quality with no more than minor revisions). I spent about a week writing that exemplary submission myself, determined to inspire the students, even if none of them would even achieve a mark above 70 (i.e. first class) for this first-year, first-semester, mid-module assessment, because all of them had the potential to achieve first-class marks before the end of their degree, and to achieve that, they would have to start practising early. I am quite proud of it. Here it is, comprising 799 words in 19 sentences. Spot the signposts.
In his popular-history work Sapiens (2011), Yuval Harari argues that only humans are capable of imagining things that do not exist, offering as ‘evidence’ at one point the assertion that “[y]ou could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven” (p27). In popular use the term ‘monkey’ means ‘all simians except apes’, and so excludes humans’ closest cousins, but more recently Harari has argued more ambitiously: in a September 2014 lecture at the Royal Society of Arts, for example, Harari claimed that “[y]ou can never convince a chimpanzee to do something, say to give you a banana, by promising that chimpanzee that “after you die, you know what happens, you will go to chimpanzee heaven, and there you will receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds”; no chimpanzee will ever be convinced by such a story to do anything” (2014, 11.51-12.09). That is, for Harari, even our closest non-human cousins are incapable of imagining an afterlife; this lecture included many such assertions of radical human/chimpanzee difference. This claim, however, has not been demonstrated. While no-one has yet shown the idea that chimpanzees cannot imagine an afterlife to be wrong, no-one has yet demonstrated it to be right, either. “Humans often look at death as a continuation of life”, primatologist Frans de Waal remarked in 2013, admitting that “[t]here is no indication that any other animal does so” (2013, p196), but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the trend of our knowledge about human/chimpanzee difference predicts that we will find that Harari is actually wrong: de Waal spends much of his 2013 book listing various assertions of absolute differences between humans and chimpanzees that have arisen during the past century but which primatologists have since debunked, admitting that while “humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, […] it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade” (p16). For example, primatology researchers have shown that chimpanzees collect resources to use elsewhere as tools, can throw parabolically and can recognise faces, all previously thought to be unique to humans (de Waal, 2013, p57, p14-15). We also have no reason to think that chimpanzees lack any human brain functions: as de Waal points out, human brains, though larger than chimpanzee brains, have no anatomical components that chimpanzee brains do not have (2013, p16). Indeed, evidence already exists to suggest that Harari’s claim is wrong: research on chimpanzees implies that they are capable of some basic aspects of the supernatural thinking observed in humans. For example, we have known for roughly 50 years that chimpanzees often react to extreme weather phenomena and waterfalls with threat displays – that is, as if these phenomena are alive and can feel fear (e.g. van Lawick Goodall, 1975, p163-4; de Waal, 2013, p195-6). This implies the presence of the cognitive tendency that psychologists call ‘hyperactive agency detection’, a tendency that widely prompts humans to imagine gods behind natural phenomena and the entire universe (discussed in depth in, for example, Guthrie, 1993, p178-194 and Barrett, 2000, p31-2). Even in 1980, cognitive psychologist Stewart Guthrie wrote of chimpanzee threat displays that “since they [chimpanzees] seem similarly [to humans] to attribute to phenomena a higher level of organization than these really possess, I suggest that their situation is closely analogous to that of religious people” (p193). Observations even hint at the specific category of supernatural thinking that is imagining an afterlife: chimpanzees show a degree of anxiety at the mortality of others that suggests they can imagine their own mortality (de Waal, 2013, p193-6), which involves the rudiments needed to imagine an afterlife, if the idea of an afterlife is defined very simply as an attempt to reconcile a) an awareness of one’s mortality with b) one’s own inability to imagine the experience of being dead (and so not experiencing anything). Humans are relatively bad at identifying what chimpanzees are thinking, because the fact that one trait does seem to be unique to humans (grammatical communication) makes us incapable of directly asking. But, under the sway of human exceptionalism, Harari has mistakenly classed the resulting relative lack of human knowledge about chimpanzee psychology as evidence of a lack amongst chimpanzees. Indeed, what even is the capacity to imagine things that do not exist? Is such a capacity qualitatively different from the capacity to imagine things that do exist? Both are just versions of the same capacity to extrapolate, from one’s observations, an idea of what is not currently observable in one’s immediate surroundings, and evidence that chimpanzees can do that is abundant. If we could communicate the ‘banana-heaven reward’ promise to a chimpanzee, we have no reason to think the chimpanzee would be unable to understand it.
References
Barrett, Justin L. (2000) ‘Exploring the natural foundations of religion’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 4(1), p29-33.
de Waal, Frans (2013) The Bonobo and the Atheist. London: W.W. Norton.
Guthrie, Stewart E. (1980) ‘A Cognitive Theory of Religion.’ Current Anthropology, 21(2, April), p181-203.
Guthrie, Stewart E. (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harari, Yuval N. (2011) Sapiens. London: Vintage.
Harari, Yuval N. (2014) A Brief History of Humankind [Lecture]. Royal Society of Arts, Royal Society House, London. 9 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vllgib842g
van Lawick Goodall, Jane (1975) ‘The chimpanzee’, in Vanne Goodall (ed.) The quest for man. New York: Praeger, p131-70.
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Brazilian academia has shown itself to be a receptive home for reiki, a pseudoscientific doctrine that presupposes the existence of a universal reservoir of “vital energy” that can be accessed by trained therapists. This energy, transmitted through the laying on of hands, is said to be capable of curing illnesses, reducing stress and increasing well-being. On the weekend of 21 and 22 September, the São Paulo State University (Unesp) not only hosted, but officially sponsored the First Brazilian Reiki Congress.
The conference is just the latest step in a climb that includes a study on “reiki via cell phone” conducted under the auspices of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, and more than a dozen postgraduate works – including master’s dissertations and doctoral theses – defended at public universities, such as USP, Unesp and Unifesp. All of them were completed in this century – the most recent being a doctorate on the effect of therapy on the anxiety levels of pregnant women, defended in 2024.
The idea of “vital energy” has no scientific basis – in fact, renowned physicists such as Sean Carroll and the late Victor Stenger point out that the existence of a force in nature capable of affecting objects on the scale of the human body, but which has not yet been detected by scientific instruments, is virtually inconceivable.
Despite this, reiki is not only integrated into the Unified Health System (SUS) as one of the 29 integrative and complementary practices authorised by the Ministry of Health, but has also found shelter within public education and research institutions.
The trend, in fact, seems to be accelerating: a search in the USP digital library for theses and dissertations with “reiki” in the synopsis or among the keywords shows one work before 2010, two between 2011 and 2020 and four since 2021.
Interestingly, the infamous 2003 master’s dissertation, which used kitchen gloves as a “placebo” to test the effect of the technique on the immune system of mice, does not appear in this search, because it is careful not to highlight the word “reiki”. The progress, therefore, seems to have been not only quantitative, but also cultural: from 2003 onwards, the university of reiki has stopped being ashamed to say its name. One could suggest the hypothesis that the normalisation was accelerated by the integration of the practice into the SUS, in 2017.
Internal policy
In the 1980s, a group of European sociologists launched what became known as the “strong program of the sociology of science.” This “program” aimed to explain discoveries, advances, and the formation of scientific consensus in strictly social terms — for example, the universal acceptance of the idea of the existence of the electron would be better explained as the result of political machinations and power plays within university physics laboratories and departments than as the fruit of rational analysis of experimental results.
The strong programme led to postmodernism, which in turn became a subsidiary line of global warming denialism, and as a result ended up losing much of its charm in academia, although some surfers of the recent “decolonial” wave have been showing signs that they would like to rescue it.
But, more than being politically inconvenient, the programme died because it proved unfeasible: it is impossible to explain the construction of the natural sciences without recognising that, at an essential level, their practitioners are discovering and describing facts that exist independently of the subjectivity and intentions of scientists: solid things that are “out there.”
In a footnote to his book Progress and Its Problems, philosopher Larry Laudan suggests, perhaps with a touch of malice, that sociologists initially accepted the idea that the content of the natural sciences was defined by departmental political pettiness because that is how the content of much of the sociology of science is, in fact, defined. “The general thesis of the sociology of knowledge … was based on the hope that all other forms of knowledge were as subjective as sociology clearly was,” he writes.
Ironies aside, however, in 2011 philosophers Maarten Boudry and Filip Buekens published an article in the journal Theoria showing that the model proposed in the “strong program” correctly describes at least one type of academic activity: that associated with psychoanalysis. It is not very difficult to generalise the diagnosis to other pseudosciences.
When doctrines without a basis in fact take root in academia, it is not because of scientific merit – because they objectively describe the world “out there” – but because someone skilfully conducted political manoeuvres; and the “knowledge” generated by these disciplines does not come from the world either, it is constructed from the clash of egos – not from the clash between hypothesis and reality.
The advancement of reiki needs to be understood (and confronted) in this light, before it takes root (as homeopathy did over more than a century) or causes greater embarrassment, such as the late Center for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena (NEFP) at UnB, established in 1989 and closed this century after a scandal involving a psychic and a murder. Pseudoscience can only occupy prestigious spaces because it relies on the complacency and complicity – through convenience or omission – of those who are responsible for safeguarding the good name of educational and research institutions.
History
Reiki originated as a form of religious healing in the 1920s in Japan, after master Mikao Usui claimed to have received a revelation that made him feel one with “the energy and consciousness of the Universe.” The enlightenment was said to have been the result of a 21-day fast.
The manual prepared by Usui states that “any part of a practitioner’s body can radiate light and energy, particularly the eyes, mouth and hands,” and that “toothache, colic, stomach ache, headache, breast tumours, wounds, cuts, burns and other swellings and pains can be quickly relieved and disappear.” The version of reiki that has become popular in the West is a largely commercial practice, established through a franchise system created by Japanese immigrants in Hawaii in the 1970s.
Today, there are many different reiki lineages, some of which incorporate elements of other esoteric doctrines, alternative therapies, and spiritual traditions; some have even become structured businesses with registered trademarks (Mai Reiki, Karuna Reiki, Real Reiki, Holy Fire Reiki). Some of these lineages have established commercial connections with broader sectors of the health and wellness industry, such as manufacturers of vitamin and dietary supplements, as well as selling courses and training.
The intangible and invisible energy of the spirit of the Universe flows from therapist to patient, from teacher to student, but the solid and visible money always goes in the opposite direction.
Since 2012, The Skeptic has had the pleasure of awarding the Ockham Awards – our annual awards celebrating the very best work from within the skeptical community. The awards were founded because we wanted to draw attention to those people who work hard to get a great message out. The Ockhams recognise the effort and time that have gone into the community’s favourite campaigns, activism, blogs, podcasts, and outstanding contributors to the skeptical cause.
Last year’s Ockham winner was Dr Flint Dibble, for his four-hour appearance on the Joe Rogan show debunking the ahistorical theories of writer and pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock. Dr Dibble went into the belly of the beast, and gave a calm, well-reasoned and enormously patient account of himself and of the evidence, showing that skepticism can be brought to even the most theoretically hostile of audiences, if presented thoughtfully and skillfully.
While we recognise the best in skepticism, our awards are also an opportunity to highlight the danger posed by promoters of pseudoscience with our Rusty Razor award. The Rusty Razor is designed to spotlight individuals or organisations who have been prominent promoters of unscientific ideas within the last year.
Last year’s Rusty Razor went to Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter saw an explosion of misinformation, scams, inauthentic accounts and hate speech. Meanwhile, Musk personally intervened to restore the accounts of hundreds of conspiracy theorists, including Sandy Hook ‘truther’ Alex Jones, misogynist and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, and far-right leader and anti-vaccine conspiracist Tommy Robinson – the latter of whom Musk cited and retweeted on multiple occasions.
Previous Rusty Razor winners have included Dr Aseem Malhotra for his influential scaremongering about the alleged dangers of the COVID-19 vaccine, the Global Warming Policy Foundation for their promotion of climate change denialism, Dr Mike Yeadon for his anti-vaccination scaremongering, Dr Didier Raoult for his promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, Andrew Wakefield for his ongoing promotion of anti-vaxx misinformation, and Gwyneth Paltrow for her pseudoscience-peddling wellness empire, Goop.
One of the most important elements of our awards are that the nominations come from you – the skeptical community. It is that time again, we ask you to tell us who you think deserves to receive the Skeptic of the Year award, and who deserves to receive the Rusty Razor.
There is a broadly accepted narrative that posits that the ‘placebo effect’, the apparent change in the condition of a patient following an inert intervention, demonstrates the amazing power the mind has over the body. Through some psycho-biological alchemy, convincing a patient they have taken a drug will cause them to experience the effects of that drug, even if all we really gave them was a fake pill.
Proponents of this narrative are often light on detail for how this might actually work, invoking instead the wishy-washy sounding ‘mind-body healing process’, or something similar. On rare occasions they might invoke endorphins or dopamine but, while these chemicals can be produced in response to psychological changes, they have a limited range of effects.
An alternative interpretation of the same observations says that placebo effects are mostly made up of statistical effects and biased reporting. Convince a patient they have taken a drug, and they tell you they are experiencing the effects of that drug, which is not the same thing as actually experiencing it. What happened and what the patient says happened are obviously related, but patient reports are also influenced by the biases and opinions of the clinician and the patient themselves.
Psychological factors like the Subject Expectancy Effect can mean that patients report what they think should be happening, rather than what is happening. Demand Characteristics can mean that patients report what they think their doctor wants to hear. Even simple politeness can result in misleading answers coming from otherwise well-intentioned patients, who don’t want to upset or disappoint the researchers.
Beyond this, we can also recognise that some fraction of patients will see an improvement anyway, no matter what you do. Many medical conditions will run their course and spontaneously resolve. Other conditions wax and wane, and patients who join a trial when their symptoms are at their worst will naturally improve regardless of the intervention.
One researcher even contacted The Skeptic to highlight cases where doctors have exaggerated the severity of their patient’s condition to ensure they meet the eligibility criteria of a trial. Which means those patients appear to make an immediate and miraculous improvement, regardless of whether they get real medicine or a sham control.
‘The powerful placebo’ also gives alternative medicines and supplements a convenient justification when evidence for their efficacy is limited. Image by AVAKA photo from Pixabay
If we view the placebo effect as the bucket into which we toss our biases and other contextual effects, there is no need to invoke a mysterious mind-body healing process, or decree that the placebo effect is one of the strongest medical responses there is.
Over the past decade or so, numerous media reports have outlined how the placebo effect is somehow gettingmorepowerful. For example, the gap between the effectiveness of painkillers and placebos in clinical trials has narrowed significantly since the 1990s. In one report from 2015, a research team led by Alexander Tuttle found that the ‘treatment advantage’ (the improvement from the active treatment over and above the placebo group) had diminished from 27% in 1996, to just 9% by 2013. This reduction was driven by an increase in the placebo response; as the mysterious placebo effect grows in strength, drugs are struggling to compete.
Under the standard mind-over-matter narrative, this is a strange and mysterious thing. Why should placebos work better today than they did 20 years ago? Is it because we have greater faith in doctors and medical science? Is it because of television advertising, promoting how powerful and effective drugs are? Somehow, this makes dummy pills more effective painkillers than they used to be?
Perhaps a more parsimonious explanation is this: placebo responses have not increased because of any therapeutic effect, but because trials have become better at isolating treatment effects from noise. As methodological standards improve, non-specific effects that previously leaked into the treatment arm are more accurately contained within the control group.
Or to put it another way, the treatment advantage was always 9% and when we measured it at 27% in the past we were in error. Our trials at time were not sufficiently well designed or conducted to offer accurate results.
These competing interpretations are not merely academic, since each generates distinct empirical predictions. If placebo effects were genuinely becoming more powerful, we would expect to see gains not only in control groups but also in groups receiving the active treatment. Since any drug effect adds to the placebo effect, both arms should benefit from a growing placebo response. The rising tide lifts all boats, as it were.
“The rising tide lifts all boats” – everyone and every treatment should be affected if the placebo effect were strengthening. Image by George Hodan, via publicdomainpictures.net
However, if placebo responses are increasing due to improved trial methodology, the overall effect would remain unchanged and the gap between treatment and placebo would narrow. Non-specific effects that had previously inflated the apparent treatment effect are now correctly controlled for.
When researchers have examined how placebo and treatment responses have changed over time, the results align better with this second explanation. Tuttle analysed US trials of neuropathic pain and found that, while placebo responses increased, outcomes in active treatment arms did not. A similar pattern emerged in antidepressant trials. These findings are difficult to reconcile with the idea of an increasingly powerful placebo effect.
The geographic distribution of this effect provides further evidence. Tuttle reported that the increased placebo response is most pronounced in trials conducted in the United States, while trials elsewhere have shown no comparable trend. Crucially, these US-based trials also tend to have longer durations and larger sample sizes, features associated with greater methodological rigour.
Proponents of the powerful placebo hypothesis have attributed the US-specific increase to cultural factors, such as direct-to-consumer drug advertising. But this explanation falls apart when we consider that New Zealand (the only other country permitting such advertising) has not reported similar increases in placebo responses.
What’s the harm?
Modern trials are longer, larger, better blinded, and more rigorously monitored than their predecessors. They employ more sophisticated randomisation techniques, standardised outcome measures, and stricter protocols for handling dropouts and protocol violations. These improvements serve to isolate the specific effects of interventions from the many confounding factors that can masquerade as treatment benefits.
When the gap between treatment and control narrows in modern trials, the correct interpretation is not that placebos have grown stronger, but that we have grown better at distinguishing signal from noise.
The misinterpretation of rising placebo responses as evidence of therapeutic potential carries real risks. Some trial sponsors have begun relocating studies to regions where placebo responses tend to be lower. Ostensibly this is for economic reasons, but it also serves to effectively avoid the methodological rigour that higher placebo responses represent.
This trend should be deeply troubling. We do not obtain better evidence by weakening our controls to maximise the chance of a statistically significant result. Rather than celebrating improved methodology that better isolates true treatment effects, the pharmaceutical industry risks undermining the very advances that make modern trials more reliable than their predecessors.
