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Reactive Oxygen Species are more than just the ‘bad guys’ of the body

Zoё Chernova
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Reactive Oxygen Species are more than just the ‘bad guys’ of the body

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are not completely “neutralised” oxygen molecules: they still have a “hole” where the electron should be, so they are extremely reactive – to fill this hole. They are often thought about as molecules that oxidise membranes and proteins, and cause ageing. But according to the latest data, ROS are more than just a horror story.

Molecules that oxidise are required in the body to burn glucose, and to form ATP, but it’s impossible to directly turn glucose into ATP, so a lot of processes occur during its breakdown. To understand the value of ROS, we need to understand a bit about these processes. These processes result in the formation of carbon dioxide, as well as special molecules, electron carriers. ATP is synthesised on the mitochondrial membrane in a system called the electron transport chain (ETC).

The ETC is quite complex, but at the same time incredibly logical and beautiful: an aqueduct of several protein complexes is built inside the double membrane of mitochondria. These proteins accept an electron from a carrier molecule and then throw it from one complex to another, like children throwing a ball to each other. Along with the electron transfer, protons are pumped into the double membrane, a strong difference in their concentration on different sides of the membrane – the membrane potential – is formed. At the end of the ETC is an ATP synthase, through which protons are driven to set this machine in motion. But where to put the electrons also traveling along the ETC? This is where oxygen comes in: it accepts them and is reduced to water.

It is the mitochondria, or rather the electron transport chain, that are responsible for the majority of ROS produced. Normally, 90% of the oxygen is reduced to water. But sometimes something goes wrong, and the oxygen is not completely reduced – and the molecule ends up with one (an unstable superoxide radical is formed), two (then peroxide is formed), or three additional electrons (a rarer situation of peroxide reduction to a hydroxyl radical) instead of the four that would be needed to produce water.

Superoxide has a very short lifespan and is not very dangerous. Concentrated peroxide is quite toxic; it is a good oxidiser which means it’s very reactive. Reactivity can cause damage in the cell. It is peroxide that is most often found in the body of mammals due to its stability and long lifespan. Normally, peroxide is constantly present in the cell and, to maintain this level, the coordinated work of both the producing and utilising systems is needed. Peroxide is also able to travel significant distances. Finally, peroxide can take another electron, and then the most toxic compound among the active brethren is formed – the hydroxyl radical. It also lives for a very short time, but is very reactive.

Dangerous or… ?

The free radical theory appeared in the 1960s and has only been developing since then. ROS oxidise (react with) proteins, lipids, and membranes. Errors accumulate in DNA… The consequence of excessive formation of ROS in the cell is indeed oxidative stress. ROS also participate in lipid peroxidation and form hydroperoxides: when they disintegrate, they lead to the emergence of toxic secondary oxidation products.

Peroxide causes oxidation of sulphur-containing groups in the active centres of proteins. It is also associated with the development of oxidative stress and apoptosis (controlled cell death). Oxidative stress in humans is associated with a huge list of various diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis. Of course, oxidative stress is also associated with ageing. Oxidative stress also occurs during brain damage.

At the same time, several independent antioxidant systems coexist in eukaryotic cells. Enzymatic systems include proteins that directly destroy ROS: for example, Mn-containing superoxide dismutase converts two molecules of superoxide into peroxide and water. The peroxide is then decomposed by an enzyme, into water and oxygen. There are also assistant molecules that allow themselves to be oxidised in the name of saving more important structures. The most famous molecule is ascorbic acid. Other known antioxidants are carotenoids — the same pigments that give carrots their hue.

It is easy to think that the appearance of ROS in a cell is just an artifact, a random error. But what if ROS are needed for some reason? This idea is a bit unusual, but it seems to be true, and we need to stop demonising ROS. First of all, it is assumed that ROS can play the role of secondary messengers — they help to carry signals.

Superoxide anions can be used by cells of the immune system to protect against infections and tumours. The fact is that during phagocytosis by macrophages and neutrophils of the immune system, an oxidative explosion occurs: quite a lot of superoxide is formed, triggering oxidative stress in bacteria. Our immune system uses ROS as protection. In addition to its protective function, superoxide is necessary for the synthesis of some important substances, for example, prostaglandins which help with inflammation during injury.

Hydrogen peroxide is the most likely contender for the title of “necessary ROS”. Even the fact that it is formed in the body with enviable regularity hints at its “normality”. There are even specialised structures – microsomes and peroxisomes – in which peroxide forms, too, and oxidative stress occurs.

Peroxide, apparently, takes part in the signaling pathways of both animal and plant cells. For example, the production of pigment by young melanocytes is apparently completely regulated by the release of peroxide by mature cells. In plant cells, peroxide has a role in in the differentiation of xylem. Peroxide even helps tardigrades fall into their suspended animation state of cryptobiosis! Under stress conditions, the tardigrade actively produces ROS, which binds to sulphur-containing cysteine ​​and reversibly changes protein structures.

How can we prove whether a molecule is needed or not? One of the important features of any secondary messenger is the presence of specific targets. And peroxide has such. In particular, tyrosine phosphatases, enzymes that destroy phosphate groups associated with tyrosine residues, change their activity under the influence of peroxide. It oxidises the residues of the cysteine ​​in the active centre, and the proposed cascade has a rather complex regulation and many different participants.

ROS are also involved in much more subtle processes – for example, in the formation of memory. Neurons are connected to each other by axons and dendrites, along which they transmit nerve impulses. Memory, in essence, is certain neural connections, like a road map linking different cities together. And ROS, apparently, quite strongly influence the speed on these roads – how quickly the signal is transmitted.

In addition, peroxide is also involved in gene expression. ROS is able to activate the transcription factor NF-kB, which is necessary for the proper functioning of the immune system; without activation the factor cannot work!

But there is also something that does not quite fit into the theory of the need for ROS. First of all, we still do not understand how exactly their concentration is controlled. There are utilisation systems, but there are also systems that produce ROS randomly. If we assume that ROS are signaling molecules and regulatory cascades exist, then all stages of this process should be catalysed, as occurs in classical regulation. However, it is currently unknown whether there is a controlled source of ROS formation.

ROS are certainly extremely interesting: they cause oxidative stress, indirectly influencing the development of diseases, and, at the same time, are important for normal physiology – or at least so it seems to us for now. Their full role has yet to be discovered.

Reputation: why do we care so much about what other people think of us?

Daniel Aaron Levy
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Reputation: why do we care so much about what other people think of us?

Ever made an absolute arse of yourself?

It probably doesn’t feel great. We want other people to like us, to respect us, to think we’re cool or respect-worthy or whatever. We worry about how we came off in that conversation earlier – sometimes we cringe about it years later! We are, in short, very concerned with our reputation; what other people think of us. Why?

Over millennia, evolution has shaped our genes and our bodies to help us survive and pass on those genes to the next generation. It did the same thing with our minds: after all, these are what control said bodies and get them to do things. All the myriad phenomena that exist inside our heads: hunger, libido, emotions, morality, rationality, concern with our reputation – everything that collectively forms the human condition – these are all psychological tools that in some way benefit human survival. They became inherent in the human species because having them helped our species survive and reproduce. Each of these tools that makes up our survival toolkit can be thought of as evolutionary adaptations. They are all intangible – but very real – survival mechanisms that humanity evolved, and they allowed us to survive from 200,000 years ago to the present day.

But here’s the thing: that psychological toolkit evolved to help us survive in a very different environment than the one we live in now. We evolved as hunter-gatherers: evolution moulded our minds for that lifestyle. Humanity, using those pesky brains of ours, then began to create agriculture, states, industrialisation, and LinkedIn. An unimaginably vast suite of changes occurred in the past 12,000 years or so. Evolution hasn’t stopped during that time, but it can’t keep up with the pace of human-made change; we’re all running on software made for a completely different environment than we’re living in now. Things that we needed to survive – like having a good reputation – aren’t life or death anymore. But our brains, moulded by evolution for an environment we no longer live in, haven’t got the memo.

Four hunters roam the Namibian bush with the sun high and bright in the blue sky behind them, almost casting them in silhouette among the green and brown plants. Some trees with light foliage are dotted across the landscape.
Photographer David Barrie followed San Bushmen as they hunted for porcupine outside the village of Doupos, east of Tsumkwe, Nyae Nyae Conservancy, North East Namibia. Via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Humans are social animals, because a lone hunter-gatherer is leopard scran. Without modern technology, living in the wild you would need a group of people to stay alive. Evolution has shaped our minds so that we’re strongly motivated to find a group and be accepted within it. Your innate desire to fit in, to be accepted, to avoid rejection – that drive is an evolutionary adaptation. The drive for social acceptance – to not be a social outcast – still strongly motivates us because without that drive, your ancestors (and you) wouldn’t be here.

But we don’t just crave social acceptance – we also want respect, to matter, to not just be accepted but liked and valued, to keep up with the Joneses and, if we can, better them. This is the drive for social status. Because even if everyone in a group is accepted, some people will be thought of more highly than others. This differential in reputation matters for hunter-gatherers; individuals with higher status have better access to food, resources, and mates. All these things affect the chances of you surviving and passing on your genes, which is the only thing that natural selection ‘selects’ for. So it makes complete sense that we’ve evolved a psychological tool to make us care about social status. You want to be seen as cool, charming, clever – whatever characteristics the people you’re around associate with social status – because that drive is why your ancestors survived all those generations as hunter-gatherers.

But where it comes from is all well and good – how do we live with them?

The drives for social acceptance and status are inherent evolutionary adaptations infused into our consciousness – people who tell you they can erase them entirely are probably trying to sell you something. The drive to accumulate resources is also an evolutionary adaptation.

But you can change how these drives affect you, and you can change how unhappy they make you. And that, ultimately, is the main goal – there’s nothing inherently wrong with caring about how others perceive you; it can help make you be nice, be principled, and maintain friendships. The problem is when these drives affect how you feel.

Your brain has many different parts, all contributing to what you feel and think in different ways. You have a rational, conscious, ‘internal monologue’ part of your brain that you can use to talk down the emotional, automatic part of your brain where your instinctive drives spring from. You can’t prevent this latter part of your brain from generating feelings and making you aware of them. You need to focus on what you can control, which is your response to it.

You can then tell yourself that these feelings of caring are there for good reason and are OK to have, but you don’t need to let them motivate you. You can accept their presence in your head but not let them change your behaviour. This is at first stressful and difficult, but over time gets easier and easier. Eventually, the intensity of these drives for social acceptance and status fades. This modulation doesn’t occur by you forcing them away, but just telling yourself repeatedly that they’re OK to have, and it’s OK to defy them even if defying them feels very stressful. You can accept that stress, too.

The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #006

The Skeptic Podcast
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The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #006

From the pages of The Skeptic magazine, this is 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. 

On this episode:

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or to support the show, take out a small voluntary donation at patreon.com/theskeptic.

The Tartarian conspiracy: a silly pseudo-archaeology for our serious times

Dave Hahn
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The Tartarian conspiracy: a silly pseudo-archaeology for our serious times

I’ll admit that I’ve become jaded about conspiracy theories. It’s hard not to be, especially in the US where the very same people that have been warning us about technocratic despots are now cheering that exact thing. They also get kind of rote. If I hear someone go on an anti-Semitic rant, I just think to myself, “Oh it’s a Globalist conspiracy theory only they’ve decided against trying to pretend who it’s about.” At the most basic level, I’m separating each conspiracy theory into one of two categories: silly or dangerous. I’m just not surprised by much anymore.

Then, a few months ago, I was listening to the 2023 Ockham-award-winning podcast Knowledge Fight. Episode 930 was covering host Alex Jones’ meltdown over an alleged siege of his studio to seize his assets. This is what people are probably going to remember, if anything, about that episode. However, I became very interested in what happened before that. Earlier in that episode Jones hosted frequent guest of Joe Rogan, Eddie Bravo (about: 49:51 into the episode).

Bravo is a conspiracy theorist who questions the Holocaust and pushes the Flat Earth theory. Bravo isn’t that interesting, he doesn’t bring anything new to the conspiracy theory table, but joining Eddie was a fellow guest named “Flat Earth Dave.” Flat Earth Dave was discussing something called the Tartaria conspiracy and my ears pricked up, I had never heard this term before. Dave and Bravo began making claims that stone buildings can’t burn to the ground, which caused an exasperated Alex Jones to make a broken clock statement, “They burn to the fucking ground Eddie.” I stopped what I was doing, quickly sketched out some notes… and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Fast forward to the present day, I was deleting emails (a task that, as an academic, takes up a surprising amount of my time) and I came across a few from academia.edu, which sends you academic journal articles… well, in theory it’s supposed to. Usually, I’m receiving emails asking if I’m the author of some article on a disease, or it’s sending me editorials and people’s thesis drafts. I tend to ignore most of their email. I don’t want to throw too much shade; it has given me some good pieces and I know that if it’s from them it won’t be locked behind a paywall. This day I opened their message and see “Tartaria: The Hidden Empire” by David Vanderper of the University of Liege.

Occasionally I’ll receive “articles” like this. I’ve been sent “commentaries” on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has just been the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with some Nazi jerk’s introduction. I don’t know what academia.edu’s upload policy is, but it has apparently been easy to game their system. So Tartaria has once again returned, and I thought this topic absurd enough to be a nice palate cleanser from the constant dread of national politics.

The first thing I did was look for the author, David Vanderper, at the University of Liege. There is no one in the directory with that name. I wasn’t surprised but I was, admittedly, a bit disappointed. There is a profile page on academia.edu, which is a goldmine of material for people like us. It all points to a very specific worldview (which I think is coincidentally related to the concept of the Crypto-Terrestrial Hypothesis that I wrote about a few months ago; the idea that there exists a secret civilisation within, or under, our own). There is writing about races of ancient giants, dragons, mother goddesses, and an uploaded copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The image used on the bio was a promotional image for a company that was attempting to make edible seaweed packaging for drinkable water.

This conspiracy theory alleges that, in the distant past, there existed a globe-spanning empire of advanced technology and spirituality that has long since faded away. If you’re rolling your eyes at the apparent cribbing of a standard Atlantis theory, I was with you. Atlantis theories are theories that are played out at this point. It’s an utter misunderstanding of the point that Plato was making in the Timaeus – which was, Athens is totes the best because they were the only nation that could stand against the sea peoples of the Mediterranean.

A computer-aided design render of an imagined city of Atlantis, skyscraper-studded and sci-fi in aesthetic, floating out amid the open ocean.
An imagining of the city of Atlantis, by AlxFX on DeviantArt, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Atlantis conspiracy theories are about giving modern conspiracy theories more depth. They are claiming a false provenance because Atlantis allegedly predates the Great Pyramids, and the theory can get on to its main point that the Illuminati are forcing us to listen to Lady Gaga, while eating bugs, in our 15-minute cities.

One feature of this conspiracy theory that I found fascinating is that the entire conspiracy theory seems to revolve around architecture. Architecture is one of those subjects that I know very little about but am fascinated with. I don’t understand the nuances in various architectural styles, despite my hometown’s city hall being a solid example of the art deco style. What the Tartaria conspiracy alleges is that “buildings hundreds of years old and located all across the world are known to be encased in a mud flow up to several stories high and in some cases even completely engulfing buildings in nothing but mud.”

While the name “Tartarian” references the “Tartar” ethnic group, this conspiracy theory has a different history in mind. The Tartars were globe spanning. Every major building, from St. Mary’s Church at the University of Oxford, to the Hagia Sophia and the Chrysler Building, are much larger than they appear, because they extend for several stories under the ground because of the great flood that buried them.

You may begin to ask, what is the point of these buildings then? Each one was an aetheric energy generator, power station, and sound-resonation healing center. The crosses, minarets and poles on top of the buildings are the collectors for this energy. I think it’s nice that they include water stations there too, I don’t know why, but it’s just fun to think that while you’re sitting in the sound-healing chamber you might get a bit thirsty so they’re making water there, too.

What is aetheric energy? It’s probably a reference to the fifth element – ether, which crops up in certain circles as the fabric of the universe. It is the medium that Newton’s gravity flows through, or it’s the thing which causes the expansion of the universe; whatever we don’t understand is probably aetheric energy. This is science fiction technobabble designed to bewilder us into agreement. It’s certainly not the Casimir Effect.

Unfortunately for us, the flood buried this technology in mud.

Remember, it wasn’t that flood, it was a different one. In fact, Vanderper makes a point of stressing that the Biblical flood is likely just a myth. The second broken-clock moment in this experience comes at this point, when the paper reiterates the point that Noah’s flood comes from a story in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Photo of the slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey with a site that some claim to be the site of Noah's Ark
The supposed site of Noah’s Ark near Mount Ararat, Turkey. By Mfikretyilmaz, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0

This theory is so absurd it leaves me giddy. It’s almost too big to debunk… almost. In my dissertation I argue that there is a type of conspiracy theory that is impossible to prove wrong – the omni-conspiracy theory, in which everything is part of the system. The theory that we live inside a computer simulation, for instance. Any attempt to create an argument that the theory is wrong is subject to the rules of the computer system we are trapped inside. Theories that employ magic describe a worldview where the natural order can be violated, rendering rational appeals to the natural world moot. The Tartaria theory isn’t doing exactly that. It’s trying to ground itself, and it isn’t presenting a villain either.

Oddly, this aspect of the theory becomes the most interesting. Where did these people go? Atlantean theories have the gods to bury the island. Here, we’ve got no explanation. It just ends, and people like Eddie Bravo say that any building built before photography is really built on the ruins of a building constructed 450,000 years ago.  

Sometimes conspiracy theory is just fun to experience. The galactic wars of Project Camelot, the UFO stuff, and now this, are all just so goofy that it almost gives me a sense of refreshment. I understand the slope that theories like this can lead down, but there is no call to action here. It doesn’t even have the veneer of a coverup either, it’s just silly. And, as my country descends into a farcical place where the only people in charge of facets of society are people that don’t believe in those facets, theories like this are pleasant in that the only thing they can do is fund archaeological digs to find the hidden empire.

Back-masking: you can’t always hear what you want

Sean Slater
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Back-masking: you can’t always hear what you want

Note: includes stories of suicide

Humans have an amazing ability to understand their own language across a wide variety of accents, dialects, speech defects, and even other languages with mutual, or asymmetrical, intelligibility. We often recognise the common patterns and fill in any blanks not quite heard properly. Of course, there are limits to this. The late great Stanley Unwin built a bizarrely long career on pushing this boundary.

The French have a wonderfully descriptive phrase: Chanter en Yaourt – or Yogurt Singing. It refers to the non-English speaker’s difficulty in singing along to popular English language songs, replacing actual words with phrasing that sounds like English – as if sung into a yoghurt pot. For example, here is French comedian Gad Elmaleh singing Chanson en Anglais, and a famous Italian version by Adrian Celentano, with his 1972 classic Prisencolinensinainciusol.

But even English speakers can have difficulties following along in many songs and will often add words and phrases they have either invented or at least misinterpreted. Boomers will remember well the TV adverts for Maxell cassettes that played on this phenomenon. How many of you who can remember one featuring the Desmond Dekker classic 1969 reggae song The Israelites, cannot listen to the original without hearing ‘Ooooo, me ears are alight’.

Maxell’s advertisers took the idea Bob Dylan had used in the video for Subterranean Homesick Blues (for younger readers: think Andrew Lincoln’s cringe-inducing Cards on the doorstep moment in Love Actually) but showed misheard lyrics on the cards to demonstrate that their cassette recordings were much clearer than their rivals.

There’s at least three separate phenomena at play: Otosis, mishearing or misinterpretation of spoken sounds, and the alteration in word forms due to it; Audio pareidolia, the experience of hearing words or other sounds in seemingly random noise; and priming, the exposure to a certain stimulus (the cards) affecting the understanding of another (lyrical interpretation).

These effects might just be an interesting psychological experience, but they can and still do have real-world, detrimental effects for people.

Tragic cases

Just a couple of days before Christmas 1985, two young men in the town of Sparks, Nevada, parked in their local church’s car park. After a day consuming alcohol and smoking cannabis, they used a shotgun to end their lives. 18-year-old Raymond Belknap died immediately, while 20-year-old James Vance survived, albeit with severe facial injuries. Though he had numerous medical treatments, he died three years later.

Both men were described by the New York Times as ‘troubled’: “high school dropouts with criminal records […] both had problems holding jobs. Each also came from a family with a history of domestic violence and child abuse and had received counselling”. After the incident, Vance declared himself to be a born-again Christian and, in an effort to offer an explanation, wrote to Belknap’s parents: “I believe that alcohol and heavy-metal music such as Judas Priest led us to be mesmerized”.

The British heavy metal band Judas Priest performing. Their frontman wears a silvery, long-tassled metallic jacket, black gloves and shades and leans forwards as he sings into the mic. The bassist lifts his guitar neck vertically to the right and lead guitars to the far left and right concentrate on their parts.
Judas Priest on stage at Wacken Open Air music festival, 2018. By Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For the uninitiated, Judas Priest are a British heavy metal band, formed in Birmingham in the late 1960s. Over the years, they have sold over 50 million albums and were formative in various aspects of metal music. The songs often focus on common tropes of the genre such as quasi-religiosity, life, death, and even themes of violence.

In 1984, the year before the incident took place, three similar instances where young men died by suicide were blamed by grieving families on the boys’ love of heavy metal music. The parents of John McCollum, a 19-year-old who had taken his own life in California, specifically blamed CBS records, their artist Ozzy Osborne and his song Suicide Solution.

The court case was dismissed before trial on the grounds of First-Amendment rights to free expression, just a month before Belknap and Vance drove to the church carpark. As a result, the other two cases waiting to proceed were rendered moot.

Read it back to me

Lawyers for Belknap and Vance’s family understood that they could not now pursue a similar action against Judas Priest, however they claimed that there were hidden messages in the band’s song Better by You, Better Than Me. Specifically, subliminal ‘back-masked’ messages compelling the listener to “Let’s be dead”, and “Do it”. This time the trial judge rejected CBS’s lawyers’ plea to dismiss out of hand. Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead ruled that such subliminal messages were not a form of speech and therefore were not covered by First Amendment protections.

Back-masking was a technique discovered in the age of magnetic tape recordings, where a sound, or a spoken or sung phrase, was added to a track backwards to introduce an interesting and novel soundscape. The Beatles made use of it quite extensively and, throughout the 1970s, rock bands would add little Easter eggs that were eagerly sought out by fans. For example, Pink Floyd’s 1979 The Wall included the secret message: “Hello, Looker. Congratulations. You’ve just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the funny farm, Chalfont” on the Empty Spaces track.

Over time, the use of back-masking became something of a rock-music cliché. So much so that even one of the first ever – and at the time most popular – Christian rock bands, Petra, added the back-masked message: “What are you looking for the devil for, when you ought to be looking for the Lord?” to their 1982 song Judas’ Kiss.

This conflation with “looking for the devil” came from the rising Christian ‘Born-again’ movement that grew rapidly in the 1970s and into the 1980s. They often equated rock music with sin, drugs, demonism and leading their youth away from Jesus. Just as the kids were looking for secret messages, soon, so too were the parents.

A vintage Sony Stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder, upright, with most of the audio tape wound around the left wheel. It has treble, bass, balance and volume dials to the right.
A vintage Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder. By Linnaea Mallette, publicdomainpictures.net

There was a precedent for the idea that playing music backwards was equated with the Devil. The occultist Aleister Crowley suggested in 1913 that his followers should: “train himself to think backwards by external means”, one of which was to “listen to phonograph records, reversed”. Coincidentally the Album that Osbourne’s Suicide Solution track appears – Blizzard of Oz – contains the track Mr Crowley.

Just as the Christian right was focusing its ire on rock music, so back-masking become synonymous in churches and religious media with the devil and evil. In 1992, one self-described neuroscientist – William Yarroll – became a proponent of the idea that the rock stars the kids were listening to were actively working with the Church of Satan to corrupt the youth of America.

Soon the idea that hidden, subliminal messages were a thing spread to legislators and in 1983, bills either outlawing the practice, or at least mandating a warning notice on the record sleeve, were introduced in Arkansas and California. At a hearing in the latter, the investigating committee heard the Led Zeppelin track Stairway to Heaven backwards, where Robert Plant appears to praise “My Sweet Satan” (he doesn’t).

If you think the Devil is everywhere, once you start looking for him, you will see him everywhere.

Primed

All this ridiculous furore ended with Judas Priest’s frontman swapping his denim and leather for a sombre suit and testifying at a trial where he was accused of causing the death of his fans. The band eventually went out and bought various recordings, played them backwards to the court and primed the judge to hear innocuous and ridiculous phrases in otherwise unblemished music.

Once you prime recipients, they will hear what they then expect to hear, in what is otherwise just noise. That is especially the case for noise that sounds like speech – because it is a human voice, using the same cadence and patterns expected in the listeners language – and there is a natural instinct to hear what you expect or want to hear.

The trial, of course, was eventually dismissed, but not before CBS and the band had had to spend a small fortune on lawyers, and take time out of a touring schedule to attend. As the band’s manager later pointed out, if they had wanted to put in secret messages encouraging the kids to do something, they would have got them to buy more records.

The problem of priming either hard-to-hear speech or noise is not just a historical problem that went away with the advent of Compact Discs, it still has current effects. Recently, the Guardian reported on an election campaigner in Dudley in England, caught on a Ring doorbell camera allegedly making racist remarks to a colleague. Of course both she, and the Asian councillor she was campaigning with, strenuously deny saying anything that could be construed as racist. But Once the TikTok video went viral, with the added priming of on-screen prejudicial words over very faint speech, then listeners heard what they wanted to hear.

We must be very careful about believing what we want hear, and with AI’s ability to mimic individuals’ speech, this is not going to get any easier in future.

Rawson’s “Human/Nature” challenges mainstream ideas about conservation

Ted Lefroy
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Rawson’s “Human/Nature” challenges mainstream ideas about conservation
The cover of Human/Nature by Jane Rawson.

When American artist Jackson Pollock was asked if he painted from nature he reportedly replied, “I am nature.” For most of us the division between what is nature and what’s not is less distinct. “Human/Nature: on life in a wild world“, by Jane Rawson, sets out to uncover the background to this distinction, to interrogate what has shaped our ideas about nature and what those ideas unwittingly hide.

But before the interrogation, a confession:

“I am not a bushwalker. I like art exhibitions and grotty little bars. I have towncraft: I can navigate a metro system, choose an unusual but satisfying combination of dishes from a menu, find a calm place to read a book. I do not have bushcraft.”

Our guide is not a tree hugger and this is not a one-sided lament about how society perceives or treats nature. Instead we are in the hands of a someone who responds to the outdoors with fear and vigilance but is also a lifelong conservationist who thinks and writes about nature, was environment editor at The Conversation, co-authored a book on climate change and currently edits a literary magazine. It is this standpoint that is the book’s strength.

Observations about how humans relate to nature are not presented as dogmatic truths but are seen through the eyes of a curious mind turning over the implications of a Noah’s Ark of facts, theories, myths and assumptions. Some of which will be confronting for the committed conservationist, such as questioning our preoccupation with saving animals when they make up less than 1% of the total mass of life on Earth (and that includes insects).

The six central chapters, bookended by personal confession and a call to love all of nature, examine our world from the perspectives of nostalgia, extinction, intelligence, belonging, killing and fear. Each exposes beliefs and biases that convince us nature is as we would like it to be – stable, ordered, balanced.

Early casualties amongst myths and certainties are the concept of wilderness and the fixed nature of species. We learn that a defining property of twenty first century wilderness is inaccessibility, places to be experienced by the privileged few, and that there are at least four competing definitions within biology of what constitutes a species. One consequence being that the relative number of birds and mammals on Earth is due in part to the fact that bird taxonomists are lumpers and mammal taxonomists are splitters.

Ever since the discovery of mathematical order in the heavens, humans have assumed a similar underlying order to life, and on the strength of this conviction have made it so by naming things. Naming and cataloguing have become acts of possession, assigning to the living and non-living alike a place in our world from which they are loved, feared, protected or destroyed depending how similar, useful, threatening or aesthetically pleasing we find them. And if those things are rare, especially the never common or last of their kind, we love them all the more. Why rarity in nature is intrinsically valuable and what this means for conservation is left for the reader to ponder.

The trail of unsafe assumptions that support our view of nature ultimately leads to moral philosophy and politics: “…our idea of nature is cultural…constructed to serve the needs of a powerful few.” A debate that was once focused on the rights of individual humans is extended to all of life: should all living things be regarded as individuals with needs and interests, or collectively as members of a species?

Rawson compares the views of ecologist Michael Soulé with philosopher Val Plumwood. Soulé contends, “It may seem logical to extend the aversion of anthropogenic extinction of populations to the suffering and untimely deaths of individuals because populations are composed of individuals. I do not believe this step is necessary or desirable for conservation biology.” Plumwood on the other hand argues that “…humans stand apart as irreplaceable and unique individuals … nonhumans on the other hand are cast in a very different story, in which they figure as replaceable members of much more holistic groupings such as populations and species, as characters in…narratives of energy flows and exchanges in the food web”

Eventually Rawson sides with philosopher Thom Van Dooren: “…it is always individuals that are acted upon, and some broader group membership or characteristic that determines the form of that action. Both positions necessarily allow the sacrifice of those that don’t ‘make the cut’.” That cut being decisions made by humans based on what we like, and what’s like us.

The discussion ultimately exposes the arbitrary nature of how we value nature and why we distinguish between nature and non-nature:

We make decisions about whose welfare is worth attending to and whose is not, and how far we’ll go to protect it, usually based on which grouping – or species – we’ve assigned them to. We talk about these decisions as though they are logical, obvious, but they are deeply rooted in ideology.

This engaging and ultimately optimistic book sympathetically blends personal experience and thoughtful enquiry to challenge the way we see ourselves and the world around us. It deserves to be high on the reading list of all committed conservationists. 

The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #005

The Skeptic Podcast
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The Skeptic Podcast: Episode #005

From the pages of The Skeptic magazine, this is 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. 

On this episode:

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or to support the show, take out a small voluntary donation at patreon.com/theskeptic.

Are pre-performance rituals simply superstition, or something more?

Kotryna Nevedomskaitė
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Are pre-performance rituals simply superstition, or something more?

From athletes to artists, performers across the globe rely on pre-performance rituals to prepare for the moment of truth. Michael Jordan famously wore his old North Carolina college shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform for every game. Serena Williams is known for her precise pre-serve rituals. These actions may seem quirky or unnecessary to an outsider. However, to the performer, they are invaluable tools for focus, confidence, and emotional regulation.

Pre-performance rituals are deliberate, meaningful actions repeated by individuals to prepare themselves mentally, emotionally, or physically for a high-pressure task. Unlike everyday habits, these rituals carry a sense of purpose. They act as a psychological bridge between preparation and execution.

They can take various forms: physical routines such as specific warm-ups, social gestures like team handshakes, or even spiritual practices like prayer. These rituals help calm anxiety, sharpen focus, or build a sense of unity. Despite their differences, all pre-performance rituals aim to instill a sense of control and readiness. This is meant to empower performers to focus their energy and attention on achieving success.

Singapore’s unique blend of cultures and rituals

Being a busy port city and strategically positioned at the crossroads of global trade routes has nurtured Singapore into a melting pot of cultures. Founded as a British trading post in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles, the island quickly attracted immigrants from China, India, the Malay Archipelago, and beyond. These communities brought a wide array of traditions, languages, and practices, each contributing uniquely to Singapore’s identity. Today, the nation stands out for its harmonious cultural blend, where people of different backgrounds live, work, and celebrate together in harmony. This multicultural heritage often finds representation in the rituals and practices of Singapore’s athletes.

Harpreet Singh, a former professional badminton player, explained how he felt his pre-match rituals were rooted in his Sikh heritage. “When I first started, I didn’t consider it a cultural thing – it was just something personal to help centre myself”, he said. “But looking back now, it’s definitely tied to my heritage. It’s like taking part of my community with me when I step onto the court, no matter where I’m playing.”

Before every badminton match, Harpreet recited a shortened version of the Sikh prayer, Ardas. Recited as part of daily spiritual practices or before important activities, it serves as both a personal and collective appeal to God, the Guru, and the wider Sikh community for guidance, blessings, strength, and forgiveness. For Harpreet, the prayer wasn’t about asking for divine help or relying on luck. Instead, it was a way to create a moment of stillness. “It was just an effective way to calm me down – stabilised me a little,” he explained. The rhythmic nature of the prayer anchored him in the present, reducing the anxiety that often accompanies high-stakes competition.

This ritual functioned like mindfulness, allowing him to tune out distractions, focus his thoughts, and mentally prepare for the challenges ahead. Its familiarity reassured him that he was ready, helping him step onto the court with composure and clarity. The prayer also carried cultural and personal significance, connecting him to his roots while giving his actions deeper meaning. For him, this ritual became a steadying force that balanced the mental demands of the game with the emotional weight of competition.

A Singaporean-Inspired “Five Elements Unity”

As the goalkeeper for the Civil Defence Academy Futsal Team, Yuen Ming created his own unique pre-performance ritual, which he calls the “Five Elements Unity”. This practice blends symbolic gestures with team-building exercises, inspired by Singapore’s multicultural heritage and the values represented by the five stars on the national flag. Before each game, Yuen Ming gathers his teammates in a circle near the goalpost. Together, they touch the ground and then raise their hands to the sky, symbolising gratitude for opportunities and their shared commitment to excellence. Each movement is meant to align with one of Singapore’s “five stars” – progress, justice, equality, democracy, and peace – values that unite the team and reflect their role as ambassadors of Singapore’s diversity.

The ritual concludes with a short chant led by Yuen Ming, spoken in three languages: “Together we stand” in English, “Majulah” (onward) in Malay, and “加油/jiā yóu” (add oil or keep going) in Mandarin. This multilingual mantra is intended to honor Singapore’s cultural fabric, and reinforces the strength the team draws from their diverse backgrounds. Once complete, Yuen Ming taps the goalpost three times, reminding himself of his role as the last line of defense, and then he’s ready to play.

While Yuen Ming appreciates the cultural resonance of his ritual, he admits it wasn’t a deliberate choice at the time. “Honestly, I didn’t think much about the cultural significance – it was more about building focus and team spirit”, he reflects. “But looking back, it feels like it ties into what makes Singapore special: our diversity and the way we come together as one.”

Do Rituals Work?

Rituals are far more than comforting routines. Rituals can be psychological tools to help individuals navigate the mental and emotional challenges of high-pressure situations. By reducing stress, sharpening focus, and enhancing confidence, rituals can help create an optimal mindset for performance.

According to a 2021 meta-analysis, rituals can help reduce stress by lowering cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. High-pressure situations, such as sports competitions or public performances, can trigger the fight-or-flight response. This can cause a racing heart, rapid breathing, and heightened anxiety. Rituals can help counteract this reaction by introducing predictability and familiarity, which the brain interprets as a signal of safety and control.

Reciting a prayer like the Sikh Ardas or performing a rhythmic action such as bouncing a ball can provide structure and stability. These repeated patterns can help to calm physical symptoms of stress and restore emotional equilibrium.

This calming effect mirrors the benefits of mindfulness or meditation. By focusing on a repetitive action or meaningful phrase, individuals focus on the present moment. This allows them to detach from the uncertainties of their surroundings. The grounding effect allows performers to regain composure, approach their task with clarity, and execute with a calm, collected mindset.

A black male relay runner kneels at the starting blocks on a red track with white lines, his hands pressed to the ground on his fingertips, ready to start.
Athletes might recite prayers before a performance. Image via Pexels/Pixabay

Rituals can also serve as a tool to sharpen focus by preparing the brain to transition into a performance-ready state. In high-pressure environments, different distractions can disrupt concentration. Rituals act as a psychological boundary between preparation and execution, signaling to the brain that it’s time to focus.

The repetitive nature of rituals reduces mental clutter and enhances control over where attention is given. For example, a futsal player who taps the goalpost three times before every match or leads their team in a chant creates a rhythm that primes their mind to stay in the moment. When performers reach this high level of concentration, they are better equipped to block out distractions. Making quick decisions and execute their actions with precision becomes much easier.

Harpreet Singh also told me that, for him, one of the most important elements of exceptional performance is confidence. Rituals play a critical role in fostering that confidence. Engaging in a ritual creates a sense of preparedness and, over time, this repetition builds a strong psychological association between the ritual and success, creating a source of reassurance.

The symbolic meaning behind rituals can further boost confidence. For instance, a badminton player’s prayer may serve as a reminder of their discipline, preparation, and values, reinforcing their mental resilience. Similarly, non-religious rituals – like stretching in a specific sequence or performing a signature move – give performers a sense of control and mastery over their situation. These actions become mental anchors, grounding them in their abilities and bolstering self-belief.

Are pre-performance rituals simply superstitions?

While pre-performance rituals are associated with numerous psychological and physiological benefits, some argue they might simply be superstitions – actions grounded in irrational beliefs rather than objective necessity. Superstition involves the belief that specific actions or objects influence outcomes in ways unsupported by science.

Many rituals stem from a coincidental association with a positive outcome. For instance, an athlete might attribute a win to the socks they wore that day and decide to wear them for every game thereafter. Over time, these associations can become ingrained, leading the performer to believe the ritual is essential for success. However, the ritual itself likely has no direct impact on outcomes – it simply becomes a confidence booster rooted in coincidence.

Rituals can be deeply embedded in cultural or social contexts, which can blur the line between meaningful practices and superstition. A culturally significant prayer or chant, for example, might hold symbolic value despite it not directly impacting performance. The ubiquity of rituals across cultures may reflect humanity’s tendency to seek control and meaning in unpredictable situations, even if the sense of control is illusory.

A significant risk of pre-performance rituals is the potential for psychological dependency. Performers who rely heavily on their rituals may feel anxious or unprepared if unable to complete them. For instance, a musician whose pre-concert warm-up is interrupted might believe they are destined to fail, even though their skills remain intact. This dependency suggests that rituals can act as mental crutches, offering reassurance rather than genuine performance enhancement.

a row of violinists in an orchestra sitting in black uniform, performing with their bows high on their instruments.
Musicians often have pre-performance rituals to get into their on-stage mindset. Image via Pexels/Pixabay

Yuen Ming acknowledges this risk. “There have been matches where I couldn’t do my usual routine because we were rushed, and I felt unsettled. It’s not like I forgot how to play, but I was distracted by the thought that something might go wrong because my ritual wasn’t complete.”

Rituals can sometimes detract from more practical aspects of preparation. Performers who spend excessive time perfecting their rituals might neglect critical tasks such as refining their skills or strategising. In such cases, rituals function more as psychological placebos – offering comfort without directly contributing to performance outcomes.

Rituals are often perpetuated by confirmation bias, where individuals focus on outcomes that support their belief in the ritual while disregarding contradictory evidence. For example, a tennis player might credit their pre-match routine for a win but ignore matches they lost despite following the same ritual. This selective perception reinforces the belief in the ritual’s effectiveness, even when no causal link exists. Harpreet Singh seemed to think so: “There have been matches where I’ve said the prayer, felt good about it, and still didn’t win. It’s not a formula – it’s just something that helps me approach the match better mentally.”

While pre-performance rituals may sometimes resemble superstitions, their psychological effects – such as stress reduction and confidence building – do appear to be real. However, performers must remain mindful of their purpose. Effective rituals should enhance focus and readiness without fostering dependency or detracting from practical preparation. By striking this balance, rituals can serve as tools for empowerment rather than mere habits of superstition.

More than preparation, pre-performance rituals are transformative: they turn nerves into energy and focus into action. They anchor performers in the present moment – connecting them to their heritage, their team, or the fire within. From the steady rhythm of a Sikh prayer to the multicultural unity in a futsal chant, these rituals embody the fusion of personal meaning and collective strength, particularly within Singapore’s rich cultural tapestry.

Skeptics may view rituals as mere superstition, but their power lies not in proving causality but in creating readiness. They serve as bridges – from chaos to clarity, from uncertainty to confidence. On every stage, court, or field, rituals empower performers to face unpredictability with poise and resolve. It’s in these moments, where preparation meets belief, that performers achieve something beyond success, carrying the echoes of their rituals into all they do.

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