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An adjective describing political, cultural or religious beliefs.

In 2006, Oprah Winfrey endorsed a book called The Secret. The self help book is based on the idea of the law of attraction - that your thoughts can change your life. If you ask, and believe, you will receive.

The Oprah Winfrey show had the author and guest speakers come on to talk about their experiences with the program. The impression left was if you follow this book, you too can get out of debt, find a new job, lose weight or find everlasting love. However, this theory isn’t realistic and is based on the simplicity theory; its a game of numbers and probabiltities, not ancient wisdom and positive energy. The Secret is based off of positive outcomes. The speakers on Oprahs stage only mention the positive experiences; the mundane or any negative outcomes are never mentioned. When two or more positive experiences occur to a person reading this book, they chalk it up to The Secret working instead of simplicity.

The reality is that life is a series of moments. Some of us will succeed and some of us will fail and will have nothing to do with whether we read a book or not; life isn’t fair and it isn’t based on The Secret.

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When a person only pays attention to information that supports their idea and ignores info that debunks the idea.

Lie detector test machines are based around confirmation bias. Most people believe they tell the absolute truth and that these machines are infallible. The police believe in them so much that they use them regularly as an investigative tool. However, these tests can be beaten, they do not always detect when a person is definitively lying and they are only about 87% correct, leaving a 13% margin of error. (Ph.D, 2020) The theory behind the machine is that the body will experience a different physical response if they are lying due to a guilty emotional response. However, not all humans feel guilt or have a conscience. Perception is in the eye of the beholder and guilt or innocence are just concepts to some. Narcissists and Sociopaths exist among regular people and are more than capable of passing a lie detector tests and getting away with being guilty while authorities dismiss due to passing the infallible test.

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Calling it a "lie-detector" suggests that a polygraph machine can detect lies. Commonly used in criminal investigations, this device actually measures nervous excitement. It operates on the premise that if a person is telling the truth they will remain calm.
Trial by ordeal
The lie detector can be considered a modern variant of the old technique of trial by ordeal. A suspected witch was thrown into a raging river on the premise that if she floated she was harnessing demonic powers.

Such techniques never had much credibility. A subject who passed the test had a reasonably high probability of drowning that was at least preferable to getting burned at the stake as a witch.

No one dies of a polygraph test, of course, and the results are mostly inadmissible in courts of law. Yet, a person who is otherwise exonerated by the evidence may endure the legal jeopardy of being unfairly incriminated in the eyes of investigators.

Although polygraph machines look scientific and measure responses such as sweating and increased pulse rate with exquisite accuracy, they are crude in their conception. Indeed, they are no more sophisticated than an ancient Arab ordeal for detecting liars.

In the Arab test a heated knife blade was pressed to the subject's tongue. If he was telling the truth, his tongue would not get burned. The idea is that when people are nervously excited, their mouth goes dry because nervousness suppresses salivation. In principle, the lie detection system involved is exactly the same as for a polygraph test.
Does the polygraph work?
There has been a lot of controversy about whether lie detectors work. Some experts claimed that a high proportion of persons who "failed" the polygraph subsequently confessed to crimes. On the other hand, the test generates a lot of false positives, i.e., people who are telling the truth but whose polygraph test suggests they are lying.

Whereas the American Polygraph Association claims accuracy rates of over 90 percent, leading critics, such as David Lykken (1) put the polygraph accuracy rate at around 65 percent that is only slightly better than the 50 percent correct one would get by flipping a coin.

Interestingly, the polygraph is quite good at identifying liars but does no better than chance at detecting honest people according to Lykken. In other words, there is a 50:50 chance that a polygraph test will say an honest person is lying (a 50 percent "false positive" rate).

It is bad enough that polygraph tests are so indirect, prompting some researchers to look for more direct evidence of lying through analysis of brain scans. Another major weakness is that the test can be faked.

In the normal administration of the test, technicians rely upon responses that they know to be true to provide a baseline against which deceptive answers can be judged as an increase in nervous arousal. One of the most effective means of faking the test is to enhance arousal accompanying honest answers so that it is difficult to detect increased arousal theoretically accompanying lies.

The fact that the test can be fooled in this way also highlights the subjectivity with which examiners judge the results, for there is little standardization of procedures as to how much of a polygraph change indicates lying.

Doubts about polygraph tests grew in the scientific community until the National Research Council - an organization of scientists - conducted a systematic evaluation and concluded that the test is lacking in scientific validity (2).

In 1998, the U.S. Supreme court acted to restrict their use in legal proceedings. In particular, defense attorneys can no longer use evidence that their client passed a polygraph test as establishing innocence of a crime.

Even as the polygraph test is discredited in legal proceedings, its use also declined in other settings and most employers are legally barred from using it as a technique to recruit honest employees. The government is one exception.

From a scientific perspective, there is no rationale for administering a polygraph test. So there is certainly no good reason to take one - if you can avoid it. Otherwise, you expose yourself to the nightmare of false self-incrimination.

1. Lykken, D. (1984). Polygraphic interrogation. Nature, 307, 681-684.

2. Adelson, R. (2004). The polygraph in doubt. APA Monitor, 35, 71. http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/polygraph.aspx

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Calling it a "lie-detector" suggests that a polygraph machine can detect lies. Commonly used in criminal investigations, this device actually measures nervous excitement. It operates on the premise that if a person is telling the truth they will remain calm.

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Believing in ancient practices used to heal, diagnose or predict.

According to the Mayan Calendar, the planets were to come into alignment and it would cause Earth to destroy itself in the end of 2012. The Mayans created a fairly accurate calendar based on their knowledge of astrology and mathematics.  This calendar predicted the end of the Earth in Dec 2012 and many believers thought it to be true.

This prediction should have been met with skepticism. The chances of the planet Earth destroying itself on a known specific day and year, was just not likely. The chances that a primitive civilization would be able to predict the end of the world is based on nothing more than ancient astrological beliefs and primitive mathematical equations. While the calendar was fairly accurate pertaining to time periods (a day, a month, a year) it also had a few flaws and miscalculations. The Mayan people did not take into consideration the time the Earth had already existed before the invention of the calendar. As well, mans understanding of astrology and math equations were primitive at that time. We now have a far better understanding of the planets, our solar system and our math equations have got to be more advanced than their civilization.

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When the mind turns something you are seeing into something you already know as a way of

The brain uses patterns as an evolutionary tool. Our brain turns objects into things we would recognize and tries to make sense out of the patterns that emerge; this is why we look at clouds and recognize shapes among them.
The picture below looks like angels are praying for us. This is the brain recognizing the shape of an "Angel" in the clouds, which for Christians, correlates with Heaven and God, or to some may believe its a sign from their loved ones.

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Agenticity
Finding dimes and attributing them to messages from angels or loved ones past, is an example of agenticity. There is no real correlation between the two but we tend to believe it’s a gift or reminder from Heaven.

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When the answer to the mystery can actually be explained by numbers and probabilities. The higher the number or the more times played, the more likely the chance of winning.

When a person plays the same numbers for 20 years straight, the chances of finally winning with those numbers increases with each play. A person will say its God will or they had a dream with these numbers and have been playing them ever since. However, this is not divine intervention, this is actually based on Simplicity. The numbers of tickets sold and the randomness of drawn numbers just happen to match up with a winner, who has a cool story to tell.

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Proof by Verbocity
Does brainspotting help heal traumatic brain injuries, trauma, psychological and mental health concerns and/or physical pain?

Brainspotting is a new age psychotherapy treatment that is taking advantage of people by charging large sums of money to try an unproven and unsupported therapeutic approach. It is sold as a new way of healing traumatic brain injuries (TBI), concussions, other traumatic experiences, assists with difficult emotions, psychological struggles and physical pain. In reality, it does absolutely nothing.

It is not covered by any medical plan and is expensive ($250 per 90 min session. Multiple sessions required). Training to perform this special treatment is available to anyone interested, you do not need any special skills,  previous experience or have any medical knowledge beforehand. You just have to have a credit card and be willing to pay the course cost.

In all of the articles I read, medical jargon was used a lot. The training sessions being offered sounded important and  official, as well as confusing. The description of brainspotting states that this treatment is based around a legitimate therapy practice, EMDR, therefore giving it a boost of legitimacy it did not earn. EMDR therapy is a legitimate treatment option available to address some of the issues brainspotting claims to heal; people associate the proven achievements of one therapy with the unproven benefits of the other. This therapy plays on peoples emotions, as people who are suffering want relief; families believe this touch therapy will help heal their loved one, and will pay the cost. In reality, the therapist performing this treatment doesn’t have any real medical training or degrees and can not provide evidence based proof that this particular therapy works.
An underlying theme is money. Selling expensive therapeutic services, accompanying books and offering classes to teach this skill to others, for a cost. This treatment hasn’t been scientifically proven to work; however, what it does do is offer a solution to hurt people who are just looking for relief. That connection is enough for some people to not question beyond that.
While brainspotting sounds like an interesting therapy option, I don’t believe it is a true medical tool that should be used in the future. Since it is not an evidence based science , the benefits can’t be proved one way or the other. Money is also a strong motivator of this pseudoscience. It also could potentially fall into the category of having faith and belief based on nothing more than a gut feeling. When people were writing testimonies about their brainspotting experiences, they would mention a feeling of relief or weight being lifted off their shoulders, being tired after a session or feeling emotional afterwards. This all makes complete sense if you consider what they may have been discussing or think about in their private therapy sessions. This is a normal response to releasing built up anxiety and revisiting past traumatic memories, not a definitive sign that this therapy works. Since it continues to remain not an evidence based science at this time, in my conclusion, it is most likely a pseudoscience belief instead of real science.

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When a marketing teams use celebrities to endorse their product, use gimmicks  or subliminal messages to try to influence opinion by showing people in lab coats or doctors offices with fake diplomas on the wall.

The picture below shows that Khloe Kardashian endorses a diet program called Flat Tummy© that sell teas, milkshakes, smoothie mixes and lollies to help people lose excess weight and burn belly fat.

Khloe Kardashian appeals to this present generation of young women as the object of perfection that they must strive to emulate. The diet products and the pictures in the advertisements are based on a cultural ideology that women should be skinny and flawless and that they can accomplish the same look just by drinking these shakes or using specialty teas. People should realize that money is strictly behind this endorsement, not her concern for your wellbeing. Khloe has no formal education in nutrition or medical sciences. Worth noting is that these products are not FDA approved, which means they have not been tested for validity.