Apathy Sketchpad

[BPSDB] On my various travels through PubMed, Medline, Ovid SP (which is like the old Ovid but with a backlight) and Google Scholar, I come across a number of papers that really aren’t what I was looking for. Some of them are fascinating, though, so I’ve now got a 11MB folder full of PDFs that range from interesting through arcane to downright silly.

These include a paper¹ whose principal conclusion “is that the regional distribution of the incidence of violent injury is related to the regional distribution of the price of beer”, one about restoring torn up documents², a mildly terrifying study in which scientists managed to work out what someone was looking at by reading the information from their brain with electrodes³, and a fantastic paper in which someone built a device that can rotate objects without touching them using angular momentum carried by sound waves⁴ — and somehow managed to resist the geek temptation and so rather boringly called it an “acoustic spanner” (and people say that the science in Doctor Who is unrealistic).

But my current favourite is one entitled “Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats”⁵. The gist is: take 52 rats, and split them into 4 equal groups (or suits). One group is left well alone, the other three are put in “restrainers” in smaller groups of 3 or 4. This is designed to piss them off. Then, you put one group’s restrainers inside a Pyramid. The pyramid is a wooden affair two and a half feet tall, with a window and a hole for ventilation.

The four triangular sides of the pyramid angled upwards at nearly 51° to the base and met at the apex of the pyramid.

My word, the triangular sides met at the apex? So it was a pyramid, then. They even have a picture, in case you’re somehow still unsure what a ‘pyramid’ might be:

Figure 1: Ratiphar had very feeew cares…

Another group’s restrainer is left in normal conditions (in a presumably-non-pyramidal laboratory), and the last is left in a square box about the same size as the pyramid, because this is a strangely well-conducted seeming study considering how completely fucking mental you have to be to imagine that a pyramid shaped box can reduce stress in rats simply by being pyramid-shaped. They even made sure to align the square box due north, as if that made any difference. The rats (in their restraining cages) were even put on little stools in the boxes, because

Maximum effect of the pyramid is believed to be exerted at one-third the height of the pyramid from its base.

I would have thought maximum effect would be at the apex, since that’s where you’re in the most pyramids. But what do I know of Pyramid Power?

The whole thing looks like ‘cargo-cult science’ to me, right down to the extensive list of references — of which there are fifty-four, although quite a lot of them come from the same couple of books, and at least one is a Geocities page which apparently no longer exists (presumably due to being stored in an insufficiently-pyramidal server room). This latter is cited to support the sentence “Pyramid exposure is believed to put the mind into an alpha state”. This comes hot on the tails of the even better sentence “Research has shown that the energy field within the pyramid can act as antistressor and thus protect the hippocampal neurons from stress-induced atrophy (10)”, in which the promising-sounding Reference 10 is a PhD thesis (not apparently available online) from the same university that ran this study. Probably one of the authors’ luckless students. Another few references discuss “bioresonance”, apparently as something reasonable, to ground the pyramid theory in something people will accept, which would work if bioresonance wasn’t also a load of made-up shit.

The strange thing is, though, that despite all the made-up woo in the discussion section, and despite the rather preposterous premise being tested, it looks like a basically okay experiment. I’d have liked to see it run as a crossover, so we could make sure it was the pyramid rather than the rats being tested, and the square box was three times the volume of the pyramid because they matched base area and height, so there’s a chance the pyramid rats got less air than the controls, but it’s not at all a bad design. Ooh, a control group not aligned to the compass would have been good, too.

And yet, apparently, it worked. The rats in the pyramid were about as stressed as the rats in ordinary cages, whereas all the other rats that had been put in restrainers were pretty pissed off about it. Apparently this is reproducible because reference 11 is an almost identical study to this (right down to the main author) without restrainers.

Of course, I’m not about to convert to pseudoscience and declare that therefore pyramid power is real, partly because the odds of even a hundred p<0.05 results coming up on the trot are still far, far higher than the odds that the shape of a pyramid works “at a hormone level”, and also a bit because the most reproducible result in science is one you just make up.

But this is still interesting — because if this is genuine research, then on some unconscious level these researchers have conspired to rig this experiment very subtly, and I for one would very much like to find out how they did that. The endless lies and deceptions that the human brain pulls on its hapless owners is infinitely more fascinating than the crystals and dowsing and pyramids that result.

1. Matthews et al, Violence-related injury and the price of beer in England and Wales Applied Economics 38, 661–670 (2008)
2. De Smet, Reconstruction of ripped-up documents using fragment stack analysis procedures, Forensic Science International 176, 124–136 (2008)
3. Kay et al, Identifying natural images from human brain activity, Nature 452, 352-355 (2008)
4. Skeldon et al, An acoustic spanner and its associated rotational Doppler shift, New J. Phys.10 013018 (9pp) (2008)
5. Bhat et al, Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats, eCAM 4, 35–42 (2007)