comments on what are being termed "earworms"
To all:
There can be many levels to a matter, and, unless you look at all of them, you can't necessarily be said to understand it completely.
For many Forteans, a likely nagging suspicion, it seems, at the back of all their thoughts is the possibility that maybe they're wrong, and what is taken to be strange occurrences may just be everyday occurrences, "poorly observed". The facade of utter certainty put up by "traditional science", in denying the existence of phenomena those such as Forteans follow, can be daunting for many. The thought, after all, is that, in "traditional science", the truth is supposedly the ultimate, empassioned goal, and the techniques are guaranteed to unveil reality, even in spite of any preferences or prejudices on the part of the observer.
The objectivity of science, though, has been glaringly obvious for at least the past couple of decades. With the life's blood of "traditional science" now the grant, and not the truth, every hack with a calculator seems to be coming up with "theories" to test and "studies" to make. All complete with a complete, and, usually, expensive, list of required expenditures! And, even if you come away with nothing, you still make lemonade. When Surveyor I was first dispatched to the moon, a NASA scientist was asked what if it turns out that the moon's surface is like quicksand, and the probe sinks and is never found. The scientists replied: "Well, we would have learned something, right there!" Even negative results can be depicted as triumphs, by the cagey liar!
If "the bottom line" wasn't more important to today's usual run of "scientists" than the truth, phen-fen would never have made it onto the market shelves, and people during the Eighties and early Nineties wouldn't have half starved themselves eating nothing but bran, and thinking that everything from coffee to red wine to butter was deadly! If some "fact" comes out over public dispatches, it's, apparently, just a matter of time before the exact opposite is declared true!
Many wonder, though, how "scientific methods" could possibly fail to point out the truth. "How can they be 'scientific' if they don't reveal reality?", it would be asked. A filthy secret of science is that the methods used can be employed to suggest, to the unwary, anything that one wishes! Magicians have methods for "forcing a card"; unscrupulous "researchers” have methods for "forcing a conclusion"!
And, where unscrupulousness trumps ethics, even more malignancies can be expected, such as trying to get "something for nothing". Increasingly, attention seems to be being paid to "astounding claims" that are decades old! A recent entry on the Fortean Times, for example, touted the theory that "the universe is shaped like a football", meaning a soccer ball. The article referenced speaks of relating the shape of the universe to "a dodecahedron, a shape composed of twelve pentagonal sides". Later, the article describes the sides as not really being straight edged, but rounded. They should be made aware that there is another name for a soccer ball, a football or a dodecahedron with curving sides, namely, a sphere! And the idea of a spherical universe goes back at least to the Einstein-DeSitter model, in the Thirties!
A dynamic example of this adulteration of scientific method can be seen in an article in the Monday, October 20, That's Odd! section of The New York Daily News. In that, the article, "No cure for songs stuck in your head", can be seen. In that article, University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris seems to trying, at once, to give the impression of conducting valid scientific analysis of a situation, and of conducting valuable research.
Kellaris' "field of study" is "tunes that get stuck in your head"! Terming them "earworms" - leave it to a professor of marketing to engage in "brand name recognition" techniques - Kellaris claims to have been interested in the subject for decades, and to have been actively collecting anecdotal information "from people all over the world", since 2000.
A major announcement: "I quickly learned" Kellaris proclaims, "that virtually everybody experiences earworms at one time or another." Because it's "experienced privately" and rarely brought up in conversation, Kellaris "concludes", "maybe people really long for some social comparison.
They want to know if other people experience what they experience."
How far is it from that to the concept up setting up "clinics" - expensive "clinics"! - to help people get songs out of their heads?
One "survey" he is credited with conducting was in 2002, among "about 500 students, faculty and staff" on the University of Cincinnati campus.
No matter what you say, the rank-and-file of society, as a whole, cannot be considered as efficiently modeled by a collection of individuals working in one spot, not engaging in a wide range of types of activity, and perpetually surrounded by rock music! To be sure, too, the depth of concerns for most college students do not quite come to the level of most adults! The college atmosphere cannot be considered necessarily close to the average environment in the wide world. But a secret of connived "research results" is carefully choosing your sample. Most "studies", you will find, are performed either on college community members, or employees of hospitals. Using these "tests", you could come to the conclusion that all an average 80-year-old man needed to have a baby would be to increase his estrogen level! Even when claims are made that samples are chosen "at random", if the original population, from which the sample is "randomly chosen", is carefully selected, the sample can say anything you want!
Nor even can Kellaris' technique be described as free from suspicion.
His "results", for example, suggest that the three most commonly stuck songs are "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", "Who Let The Dogs Out" and the "Baby Back Ribs" tune from "Chili's" - does a product tie-in seem in the works? The means whereby he "discovered" this fact, though, was in having participants in the "study" mark off which of a pre-determined list of songs, they tended to get stuck in their heads! Although these songs ranked the highest among the allowed list of candidates, Kellaris reports that the most frequent choice marked, though, was "Other", meaning that a song not on the list would get stuck in their heads.
This is reported as having led Kellaris to conclude "that stuck songs are highly idiosyncratic".
In other words, that everybody has their own special song, or group of songs, that will get stuck in their heads.
But, if most of the people interviewed had the song, say, "Bless Your Beautiful Hide", from "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers", stuck in their heads, since that wasn't on the list, they would also tend to respond "Other"! Simply responding "Other" could mean that all those respondents were thinking of the same song, but a song that was not on the list, but Kellaris' apparently careful misinterpretation of the results led to the "conclusion" that all of them were thinking of their own tunes!
Two diametrically opposed conclusions, from the one result!
Another secret of "forcing a conclusion", judicious "interpretation" of the material!
If you take the word of any member of what is termed the "scientific community", it appears, you're just as good as sticking a gun to your head!
As an aside, another of Kellaris' "discoveries" is that one way of freeing yourself from a stuck song is to chew on a stick of cinnamon.
There are lessons that, apparently, can be learned from anything, but you have to see them. This "study" bears very strong similarity to all of the "research" projects being used, these days, to, apparently, defraud the people into releasing taxpayer dollars for lab-coated swindles! The methods employed may be less subtle than the ones used to convince people that eggs are poison, but they are apparently of the same cloth! And it is important for people to realize the shape of lies, in order to avoid them, and, even, overcome them!
Julian Penrod