Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

By Terence Hines

Book Overview

Television, the movies, and computer games fill the minds of their viewers with a daily staple of fantasy, from tales of UFO landings, haunted houses, and communication with the dead to claims of miraculous cures by gifted healers or breakthrough treatments by means of fringe medicine. The paranormal is so ubiquitous in one form of entertainment or another that many people easily lose sight of the distinction between the real and the imaginary, or they never learn to make the distinction in the first place. In this thorough review of pseudoscience and the paranormal in contemporary life, psychologist Terence Hines teaches readers how to carefully evaluate all such claims in terms of scientific evidence.Hines devotes separate chapters to psychics; life after death; parapsychology; astrology; UFOs; ancient astronauts, cosmic collisions, and the Bermuda Triangle; faith healing; and more. New to this second edition are extended sections on psychoanalysis and pseudopsychologies, especially recovered memory therapy, satanic ritual abuse, facilitated communication, and other questionable psychotherapies. There are also new chapters on alternative medicine, which is now marketed in our drug stores, and on environmental pseudoscience, with special emphasis on the evidence that certain technologies like cell phones or environmental agents like asbestos cause cancer.Finally, Hines discusses the psychological causes for belief in the paranormal despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This valuable, highly interesting, and completely accessible analysis critiques the whole range of current paranormal claims.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573929794
• ISBN13: 9781573929790
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 516 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

The Gift of Rational Thinking

As a medical writer who has become more and more interested in alternative medicine, being able to think clearly and evaluate rationally has been one of my greatest strengths. I owe much of this to Dr. Hines, who deftly explains why so much pseudoscience is plain old junk, while keeping an open mind about things that are still under investigation. He even manages to do this in an interesting, amusing, and entertaining way.People really want to believe in the paranormal, and rarely want to have their beliefs challenged with rational explanations. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? But the truth is the truth, and sometimes, when Dr. Hines tells it, it's even better than the fiction. Most people think that having an open mind means being receptive to strange and "unbelievable" things. I think that having an open mind means being receptive to all possibilities -- including those that indicate that some unbelievable things really shouldn't BE believed. If you consider yourself an rational thinker, take the time to read this book, and give it to others as a truly magical gift -- the gift of reason.

Pseudoscience: the secular religion

According to Terrence Hines, "The continued claims by proponents of pseudoscience constitute nothing short of consumer fraud," a fraud that costs the American public billions of dollars each year. In debunking the most widely believed contrary-to-fact beliefs, he devotes several pages to explaining how cold readings are accomplished in sufficient detail to satisfy all but the incurably giullible that the psychic scam relies on the Barnum dictum that there is a sucker born every minute. He shows that passages by Nostrodamus widely interpreted as foretelling the rise and fall of Napoleon could equally well be applied to Ferdinand II, Adolf Hitler, or any European ruler whose governance was less than beneficial. He also shows that a novel retroactively interpreted as a prediction of the sinking of the Titanic conformed to all of the circumstances that a book about an ocean liner sinking was virtually obliged to incorporate in order to be plausible.Hines' chapter on psychoanalysis should be mandatory reading for all persons who still believe Sigmund Freud's imbecilic fantasy differs in any qualitative way from spilling one's guts to a bartender, taxi driver or hetaera, particularly TV scriptwriters who regularly portray psychoshrinks as something other than self-deluded humbugs.Hines catalogues an abundance of evidence that polygraphs are no more effective as lie detectors than tossing a coin, "Heads it's the truth and tails it's a lie." He described an experiment conducted by "Sixty Minutes," in which polygraph operators from several firms were asked to determine which CBS employee was responsible for a series of thefts. Each operator was given a hint that a particular individual was the prime suspect. In fact there had been no theft, and each operator was pointed toward a different suspect -- and without exception each identified the individual touted to him alone as the guilty party. After such exposure on the world's most watched news magazine program, how in the name of science can polygraphs continue to be mistaken for "lie detectors" (there is no such thing) by law enforcement agencies and other unteachables? The answer is that believers in the validity of polygraphs are as impervious to falsifying evidence as believers in the other nonsense beliefs Hines falsifies.

A Virtual Encyclopedia of Bogus Ideas and Beliefs

I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to immunize themselves against irrational beliefs in the strange and unexplained. This is one of the better books on the subject, even though some entries are treated unfairly such as Chiropractic. In fact, some schools and colleges actually use this as a textbook and make it required reading.The author covers many areas in this book and offers, for the most part, sound reasons for not believing in the subjects he is attempting to debunk. The book is very detailed, but still very readable. Anyone who enjoyed this book should also check out the following: Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World, James Randi's Flim Flam, and Henry Gordon's Extra Sensory Deception. These books, along with the book being reviewed, are among the best available dealing with the subject of debunking paranormal claims. They should all be read to help build what Carl Sagan calls a "Baloney Detection Kit".

Excellent Primer-Encyclopaedia on irrational beliefs

A very complete way to review the sceptical/scientific approach to XX Century paranormal myths, hoaxes and scams. Highly commendable as a first book on the subject, and with the excellent bibliographic index, it would guide very well any reader interested on learning more on the matter, (although Hines' treatment of the subject, at over 300 pages, is quite thorough in itself). By the way, I found the other review (a reader, 1997) very useful, but I am not sure what I voted (boxes are not too clear as to which is which)

Excellent insights into everyday irrational beliefs

Entertaining and engaging, this book presents insight into widely accepted "bad arguments." Less stuffy than any Introduction to Logic text, Hines takes the reader on a guided tour of every illogically-supported belief in America, from UFOs to Christianity. Be warned, however; almost everyone has a personal "irrational belief" -- and none of them get kid-glove treatment here. A real eye-opener