The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (46 page)

More generally, autism is a descriptive term for a set of symptoms that can have many different causes. The spectrum of children diagnosed with autism is broad, ranging from kids who are completely nonverbal and unable to interact with others to people who successfully integrate themselves into society and have highly productive careers and relationships. Moreover, the range of behaviors exhibited in autism varies widely, with
some people with the diagnosis showing aggressive antisocial behavior and others exhibiting extreme shyness and passivity. Behavioral therapies can be effective in treating the symptoms of autism for many children, helping them learn to interpret and understand the social behaviors of others or eliminating undesirable behaviors. Yet, like cancer, autism is not a single thing. There can be no single cure for cancer because cancer is not a single disease, and there can be no single cure for autism because autism represents a constellation of neurological and behavioral atypicalities that can manifest themselves in a wide assortment of ways.

33.
Evidence about secretin comes from the following sources: D. Armstrong, “Autism Drug Secretin Fails in Trial,”
The Wall Street Journal
, January 6, 2004 (
online.wsj.com/article/SB107331800361143000.html?
); A. D. Sandler, K. A. Sutton, J. DeWeese, M. A. Girardi, V. Sheppard, and J. W. Bodfish, “Lack of Benefit of a Single Dose of Synthetic Human Secretin in the Treatment of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder,”
New England Journal of Medicine
341 (1999): 1801–1806; and J. Coplan, M. C. Souders, A. E. Mulberg, J. K. Belchic, J. Wray, A. F. Jawad, P. R. Gallagher, R. Mitchell, M. Gerdes, and S. E. Levy, “Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. II: Parents Are Unable to Distinguish Secretin from Placebo Under Double-Blind Conditions,”
Archives of Disease in Childhood
88 (2003): 737–739. The subject is also discussed extensively by Paul Offit in
Autism’s False Prophets
.

34.
Recall our example of the perceived link between arthritis pain and the weather. In that case, even when people had all of the necessary numbers to properly calculate the correlation, they did not do so. Instead, they judged the strength of a relationship primarily from the number of cases where the putative cause and the putative effect were both present. In the weather/arthritis case, those were the times when the weather was cold and rainy and pain was higher. In the autism example, those were the cases in which kids were vaccinated and later developed autism. In both cases, people ignored all of the other critical numbers. This reasoning error was discovered nearly fifty years ago: J. Smedslund, “The Concept of Correlation in Adults,”
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
4 (1963): 165–173.

35.
A recent “cure” for autism, promoted by believers in the vaccine theory, involves large doses of the drug Lupron, which suppresses testosterone. Lupron is occasionally used to chemically castrate violent sex offenders. It might well lead to more docile behavior, but so would a frontal lobotomy. Unlike changing a child’s diet, administering Lupron could have substantial negative side effects, such as delayed puberty and heart and bone problems, not to mention regular, painful injections. The prime promoters of the drug as an autism therapy have conducted no clinical trials and have no special training in the medical subfields related to autism, and no scientific studies have ever been conducted on the use of the drug in autism. For some details on this “therapy” and its promoters, see T. Tsouderos, “Miracle Drug Called Junk Science,”
Chicago Tribune
, May 21, 2009 (
www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-autism-lupron-may21,0,242705.story
).

36.
Retrieved from Amazon.com on July 27, 2009.

37.
From the representative national poll conducted by SurveyUSA on our behalf in June 2009 (see notes to Chapter 1 for details).

38.
For a discussion of such differences, see D. C. Penn, K. J. Holyoak, and D. J. Povinelli,
“Darwin’s Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity Between Human and Nonhuman Minds,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
31 (2008): 109–178.

1.
R. Cimini, “Mangini Gets Players Tuned In,”
New York Daily News
, July 31, 2007 (
www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/jets/2007/07/31/2007-07-31_mangini
_gets_players_tuned_in.html
).

2.
S. Yun, “Music a Sound Contribution to Healing: Good Samaritan Taking Cacophony Out of Hospital Care,”
Rocky Mountain News
, May 31, 2005,
www.mozarteffect.com/RandR/Doc_adds/RMNews.htm
(accessed June 24, 2009).

3.
Zell Miller gave his speech on June 22, 1998, and requested $105,000 of public funds, according to “Random Samples,”
Science
, January 30, 1998 (
www.scienceonlineorg/cgi/content/summary/279/5351/663d
).

4.
“Slovak Hospital Plays Mozart to Babies to Ease Birth Trauma,” Agence FrancePresse, September 10, 2005,
www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=25923
(accessed May 29, 2009).

5.
F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky, “Music and Spatial Task Performance,”
Nature
365 (1993): 611.

6.
Shaw described this idea as a “bold prediction” in the report on the Mozart effect done by the Fox Family Channel on their program “Exploring the Unknown” (broadcast in 1999).

7.
G. L. Shaw,
Keeping Mozart in Mind
, 2nd ed. (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2004), 160. You may be reminded of our comments in Chapter 4 on “neurobabble” as you read these claims about a special relationship between Mozart’s music and the workings of the brain.

8.
Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein, quoted by Shaw
(Keeping Mozart in Mind
, 162).

9.
R. A. Knox, “Mozart Makes You Smarter, Calif. Researchers Suggest,”
The Boston Globe
, October 14, 1993.

10.
According to a report on
NBC Nightly News
, August 1999.

11.
No studies have ever tested infants, a fact noted by Rauscher herself in a quote here: “Random Samples,”
Science
, January 30, 1998 (
www.scienceonline.org/cgi/content/summary/279/5351/663d
).

12.
Followup studies by Rauscher and her colleagues included the following (among others): F. H. Rauscher, G. L. Shaw, and K. N. Ky, “Listening to Mozart Enhances Spatial-Temporal Reasoning: Towards a Neurophysiological Basis,”
Neuroscience Letters
185 (1995): 44–47; and F. H. Rauscher, K. D. Robinson, and J. J. Jens, “Improved Maze Learning Through Early Music Exposure in Rats,”
Neurological Research
20 (1998): 427–432.

13.
C. Stough, B. Kerkin, T. Bates, and G. Mangan, “Music and Spatial IQ,”
Personality and Individual Differences
17 (1994): 695.

14.
All studies of the Mozart effect conducted up to the summer of 1999 are summarized in C. F. Chabris, “Prelude or Requiem for the ‘Mozart Effect’?”
Nature
400 (1999): 826–827.

15.
K. M. Steele, K. E. Bass, and M. D. Crook, “The Mystery of the Mozart Effect: Failure to Replicate,”
Psychological Science
10 (1999): 366–369.

16.
According to a personal communication between Chris and Kenneth Steele, June 13, 2009.

17.
K. M. Steele, “The ‘Mozart Effect’: An Example of the Scientific Method in Operation,”
Psychology Teacher Network
, November–December 2001, pp. 2–3, 5.

18.
Mentioned in Kevin Kwong’s review of upcoming music and theater events in the
South China Morning Post
entitled “Just the Ticket,” August 25, 2000.

19.
A. Bangerter and C. Heath, “The Mozart Effect: Tracking the Evolution of a Scientific Legend,”
British Journal of Social Psychology
43 (2004): 605–623. This paper argues that coverage of the Mozart effect supports the theory that rumors and legends spread because they “address the needs or concerns of social groups.” We agree, and we argue further that the particular need involved here is the need to believe that all of us have untapped mental potential that can easily be released. Adrian Bangerter published an expanded version in French as
La diffusion des croyances populaires: Le cas de l’effet Mozart
(Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2008).

20.
The most famous exposition of this argument appears in S. J. Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man
(New York: Norton, 1981).

21.
Sir Francis Galton performed this experiment at a country fair in England and reported it in this article: F. Galton, “Vox Populi,”
Nature
75 (1907): 450–451. For more on this topic, see J. Surowiecki,
The Wisdom of Crowds
(New York: Doubleday, 2004); and C. Sunstein,
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

22.
E. G. Schellenberg and S. Hallam, “Music Listening and Cognitive Abilities in 10 and 11 Year Olds: The Blur Effect,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1060 (2005): 202–209.

23.
K. M. Nantais and E. G. Schellenberg, “The Mozart Effect: An Artifact of Preference,”
Psychological Science
10 (1999): 370–373.

24.
In addition to the “Blur Effect” study mentioned earlier, two other published studies have failed to find a Mozart effect in school-age children: P. McKelvie and J. Low, “Listening to Mozart Does Not Improve Children’s Spatial Ability: Final Curtains for the Mozart Effect,”
British Journal of Developmental Psychology
20 (2002): 241–258; and R. Crncec, S. J. Wilson, and M. Prior, “No Evidence for the Mozart Effect in Children,”
Music Perception
23 (2006): 305–317. The mistaken impression that the Mozart effect works best with fetuses, which led some parents to play classical music to their unborn children by wrapping headphones around the mothers’ bellies, might have arisen from publicity given to another finding by Rauscher, published in another obscure journal. She reported exposing rats to the magical Mozart sonata for 60 days in utero, plus several days after they were born, and comparing these animals with a control group for maze-running ability. The Mozart-exposed rats did better (Rauscher, Robinson, and Jens, “Improved Maze Learning”). Rauscher’s bête noire, Kenneth Steele, later pointed out that limitations on the auditory perception abilities of rats
prevent them from hearing
many of the notes in the sonata. See K. M. Steele, “Do Rats Show a Mozart Effect?”
Music Perception
21 (2003): 251–265. However, Rauscher continued to trumpet her rat studies, claiming that gene expression was different in the brains of Mozart-exposed rats compared with control
rats. See F. H. Rauscher, “The Mozart Effect in Rats: Response to Steele,”
Music Perception
23 (2006): 447–453. This is not surprising, of course: The brain processes music—it doesn’t go in one ear and out the other—so one would expect to find
some
difference between brains exposed to even just a few notes of music and brains exposed to something else. Finding such a difference, whether in gene expression, blood flow, electrical activity, or whatever, is irrelevant to the debate over the Mozart effect unless the difference is linked to a change in performance that is specific to Mozart’s music, and not just a consequence of changes in mood or arousal that could result from many different kinds of stimulation.

25.
B. Mook, “In a ‘Tot’-anic Size ’01 Deal, Disney Buys Baby Einstein,”
Denver Business Journal
, March 1, 2002 (
www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2002/03/04/focus9.html
).

26.
V. C. Strasburger, “First Do No Harm: Why Have Parents and Pediatricians Missed the Boat on Children and the Media?”
Journal of Pediatrics
151 (2007): 334–336.

27.
F. J. Zimmerman, D. A. Christakis, and A. N. Meltzoff, “Associations Between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children Under Age 2 years,”
Journal of Pediatrics
151 (2007): 364–368. The CDI gives a percentile score for a child based on how many of the ninety words he or she knows and says; the estimate of 8 percent reduction per hour of viewing is based on a drop of seventeen percentile points. That is, consider Jane and Tanya, two children from similar families and with similar experiences, differing only in that Jane never watches baby DVDs but Tanya watches them for an hour per day. If Jane has an average vocabulary for her age (i.e., she is at the 50th percentile), then Tanya would be expected to be at the 33rd percentile, and to use 8 percent fewer words than Jane. Smaller-scale studies have found similar negative effects for some educational TV programming; e.g., see D. L. Linebarger and D. Walker, “Infants’ and Toddlers’ Television Viewing and Language Outcomes,”
American Behavioral Scientist
48 (2005): 624–645.

28.
R. Monastersky, “Disney Throws Tantrum Over University Study Debunking Baby DVDs and Videos,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, August 14, 2007 (
chronicle.com/news/article/2854/disney-throws-tantrum-over-university-study-debunking-baby-dvds-and-videos
).

29.
Disney spokesman Gary Foster was quoted in H. Pankratz, “Retraction Demanded on ‘Baby Einstein,’”
The Denver Post
, August 14, 2007 (
www.denverpost.com/news/ci_6617051
). In September 2009, Disney announced that it would offer refunds to purchasers of Baby Einstein DVDs during the previous five years. See T. Lewin, “No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund,”
The New York Times
, October 23, 2009, p. A1.