PBS is in pledge drive mode and it’s showcasing the infomercial “Change your Brain, Change your Life”, hosted by Dr. Danial Amen.

PBS is of course free to run whatever it wants, but I do have problems when it runs such programming from a man featured on Quackwatch and has had his clinic compared to Phernology. 

Salon has a good article on him called “Brain Scam”. Here’s an except:

For example, on his Web site, Amen touts NeuroMemory, a non-FDA-approved combination of folic acid and various plant extracts, including Huperzine A, a moss extract that has some anti-cholinesterase properties. The Alzheimer’s Foundation warns that such drugs are “unregulated and manufactured with no uniform standards.” Even the manufacturer issues (in small print) the following warning: “These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any diseases.”

John Stossel from ABC news likes to rustle feathers.  In many cases because he does it with reports on common myths, such as the Full Moon effect.

In this clip you’ll see the same patterns people use to support the supernatural: Anecdotal evidence and reliance on self-perception (i.e. “I can feel it”) rather than empirical evidence.

60 Minutes had a great segment on how even in the most seemingly of certain eyewitness testimony cases, that testimony can be wrong. It can go wrong because people can be wrong due to faulty memory.

As Leslie Stahl points out in the beginning of segment two, of the 200+ wrongful convictions, 75% of them where originally convicted (in part) on eyewitness testimony.

The second segment then goes into how memories can be contaminated and how the police line up system can help reinforce the incorrect memory.

Part I

Part II

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