ASM017 Essential Oils, Modesty and Talking to the Dead

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essential oils modesty culture and talking to the dead all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life we open registration this week on belong it's the first conference event by the liturgist and it's a safe place for us to get together and conversations about science and faith and art and life and all the ways that those things are changing you can find out more on my website but for now let's get it started hey science mike this is ben uh my question is regarding the use of essential oils for medical purposes i have a lot of people in my family uh specifically my mom and aunt and grandparents that have gotten into using these oils for different medical purposes curing a headache curing back pain they'll rub it on their big toe or behind their ear or put in a caplet and swallow it they say that it has all kinds of reliable effects i've even used it and it's cured a headache but i was wondering how much of this is a placebo effect are there any scientific studies behind the reliability of the use of oils for medical purposes i know the ancients used it for all kinds of different purposes but i just wanted to hear what your thoughts were thank you so much for all the work that you do for this podcast and for the liturgists you've helped me a lot growing in my faith and relating it to science and modernity ah thanks for taking my question one of my best friends in the world swears by essential oils absolutely swears by them gets other people to use them so and she's smart knows a lot about modern medicine she's smarter than i am anyway as a person another one of my friends swears that essential oils stopped her husband from snoring so we talk about the placebo effect which is a psychological phenomenon wherein if you believe doing something will have some effect on your physicality or the way you feel it measurably will more than chance so the placebo effect is a real thing but the placebo effect certainly wouldn't apply to snoring right you're asleep you don't have a psychological factor at play when you aren't conscious you know certainly a cured headache i could give you a sugar pill and tell you that it's tylenol and there's a decent chance that your headache is going to go away or when your headache goes away naturally you will ascribe it to that pill through something called confirmation bias still doesn't explain the snoring here's the thing anecdotes are not data one person's personal account of a phenomenon does not validate the effect of something because of the placebo effect and confirmation bias among other things that's the reason controlled double-blind studies are essential to the sciences especially medical science because you're trying to eliminate as many extraneous factors as possible that's how medical science works now i notice you mentioned the ancients i do want to mention something about that the ancients also drilled holes in people's skulls for headaches so what the ancients did for medicine is not of any interest to me unless we've done some testing in modern medicine okay now essential oils in general are part of this homeopathic medical movement and things generally live in homeopathy because they haven't been validated by medical trials if they had been they'd be normal medicine and regulated by the fda much more tightly although based on the explosion of things like essential oils the fda is examining the way that it handles non-traditional or alternative medicine but let's talk specifically about essential oils first of all the research is very sparse and what research there is aromatherapists make claims about them that psychologists and neurobiologists reject and further even when we do see some measured phenomenon with essential oils aromatherapists and psychologists and neurobiologists disagree on the mechanism in general i don't trust aromatherapists to give me good science i do trust neurobiologists and psychologists through the peer review process to create good science so here's what the science tells us not the aromatherapists but the science tells us about essential oils number one they smell great i know that seems obvious but it is true that things that smell good can alter your mood we like to be surrounded by pleasant sense that does have a cognitive effect it has an emotional effect and those things are measurable in fact when essential oils were tested on cancer patients they were found to have an effect on depression on anxiety and on stress levels a positive effect here's the problem so did synthetic oils which aromatherapists say aren't the same and so did normal pleasant fragrances like lavender that weren't involved with oils at all things that smell good make us feel good essential oils included now what we're talking about here is is the ability to smell it so behind your ears kind of an odd spot or on your toes or you know that kind of thing uh i'd definitely put that in the folk medicine category but we do know that oil on your skin is a good moisturizer and can have a detergent quality it can clean your skin and moisturize your skin which is one of the reasons the ancients would have been attracted to this oiled skin is healthier skin with it within reasonable constraints and in fact some studies have shown a genuine anti-microbial or even antiviral effect to oils on the skin including essential oils including reduced propensity to transmit or be infected by herpes virus so that's real now the antimicrobial effect of essential oils is less than the anti-microbial effect of soap and warm water but but certainly studies have validated that they can have a measurable even significant antimicrobial effect so basically the science says that essential oils are good for your skin and that they smell good and that other claims about essential oils are dubious at best from a scientific perspective typically if someone makes a claim like this that's medicinal the way you validate it the way you accept that it will work projected across a larger population group and is not just confirmation bias or the placebo is published medical studies and so my response typically when someone tells me about the miracles of essential oils is simply show me the data [Music] our next question comes from the email inbox and it reads science mike can i call you science for short i guess if you want to sure what's your take on modesty culture what's the science to men's sex drives versus women's and the whole visually stimulated thing on the other hand i think that it's making a big deal over nothing on the other my eyes play ping pong when i'm at the beach and bikinis are everywhere help me figure out if i'm a visual creature okay great question uh common question let's talk about attraction for a second um because it's complicated the process by which you're attracted to something or not is a very complicated process it involves both cognitive and physiological factors so cognitively sort of what's happening in the emergent factors of your neurological makeup sexual arousal isn't entirely known but we know that it involves an appraisal and an evaluation of the stimulus the categorization of the stimulus is sexual and an effective response and i'm quoting a paper that is linked on the show notes of ask sciencemike.com because that's a riveting sentence and i'll continue the physiological components of sexual arousal include changes in cardiovascular function respiration and genital response erection in men and vasocongestion in women so you have things that you think about when you're attracted to someone and you have things that happen with your body and those correlate or they don't and the end result is you feeling attracted to someone okay so what does that mean for the purported visual differences in the genders well studies have shown that men are in fact more visually aroused at a cognitive level but also more selective about what arouses them so men are typically most aroused by images of a man and a woman in sexual or heterosexual men anyway are aroused by pictures of men and women having sex women are less gender selective so even if their preferred gender is not on the media they still exhibit arousal men much more tied to their chosen gender men also tend to appreciate images that incorporate some form of objectification to both genders whereas women prefer media that allows them to project themselves into the scene at the physiological level men and women show remarkably similar responses so to even to media that women report themselves as not being stimulated by their physiological responses show arousal so there's a bigger disconnect between women self-reporting arousal and men self-reporting arousal and researchers think that that's probably socially driven that's socially social conditioning basically women are told that they're less visual and so they repress their responses to visual stimuli at a cognitive level whereas men are told that they're more visual so that they respond you know more strongly to visual stimulus now there are certainly uh differences and and if we had more time i could cite some other studies and interesting research but it's a problem we take a little bit of research which a lot of it has to be filtered through social science and we take a lot of anecdotal observation and the end result is that we objectify women we turn them into sex objects and then vilify that sexuality uh we tell women that if they expose parts of their bodies that they are being unethical or immoral and they're affecting the will and agency of men that they're inviting rape and and we're emphasizing and vilifying their physicality at the same time we're telling men that they are weak willed sexually driven beings who can't exhibit willpower and studies don't validate this studies do not validate the fact that visual stimulus can put men into some sort of uncontrollable state of sexual arousal and that's the damage of this modesty culture narrative it actually frustrates me a great deal because we tell women that their bodies are beautiful but dangerous which tells them that women are primarily physical beings that the rest of their attributes are subordinate to their physical appearance and that their appearance taken too far is dangerous and and we create this culture in which men pursue and conquer women in which our media portrays women primarily as sex objects now the equality movement and feminism has created more quality but primarily frustratingly to me the move has been to simply also objectify men we photoshop men and make them topless and put them on magazine covers as well a healthier approach is to look at the wholeness of a human being and understand that people's bodies are them and they have their bodies but that's not the limit of them and that humans have self-control i realized this most powerfully when i went to one of my clients uh resorts with my family and we went to a beach that had a lot of europeans there and a lot of the women were topless and my southern baptist southeast conditioned brain expected that to be this shocking calamity and instead it was the biggest non-issue i've ever seen nobody cared nobody ogled nobody was titillated everybody just enjoyed their time on the beach you see the stories we tell ourselves about how we approach the world matter and so we tell girls that their belly buttons are dangerous or that their nipples are shocking we create a culture that overemphasizes their bodies and under-emphasizes their minds and when we tell men and men tell themselves that they can't help but be titillated by visual imagery we empower the distribution of really damaging pornography in our society of we empower rape culture and we weaken the will of men so of course you play ping pong at the beach because you're a heterosexual male and women are attractive to you today a lot of women also play ping-pong with their eyes at the beach as they watch attractive men walk by and there's nothing wrong with that that's how humans have found other humans to make humans with as long as there have been humans but the danger comes when we start to vilify and fear that physicality or obsess over it i say it's much more healthy to accept the fact that we as humans are of course attracted to other humans but that every human is much more than a body every human is also a person who is trying to move through life to succeed and to do good and to look only at belly buttons and backsides fails to look at the whole person [Music] hi science mike my question is about the science of the afterlife or more specifically the science of being able to connect with those who've passed away through a medium we've all seen reality shows or read books or articles about those who say they're able to connect with the those who've passed away and even send messages back and forth between loved ones and then of course there's first samuel 28 where king saul frustrated with god's lack of response goes to a medium and has the medium bring up the ghost of the prophet samuel to give him some advice and even though samuel's pretty kind of annoyed when this happens he does show up and talk to him so i have a close friend who's had personal experience with this type of thing and it was very impactful for her and i i don't really want to write off her experience because it seems out of my realm of understanding so i'm wondering what your thoughts are on it what the science is behind it if and um if you think that this type of view or this type of activity is compatible with being a follower of jesus thank you well let's start with the easy part uh has science validated the claims of people who say they're mediums or that they can talk to the deceased or the dead no it has not and it has tried there have been challenges issued and controlled studies done on mediums and we just absolutely no case of a medium outperforming chance in describing events or knowledge ascribed to people who have passed that's not surprising because science also has not validated that consciousness or life persists in any manner beyond physical death when we talk about the afterlife today we are not talking in the realm of science we are firmly in the land of faith and if you follow my work you know that i appreciate faith i'm a man of faith but i also say that faith is used as a means for determining facts about physical reality tends to produce conflicting claims so faith is a personal matter that means if you believe in an afterlife like most people do i understand that belief i even understand some of the cognitive basis for that belief but you don't have an empirical belief at least as far as i've seen if if you disagree send me an email i'd love to look at your research and also that's true of mediums but and and and i actually spent more time than most questions researching this one to make sure i hadn't missed anything and i was unable to find any peer-reviewed study that validated the work of mediums what i did find was that my hero andrew newberg who is a neuroscientist that studies religious phenomenon has done some brain tests on mediums and this was research of his i hadn't seen and frankly i thought i'd seen his entire body of work since i am an andrew newberg super fan but thanks to your question i found a completely new study where he has brain scan tend mediums and he did find something interesting because five were expert mediums and five were novice mediums and the way that their brains behaved during a medium session was different so expert mediums went into a trance that was similar to a meditative state but without the the corresponding prefrontal cortex focus essentially they gave away some of their agency and in an exchange gave a lot of energy to the parts of the brain associated with creativity so they were in an unfocused creative trance which makes it really easy to buy that mediums honestly believe they're talking to the dead because they would in their own perception potentially experience insights that seem to come from beyond their own consciousness this frankly can be similar to the way that people like myself who when we believe we hear from god our brains probably look very similar uh whereas the novice mediums were concentrating quite quite hard and didn't show that same trance state or that same yielding to the creative centers of the brain now newberg was careful to point out that his test neither proved nor disproved what mediums were up to any more than his tests prove or disprove the existence of god they merely observe what happens in the brain during these moments so you can say that these creative centers are the mechanisms by which the deceased speak to us today through a medium or you can say that it's simply allowing a person's creativity to be perceived as beyond their own consciousness or very empirical or scientifically minded folks are going to look at the previous data where we haven't seen any fact claims that can be verified from mediums and they're going to say i'm going to honor the null hypothesis people who are more faith oriented of course are going to say that our brains are acting as antennas for the immaterial realm i'm going to let you decide you're the listener now i do want to say what about the therapeutic action of talking to a medium and your friend who enjoyed her time well i think talking to a medium could certainly be therapeutic because if you honestly believe you are speaking with one who's passed it could provide closure and it could provide a safe environment with which to grieve on the other hand mediums could prey on your vulnerability and engage in some pretty predatory behavior especially because they aren't regulated in the same manner that other mental health professionals are so i think the safer bet of course is a licensed counselor or psychotherapist but i think if you've got friends or your guards up you want to try medium hey it's okay with me now the last part of your question is the most difficult is this behavior compatible with being a christian i think most christians would say no uh even though there are a couple and i think literally a couple examples in the bible of medium-like behavior especially in the old testament but i think this falls outside of the accepted practice of most of the church today i mean you know me i tend to to hold people in a lot of grace and a lot of compassion if you want to follow jesus and mediums are important to you i'm not going to knock that out at you or tell you you're wrong or evil or anything i do think it's it's further off the beaten path than even most of the things i say for the church so that's it the science of mediums [Music] hi science mike my name is zach my question is about leadership in the church and i guess in general a lot of my story of being in a place where i'm questioning a lot of things in my faith starts with being disillusioned uh because of a leader that i trusted really two leaders that i trusted who experienced some degree of moral failure in my opinion and nothing really extraordinary or extreme just hurtful things and manipulative behavior nothing newspaper worthy but it was hurtful enough and shocking enough in my life and my wife's life that we really have come to question how first we question how the church was organized around certain leaders with a lot of influence and power and then it's led me personally to look at the idea system that a lot of our churches operate under so i guess really what i'm wondering is does science have something to say about leadership and is there some critique that science can give to how a lot of churches that have been historically patriarchal article i guess and sometimes revolve around a single leader operate is there any insight there because i think that's something that i just continue to struggle with when i'm looking at coming back to a church community is being afraid of manipulation and influence from you know someone who has more power than i do in a social structure yeah thanks your podcast really helps a lot well first i want to say i am sorry that you had a clergy person or some spiritual leader fail you in this way and that it affected you profoundly and i also want you to know that this is unfortunately very very common and at least in my interpretation of the data i've seen one of the leading causes that's turning people away from the church today is the abuse of spiritual authority and even outright spiritual abuse and it's it's awful let's talk about what science has to say about it and see if there's any practical application first of all avoiding patriarchy and leadership is pretty easy you can do what i do and go to a church with a female pastor it's just automatic no more patriarchy i hate to make generalizations but i'm going to make one right now i have found typically women pastors to be a bit more empathetic to be a bit more consensus driven and a little less power seeking than your average male pastor there are certainly exceptions both ways in fact there are probably more exceptions both ways than the baseline as always generalizations apply to people groups but never to individual people so that little clip aside let's talk about what happens when people seek and then get power the first thing is surprising the best way to become powerful is to actually be nice humans reward kind behavior with increasing levels of power and responsibility science has shown that pretty clearly however once we get and accumulate power and that power is stabilized and no longer contingent on the approval of others then it starts to change us we act like people with brain damage specifically we act like someone who has damage or impairment in our orbito frontal cortex that's the part of your brain which is in your prefrontal cortex right up in your forehead that helps you make ethical decisions or or evaluate risk and when you secure power you become less empathetic you become more impulsive and you even start to look people in the eye less if you view them as having little or no power and it's a really consistent phenomenon once people feel powerful their behavior changes as does the way their brain processes information oh yucky and let's be honest pastors get powerful so do leaders in the church we give them a lot of power because we connect their role with god who we mentally project absolute power onto so here's the thing it's critical to balance power with accountability boards of directors elder boards and churches church structures you know many churches have central church authorities that have accountability for local leadership although then they what they have bishops or popes or whatever who have again high levels of power and also these accountability structures for power can turn into power structures themselves and then that can foster authoritarianism and once authoritarianism enters a religious institution danger will robinson because the good of the organization now supplants the good of its members and that's how you get a church covering up child rape it's authoritarianism and it's bad every time so what's the answer how do you find or create a spiritual community where the necessary in many ways power offered to her spiritual leadership does not become destructive and doesn't start short-circuiting people's brains transparency more than anything transparency creates accountability especially financial transparency when people have to answer for where the money goes and what the actions are done and once they feel like their frankly actions are being monitored they are more likely to maintain neurological niceness with that transparency it's important to create an environment that fosters open dialogue and honesty and mutual respect and an environment where the prevailing dogma is always open to question and examination do those things and you can minimize this tendency for spiritual authority to become spiritual power authoritarianism and abuse [Music] i think those were some of the best questions this week that we've had in the history of the show so thank you everyone who sent in such interesting and insightful questions and if you haven't put a question to ask sciencemike yet i need your help to keep the show going you can use hashtag asksciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube which almost no one does or you can go to asksciencemike.com and put in a voice message or write out an email for me and i'll read those you can do anonymous questions that way as well and you can also view full show notes with resources for every question on ask sciencemic.com but before you tune out i go into the the close of show spiel i do want to tell you that we've got a lot of stuff coming up and events specifically i've got events that if you happen to be in a given city you can come see me at i'm going to be at praxis in houston in just a couple of weeks if you go to praxisconference.com you can get the full line up the literature's going to be there michael gunger is going to be there sarah bessie's going to be there i'm a huge fan of hers and i'm excited to hear what she does at the conference uh but just a huge cast of interesting people my friend stephen proctor is going to be there aaron nequis is going to be there um so love to see you at praxis also the liturgists the group that i co-founded with michael gunger is putting on an event called belong around spiritual openness if you go to the liturgist.com belong there are a few seats left hopefully there will still be seats by the time the podcast comes out i record this on wednesdays you hear it on mondays so you want to move quick because seats are moving fast and then later in the summer i'm going to be at the wild goose festival i'm really looking forward to that as well they haven't announced the full speaker lineup yet but i've seen some of the names on the docket and it's going to be a great event and of course there's always a wild goose see some really really top-notch musical acts so i'd love to see you at either praxis belong or wild goose or heck all three if you just want to have a science mike summer and i also want to let you know ask science mike is listener supported to the tune of fifteen hundred dollars a month wow that happened today and i'm blown away by your generosity and every single dollar helps a lot of those dollars that make up that 1500 are small donations one dollar a month five dollar a month and it helps this keeps the show going it helps pay for all the bills that i accumulate making the show and getting the show on itunes and delivering all these bits over the internet so it's incredibly helpful and you can change or cancel pledge at any time it's happened i've seen people they come in at one level they realize it's too much they ratchet that down to a number they're more comfortable with don't feel bad about that i appreciate it i've had a couple of people actually email me and apologize for reducing their donation i'm grateful that you would send me any money at all come on thank you and uh listen if money's tight or heck even if you've already donated one of the best things you can do to help the show is to rate the show on itunes give us five stars if you really love the show most people do also if you actually write a review that helps a lot too i read those reviews they're incredibly encouraging you can also tweet or post on facebook any episodes you've really enjoyed that also helps people find this show our show was produced by the amazing canadian greg nordin his work is absolutely valuable i honestly couldn't keep the show going without him so if you get a chance to send greg's twitter love i'd appreciate it of course our theme song is by jeb my bff and if you need original podcast music done he can write theme songs and little turns and all the sounds you hear on the show jeb wrote and recorded and composed and sang and performed what can i say the guy's a ninja that's it for this week and i'll catch you guys next week [Music]