Scientific American
May 20 2007

The (Other) Secret

The inverse square law trumps the law of attraction
By Michael Shermer

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of
wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money
and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they
discover the secret–write a book about how to make a lot of money
and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon
& Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of
self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, have now
sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the
so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts
sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the
form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. "The
only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are
blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts," we are told.
Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic
sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such
vainglorious money mantras as "Everything I touch turns to gold," "I
am a money magnet," and, my favorite, "There is more money being
printed for me right now." Where? Kinko’s?

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is
grounded in science: "It has been proven scientifically that a
positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative
thought." No, it hasn’t. "Our physiology creates disease to give us
feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re
not loving and we’re not grateful." Those ungrateful cancer patients.
"You’ve got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for
nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body’s hydrogen into energy
through nuclear fission. "Thoughts are sending out that magnetic
signal that is drawing the parallel back to you." But in magnets,
opposites attract–positive is attracted to negative. "Every thought
has a frequency…. If you are thinking that thought over and over
again you are emitting that frequency."

A pantheon of shiny happy people assures viewers that The Secret is
ground in science.

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents
flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance
with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic
field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of
California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule
and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive
superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily
shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse
square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source
is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that
source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as
another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy
that the closer object receives. The brain’s magnetic field of 10^-15
tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by
other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of
10^-5 tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts
than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never
equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of
Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews–along
with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the
massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans–had it
coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah’s
backing of The Secret on her Web site: "The energy you put into the
world–both good and bad–is exactly what comes back to you. This
means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you
make every day." Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to
enslave them?

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle–as you
did when you discovered that James Frey’s memoir was a million little
lies–and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good
dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

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