Never mention the progress of quantum physics, The Secret and that bleep movie again. Please.

This is a low point for this blog.

has handed me a whole lot of heartbreak.  I am just now coming into my own after I began tempering my "Little Miss Sunshine" personality with a daily dose of reality.  Like many, I don't believe in this theory at all.  But if it happens to lend a hopeless person some hope, than I won't knock it. 

There was a study that was in the news a while back where subjects answered a questionnaire which included a question about whether they considered themselves a lucky person or not. Then they were given a task: Count all the photos in today's newspaper.

But the newspapers had been specially printed for the study and page 3 was a big full-page "ad" that said in huge letter, "You can stop counting now. There are 47 photos." For the most part, the people who had identified themselves as lucky saw this and stopped counting, while the unlucky people didn't notice the ad and counted all the photos. The conclusion was that lucky people are the ones who are aware of the opportunities that others miss.

A positive attitude has nothing to do with quantum mechanics or any other mumbo-jumbo. Read this and learn: http://csicop.org/specialarticles/secrets.html

I think Winston has a great point. The Secret is not really based on quantum physics. Rather, it is based on very basic self-help ideas, such as the power of suggestion, the power of focus, and as Winston pointed out, the power of being optimistic and open minded. These are powerful forces and I think when used in the right context they can definitely help people succeed.

I know some very successful people who swear by The Secret, so I'm definitely willing to keep an open mind and see what it has to offer. Thanks for the resources Nora!

"More like this and I'm off the Wise Bread bandwagon." But we haven't given you our complimentary tin-foil hat and giant "we are #1" foam finger yet.

The Secret, like some other religions, is harmless, mostly a marketing ploy and completely non-provable. I say "some other religions" because most are not harmless.

At least this religion doesn't appear to drive lost souls down the path of self-righteousness and prejudice towards those with differing beliefs at quite the same rate as many others.

People will always need something to hold onto. This is the flavor of the month.

You found $65 on a stair well and kept it? I find that a bit disturbing, small change, even a dollar is one thing, but that much money probably was important to someone. I am all for positive thinking and defining goals -- for me figuring out where I wanted to be helped me realize opportunities that had been there all along but that I wasn't taking advantage of. But I would hope that if I lost something of value someone would try to turn it in to lost and found or something (in fact that did happen to me in college) and I would always try to return something of value I found. I would never want my "good luck" to be at someone else's expense.

and opinionated, no?

I like Will. He gets my nomination for favorite person of the day.

This is something I've been thinking about for some time now. From experience, during those times when I've been most optimistic and positive about the future, they usually result in good things. And when my mental outlook is dark, if often results in more struggles and failure.

This really bothered me because it didn't make sense, why would our thoughts play such a big part in whether we get good or bad luck? Then I came across this book, 'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins, which gave me an insight as to why this was the case. The book is heavy on the science of how the brain operates and gives lots of theories as to how we think, and how we are intelligent. In one of the sections, it describes the process in which our brain causes physical action.

For instance, when we pick up a pen, what actually goes on is our mind envisions my hand reaching out for the pen. The key thing here is that our mind "predicts" that we will successfully reach out and pick up the pen. And it is this prediction that causes the physical action.

Taken into a larger scale, when you are optimistic and feeling good about yourself, you are in full 'predictive' mode. It's almost like you have placed a huge bet that you will be a success, which in turn results in many small choices on our part that results in fulfilling the prediction. Or at least that's the theory.

Whether or not the effect of 'positive thinking' is real, I almost *despise* the way quantum physics is pulled into it. It's really just a way to give magical thinking a scientific patina.

It's like any new scientific discovery: when x-rays were first discovered people rushed to get irradiated by this new mysterious radiation in the belief it would cure everything physical and mental. While people eventually got 'real' about x-rays, quantum physics is much harder to understand and is that much more vulnerable to being used by anyone who wants to deploy a fancy-sounding scientific 'explanation'.

I think the problem works both ways: it gives an unrealistic validity to otherwise uncertain claims, and people are given a glossy-but-incorrect understanding of what quantum physics really is - they'll think "ah - everything is connected" and stop thinking about it. It becomes an excuse to be ignorant.

I welcome a serious attempt to understand if/how/why 'positive thinking' works, but resorting to "quantum physics" hurts that effort more than helps it.

Sure, there are interesting experiments involving quantum effects, and some of those experiments are analogous to some human endeavors, but that in no way makes them equivalent.