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It was a lazy day today, with one visit to an architectural/history site and then one big and delicious meal.  After we had a leisurely breakfast and did our ablutions, it was nearly 11 a.m.  We then walked the ten blocks to the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters:

The Owens–Thomas House & Slave Quarters (originally known as the Richardson House) is a historic home in Savannah, Georgia, that is operated as a historic house museum by Telfair Museums. It is located at 124 Abercorn Street, on the northeast corner of Oglethorpe Square. The Owens–Thomas House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, as one of the nation’s finest examples of English Regency architecture.

Renovations in the 1990s uncovered and restored one of the oldest and best preserved urban slave quarters in the American South.

. . . The house is notable for its early cast iron side veranda with elaborate acanthus scroll supports on which the Marquis de Lafayette addressed the citizens of Savannah on his visit in 1825.

The house was built between 1816 and 1819, designed by the architect William Jay of Bath and financed and occupied by Richard Richardson. It was then purchased by attorney and politician George Welshman Owens, who was briefly mayor of Savannah and later a U.S. Representative.

The Owens family lived in the house for a while, but after some decades turned it into a boarding house, which is when Lafayette stayed there on his final visit to America on the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution—in which Lafayette played a huge role.

In 1951 the family turned the house over to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences , which still owns it (I visited the other two parts of the Museum on my first day here).

The sign below gives pretty much the same information above.

The front of the house (I forgot to photograph the famous balcony).  When Lafayette, an abolitionist, visited Savannah in 1825, the town kept all the slaves inside, along with the free blacks, so they wouldn’t be incited by Lafayette’s antislavery sentiments.

The back garden of the house, designed to be completely symmetrical. In the rear are the slave quarters.  This is only part of them: the small house held 12 people, and there were a bit more than 20 enslaved people working for the white residents.

This sign was in the slave quarters, explaining why the guides and many of the signs used the terms “enslaved people” instead of “slaves.”

Inside the quarters, which slept at least twelve people, though many of the enslaved, like the cook and those who took care of the chlldren, slept inside the big house.

The dining room.  Food was cooked in the basement, and since there was no dumbwaiter it was carried on trays up two floors from the basement and put in the butler’s pantry before being served.

The butler’s pantry was a small room, with four empty bottles of wine sitting on the sideboard. As the tour moved on, I picked up one of the bottles and saw what’s below: a bottle of Barton and Guestier bordeaux—from 1870! I’d never held a wine bottle that old before.  And this chateau is still going strong; it was founded in 1725.

The structural material of the house was tabby, an equal mixture of sand, burnt oyster shells, water, and ash. It was an early form of concrete, and was quite durable. As you see, the tabby was covered with wood paneling.

This room was presumed to be the library/study, though now they’re unsure what all the rooms were used for.

This is presumed to be the oldest son’s bedroom.

And a mirror, at the bottom of which you can see a selfie of Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus):

The (presumed) master bedroom, now a word that’s out of favor for obvious reasons (I can’t remember what it’s supposed to be called now).

After the tour we walked home and then got in the car to drive to a restaurant I’d scoped out as a likely prospect: great food, not overly expensive and, most important, Southern. Yes, we went to Erica Davis Lowcountry.  It turned out to be all I hoped for, though if you drove by this place you wouldn’t think to go in. But you’d be making a mistake if you didn’t.

We split two appetizers. First, oysters Rockefeller made with local oysters. Wikipedia describes the dish this way:

Oysters Rockefeller is a dish consisting of oysters on the half-shell that have been topped with a rich sauce of butter, parsley and other green herbs, bread crumbs, and then baked or broiled.

There were also collard greens, cream. and Parmesan cheese.  It was scrumptious—the first time I’ve had this dish. With all that garnish you could still taste the oysters, and I love oysters. You’d think the dish would be too busy with all the ingredients, but the flavors mingled perfectly.

Another Southern classic: fried green tomatoes, these with feta cheese and balsamic vinegar reduction.

The menu was so full of good stuff (see the link above) that I asked the waiter what she recommended. Without question she mentioned the shrimp, which are local, fresh, and delicious. So I got a half pound of boiled shrimp. They came with clarified butter, shrimp sauce, and two sides (I chose cheese grits and deep-fried okra).  And oy, were those shrimp good! I ate the shells, of course, as all good shrimp lovers do.

Tim had the Wassaw redfish, described as “pan-seared redfish filet, garlic beurre blanc, heirloom tomato, stone ground grits, fresh green beans.” He pronounced it excellent.

Betsy had two crab cakes along with green beans and cole slaw. As expected, the cakes were almost all lump crabmeat, with just a small amount of filling to hold them together. With a little bit of the sauce on the crab, it was a Platonic version of this dish.

And my Southern dessert: the third helping of banana pudding I’ve had on this trip—this time served in a Mason jar. This was the fanciest version of all I’ve had.  As you can see, it’s topped with whipped cream dusted with vanilla wafer crumbs, with a whole wafer on the side. (Banana pudding sans vanilla wafers is unthinkable.) Then there’s a layer of banana pudding, then a layer of cake, and then a bottom layer of pudding with chunks of banana. This was the best version I had on this trip, and probably the best version I’d ever had. (I’ve eaten it many times, often with BBQ or a meat-and-three plate in the South.)

The meal was terrific, not very expensive, and prepared with great care. I’d recommend this place very highly to anyone who visits Savannah.

People with cognitive decline or early-stage dementia saw their symptoms improve when given bespoke treatment plans that targeted their personal nutritional deficiencies, ongoing infections and environmental exposures

Physicists have long suspected that there is a layer of physical reality beneath quantum theory and a new mathematical model unveils just how strange it might be

A clinical trial to reverse age-related vision conditions using stem cell treatment could finally deliver on the promise of a major discovery in ageing and regeneration made 20 years ago, says columnist Graham Lawton

The same disinformation agents who are trying to erase the history of the pandemic, are also trying to erase the history of MAHA.

The post The MAHA Amnesia Project first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A new analysis of data obtained by JWST on 3I/ATLAS as it was on its way out of the Solar System (in December 2025) showed that its interior is rich in methane ice.

The interplanetary comet 3I/ATLAS is remarkably rich in a specific type of water that contains deuterium, meaning it came from somewhere colder and with lower levels of radiation than our early Solar System.

NASA's MSL Curiosity rover found a bathtub ring-like deposit of zinc, manganese, and iron in Gale Crater. These metals precipitate out of water in the right conditions, and there's not really any other way they could've become concentrated here. Adding to the excitement, these deposits also form in lakes on Earth, where the concentrated metals are food for some types of bacteria.

During the Cretaceous, 19-metre-long predatory octopuses swam the seas, and evidence from their fossilised remains suggest they may have been highly intelligent hunters

A powerful AI kept from public access because of its ability to hack computers with impunity is making headlines around the world. But what is Mythos, does it really represent a risk and might it even be used to improve cybersecurity?

Neutrinos are very difficult to detect. And when they are detected, pinpointing their sources is likewise difficult. New research shows that the most energetic neutrino ever detected must have had an extraordinarly energetic source. It could even be primordial.

Infecting mice with RSV, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms, prevented breast cancer cells from reaching their lungs. This was due to the release of proteins that stop viruses from replicating in the lungs also making it harder for cancer cells to seed new tumours

Fabulist or sincere but mistaken?

In 1989, Bob Lazar told Las Vegas reporter George Knapp that he had worked at a secret facility called S4 near Area 51, where his job was to help reverse-engineer the propulsion system of a craft “not made by human hands.”

More than three decades later, despite other whistleblowers alleging the existence of such programs, Lazar remains a rare figure in claiming direct technical work on a purportedly non-human vehicle. And he is now back in the spotlight because a new documentary, S4: The Bob Lazar Story, directed by Luigi Vendittelli, was released on Amazon Prime in early April 2026, and Lazar then did a burst of media coverage, including Joe Rogan, Area52, and Jessie Michels.

He has claimed to have earned two master’s degrees, one in physics from MIT and the other in engineering from Caltech. Skeptics reported finding no record of him at either institution.

Lazar is a contested figure. He has claimed to have earned two master’s degrees, one in physics from MIT and the other in engineering from Caltech. Skeptics, including ufologist Stanton Friedman, reported finding no record of him at either institution and have pointed to the absence of identifiable professors or classmates who could corroborate his attendance. Friedman also cited evidence that Lazar attended Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles, which he argued was difficult to reconcile with the timeline Lazar later described. Lazar has maintained that records connected to his work were altered or removed. He also pleaded guilty in 1990 to a felony pandering charge in Nevada. Taken together, these elements have remained central to skeptical assessments of his credibility.

But beyond these biographical facts lies a deeper disagreement about how his case should be evaluated at all. Part of the friction in the Lazar debate is about what kinds of evidence people are willing—or able—to perceive. When you listen to Lazar at length, you start processing how his claims are generated. Over time, it produces a strong impression that the account is being recalled rather than constructed. Notably, individuals who have spent extended time with Lazar without prior exposure to his story have described a similar shift: from initial skepticism to the sense that they were dealing with a person recounting, rather than constructing, an experience. For some observers, that distinction becomes difficult to ignore.

Many skeptics, however, operate with a different evidentiary filter. When claims are extraordinary, they tend to discount behavioral authenticity signals almost entirely, treating them as unreliable or irrelevant. Testimony, in this view, is flattened: people lie and misremember, and beyond that there is little to be extracted from the manner of delivery. This has the advantage of protecting against being misled by charismatic or deceptive individuals. But it also comes at a cost. It removes from consideration a set of cues that, while imperfect, are often central to how humans actually evaluate one another in real-world contexts.

So we are left with a perceptual mismatch. Where one person sees constraint, specificity, and resistance to fabrication, another sees only an unverified claim. One may register the difference between a narrative that is expanding versus bounded, while another treats both as functionally equivalent. On top of this, many skeptics place heavy weight on abstract priors—chief among them the assumption that non-human technology is so unlikely that no amount of testimonial evidence can meaningfully shift the balance. Once that prior is fixed, the rest of the evaluation becomes largely procedural.

This produces a kind of epistemic stalemate with asymmetrical risks. If behavioral signals are granted no weight, then no amount of constraint, consistency, or non-performative delivery can ever move the needle. Testimony collapses into a binary of verified or dismissed, and cases like Lazar’s are effectively decided in advance by prior assumptions. But if those signals are taken seriously, even provisionally, then the burden shifts: one can no longer dismiss the account wholesale without offering a comparably structured alternative explanation. The alternative explanations largely fall into two categories: 1) Bob Lazar fabricated the story, or 2) Bob Lazar is sincerely recounting a real experience that he fundamentally misinterpreted. 

Before turning to those explanations, it is worth acknowledging that Lazar’s disputed credentials and legal history are real and relevant, and any serious assessment has to take them into account. They establish that he is not an unimpeachable witness and that elements of his biography invite skepticism. Whether they are sufficient, on their own, to resolve the case is far less obvious.

Bob Lazar is a Fabulist

Lazar’s central claim has not been proved, but several elements once dismissed as fantasy have since entered the documentary record. After his account told to George Knapp, Area 51 was eventually acknowledged by the CIA, and federal litigation in the 1990s showed that the government was willing to invoke state-secrets doctrine and repeated presidential exemptions to shield information about the Groom Lake site. That does not prove Lazar worked on non-human craft, but it does mean one major plank of the old dismissive posture—that he had built an outlandish story around an imaginary place—has aged badly.

The CIA’s own history describes daily air shuttles moving personnel and cargo to the facility

The same is true of the surrounding logistics and of Lazar himself. Beyond a secret base in the desert, his story concerned a tightly compartmented installation serviced through unusual access patterns, including shuttle flights out of Las Vegas. The CIA’s own history describes daily air shuttles moving personnel and cargo to the facility, and reporting from Las Vegas has since made the JANET system (or Janet Airlines—a highly classified, top-secret airline operated for the United States Air Force) and its secure terminal common knowledge. Again, this proves far less than believers want. But it also proves more than skeptics used to allow. A fabulist could have been lucky once. He is harder to dismiss as a mere fabulist when elements of the practical architecture around his story keeps turning out to be real.

It is also worth recalling the context in which these claims were first made. In 1989, even within UFO circles, the idea of intact craft in government possession—let alone reverse-engineering programs—sat at the fringe of an already fringe field. The involvement of the U.S. Navy in such matters was not part of the discourse at all. Whatever one ultimately makes of Lazar’s account, it did not emerge as a straightforward amplification of existing narratives.

Then there is Lazar himself. Whatever one makes of his grander claims, it is no longer serious to imply that he was simply invented out of whole cloth as a nobody pretending to have moved in scientific circles. A 1982 Los Alamos Monitor article identified him as a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, years before the UFO story made him notorious. Even the skeptical archival work that has tried hardest to reduce that credential concedes the key point: Lazar was in the Los Alamos world, and the facility in question was a major user laboratory hosting large numbers of outside researchers and contractors. That does not settle what his precise status was, but it does narrow the space for the old picture of Lazar as a basement fantasist who conjured a scientific persona after the fact.

Taken together, these later confirmations vindicate enough of the external scaffolding of his story to make the pure-fabulist thesis look increasingly strained. Even the once-mocked reference to element 115 no longer belongs to the category of obvious fantasy, though its later recognition by IUPAC does not validate Lazar’s specific claims about a stable isotope or gravity propulsion. But the record increasingly undermines the idea that he spun his tale out of pure nonsense. 

The most common objection to Lazar’s credibility concerns his lack of verifiable academic records, particularly his claim of having attended MIT. This is often treated as dispositive. But it only is if one assumes a normal career trajectory. Lazar has consistently maintained—publicly in broad terms, and in more detail in private conversations—that his presence in that environment was tied to recruitment into classified work. If that is even partially true, the absence of a standard paper trail is a predictable outcome. That explanation may be challenged, but it is not incoherent, and it is not obviously less plausible than the idea that an individual capable of navigating Los Alamos environments simply fabricated an MIT background without anticipating the most obvious line of scrutiny.

That is why the fabulist position now looks less like skepticism than inertia. That model asks us to believe that Lazar wrapped an elaborate falsehood around a secret aerospace world he happened, by chance or intuition, to sketch in several increasingly accurate ways before much of that world entered the public record. That is possible, but it is no longer the modest position. Too much of the story’s external scaffolding has since been independently corroborated to go on speaking as if we are dealing with a man who simply spun a science-fiction yarn out of thin air.

Bob Lazar is Sincere but Mistaken

Lazar may not be lying, this argument goes, but that does not mean he is reporting reality accurately. He may be recounting a real experience, interpreted incorrectly.

At first glance, this sounds like a reasonable position. It avoids the embarrassment of outright credulity while refusing the cheap certainty that he is simply a fraud. It lets one acknowledge the obvious fact that Lazar does not present like a conventional fabricator without having to follow that concession where it may lead.

“He believes what he is saying” has no explanatory power.

The trouble is that this middle position is often treated as though it were self-supporting. It is not. “He believes what he is saying” has no explanatory power. It tells us something about Lazar, but almost nothing about the world. To get from there to a real account of events, one has to specify how a sincere man ended up with this particular story: a decades-long account of a highly unusual engineering environment, populated by sharply bounded details that do not behave like decorative embellishments.

A more concrete version of the “sincere but mistaken” hypothesis is sometimes proposed: that Lazar did have some level of access to classified environments, but in a limited or peripheral role—variously described as a technician, contractor, or even something as mundane as scanning badges—after which he constructed a far more elaborate narrative around fragmentary exposure. In this version, the expansion is not assumed to be deceptive, but the result of inference that gradually hardened into belief. This is, in many ways, the strongest non-fabulist alternative. It preserves sincerity, explains his familiarity with certain logistical details, and avoids the need to posit a decades-long fabrication.

But this refinement simply relocates the core difficulty. It still has to explain how limited, peripheral access could generate a highly specific, mechanically structured account of a system he would not have meaningfully interacted with. It must also explain why that account exhibits the same constraint, stability, and resistance to embellishment as a bounded recollection, rather than the looser, more adaptive structure one would expect from extrapolation. In other words, it replaces one explanatory burden with another, without clearly reducing the overall cost.

He says he did not believe in flying saucers and thought those who did were nuts.

One striking thing is that Lazar describes initially drawing the ordinary conclusion. When he first saw the craft, he says the American flag on it made him think it belongs to the US, a top-secret breakthrough that would explain the UFO reports he had previously dismissed. He says he did not believe in flying saucers and thought those who did were nuts. Only later did he conclude that it was not human-made. In his account, the non-human inference was what he was pulled into by the structure of the work itself.

That is already a problem for the standard middle position. It means the “misinterpretation” in question cannot be a simple matter of a UFO-minded witness projecting his prior beliefs onto an ambiguous event. Lazar’s own account begins with the conservative interpretation and moves away from it only when the setting itself stops making sense under that frame. The skeptic who grants that Lazar is sincere now has to say more than “people can be mistaken.” Of course they can. The question is: mistaken about what, exactly?

That question becomes sharper once one notices the kind of details around which his account is built. The memorable parts are not the ones a hoaxer would obviously choose. Instead of dwelling on awe, he repeatedly says the dominant feeling when coming into contact with the craft was ominous, even creepy. The emotional tone is constraining.

One need not treat that as decisive.

The same is true of the physical details. Lazar describes the inside of the craft not in grandiose terms but in awkward, almost inconvenient ones: no seams, no stylized features, the same sheen and radius of curvature everywhere, light behaving strangely inside, halogen lamps illuminating where they were aimed but failing to brighten the surrounding interior the way one would expect. Luigi Vendittelli, director of the S4 documentary that recreated the facility in a VR environment, says that when they built the set, they ran into exactly this problem: the interior remained unexpectedly dark. He presents this as one of the moments that made him feel Lazar had not simply invented a cool image but was describing a physicality that does not lend itself easily to intuitive fabrication. One need not treat that as decisive. But it is exactly the sort of thing that makes the middle position harder. The details are bounded in ways that feel discovered rather than chosen.

That distinction is central. A constructed story tends to optimize for effect, and answers too many questions. Lazar’s account contains stubborn little irregularities. He says the craft turned into sky when he walked beneath it because the light bent around it, and that the weight was simply gone rather than transferred to the ground. He describes people working around a purportedly non-human craft in a surprisingly nonchalant, dusty hangar rather than in the kind of sterilized environment one might imagine from science fiction. These details raise the cost of the fallback explanation that he is sincere and simply mistaken.

He also describes intimidation tactics after going public.

We are also not in the presence of a private mythology floating free of the world. Lazar told Gene Huff first, then John Lear, and brought them out to see a Wednesday-night test flight because he had the schedule. He also describes intimidation tactics after going public: locked car doors and trunks found open, houses entered, George Knapp himself being followed. One can reject some or all of that. But once again, the middle position cannot simply wave it away with the generic proposition that sincere people can misread events. It has to say what kind of reality generates this pattern.

“He believes it” allows a skeptic to concede the very thing that gives the case its force while refusing to pay the price of that concession. But once sincerity is granted, the path to error is no longer cheap. It has to explain why Lazar’s account exhibits the structure of a constrained recollection of a specific environment, rather than that of an interpretation layered over an ambiguous experience.

In short, Lazar’s central claim—the custody and reverse-engineering of non-human craft—remains unproven, but the standard counterclaims do not carry the weight often assigned to them. Treating Lazar as a fabulist requires a level of sustained fabrication that sits uneasily with the structure of his account and its partial alignment with a once-hidden environment. Treating him as sincere but mistaken requires a chain of error that struggles to generate the specific, constrained features of the story. Neither path collapses under scrutiny, but neither settles the matter.

What remains is a less comfortable position: the case resists easy resolution, and the confidence with which it is often dismissed exceeds the explanatory work that has been done.

The Epstein-Barr virus seems to affect gene expression and cell signalling in a way that causes the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is fully of contempt and vitriol for doctors who worked in hospitals, but he literally “loves” lockdowners.

The post The COVID Amnesia Project III:  The Plot to Erase Who Ordered Lockdowns in 2020 first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

One of the most dramatic and memorable scenes from Interstellar comes from Miller’s planet - and if you don’t want a spoiler for an 11 year old movie, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. When the crew arrives on this potential new home for humanity, they are faced with a literal 1.2 km high wall of water bearing down on them quickly. It’s a great representation of how waves on other planets can act differently than on Earth. Admittedly, according to Kip Thorne, the scientific advisor for that movie, those waves are actually caused by the planet’s proximity to a local black hole rather than the wind that forms our waves here.

Physicists have taken a major step toward using AI not just to analyze data, but to uncover entirely new laws of nature. By combining a specially designed neural network with precise 3D tracking of particles in a dusty plasma—a strange “fourth state of matter” found from space to wildfires—the team revealed hidden patterns in how particles interact. Their model captured complex, one-way (non-reciprocal) forces with over 99% accuracy and even overturned long-held assumptions about how these forces behave.

Physicists have taken a major step toward using AI not just to analyze data, but to uncover entirely new laws of nature. By combining a specially designed neural network with precise 3D tracking of particles in a dusty plasma—a strange “fourth state of matter” found from space to wildfires—the team revealed hidden patterns in how particles interact. Their model captured complex, one-way (non-reciprocal) forces with over 99% accuracy and even overturned long-held assumptions about how these forces behave.

This interesting case was reported in the literature in 2007. For some reason it was then widely published in the mainstream media in 2015. Now it is making the rounds again on social media to support a false narrative about brain function. The story is of a 20 year old German woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Over the next several months she started to slowly lose her vision – which is an important detail, it was not a sudden loss as a result of the physical trauma. After evaluation she was diagnosed with psychogenic blindness, meaning that it was not due to any physical damage to her visual system but was rather due to psychological stress. This patient also has what is now called dissociative disorder, or multiple personality, with 10 distinct personalities.

What makes the case even more interesting is that, with therapy, some of her personalities regained vision while others did not. Eventually eight of her ten personalities regained vision. This presented a rare, perhaps unique, opportunity to study the underlying neuroanatomical correlates of psychogenic blindness – what is happening in the brain when someone loses the ability for conscious sight despite their visual system working?

Psychogenic or functional neurological disorders are a complex and poorly understood phenomenon in which emotional stress and trauma presents as physical neurological symptoms. Common presentations include paralysis, language difficulty, sensory loss, and blindness. The diagnosis is mostly one of exclusion, which means sufficient examination and study is done to rule out any demonstrable damage, lesion, or other physical cause. This does not mean the patient is faking (technically called malingering) – that is a distinct condition that can usually be distinguished from a functional disorder. Usually patients with a functional disorder are very distressed by their symptoms and want further examination to find out what is wrong. In addition to simply ruling out physical causes, the diagnosis of a functional disorder can be supported by some positive evidence from the neurological exam. With psychogenic blindness, for example, patients will have normal pupillary responses (assuming no separate baseline deficit), and will have a normal reaction to optokinetic testing.  This involves moving vertical black and white stripes horizontally across their vision. This will cause an involuntary response of tracking the stripes with eye movements. If this happens then we know that visual information is getting in and making its way to the visual cortex.

With functional neurological disorders what we do not know is what specific pathways in the brain are causing the symptoms. The hypothesis is that higher brain functions are somehow interfering with or inhibiting more basic functions. Those higher brain functions, the ones responsible for our subjective awareness and consciousness, are extremely complex. There is a lot of emergent behavior there, where we experience the net effect of many processes in the brain. Also, the more we investigate brain function with the latest tools the more we are discovering that communication in the brain does not just flow from basic inputs (like vision) to the higher conscious centers of the brain, but also back down, meaning that our higher brain centers can influence the basic processing of information. When you think you hear something, your brain makes it sound more like what you think you are hearing. When you see a shape that your brain matches to a giraffe, your cortex then sends signals back down the chain to construct the image to make it look even more like a giraffe. This is critical for pulling signals out of noise and for our ability to make sense of all the information coming it, but it also tends to generate illusions.

We also have to note that there is a lot of neurodiversity when it comes to brain anatomy and function – some people literally have pathways in their brain that most other people do not, or the relative robustness of specific pathways may differ wildly. Some people, therefore, may simply have neurological abilities that others lack. This case is very unusual – the person in question is neurologically capable of having a dramatic functional disorder, which may not be true of everyone. She also has dissociative disorder, which again is extremely rare. It would not be reasonable to assume she is neurotypical, and that we can extrapolate from her to the general population.

With those caveats in mind, the doctors studying her did something interesting – they performed a visual evoked potential (VEP) on her while she was exhibiting a personality that was blind and again while she was exhibiting a personality that could see. What a rare opportunity to compare the two states. The VEP essentially is a test in which a flash of light is given to the patient while electrodes record the response from her visual cortex. There is typically a delay of about 100 ms. If this is significantly slow or absent that could indicate a lesion in the visual pathway. This was a common test to evaluate patients with MS, for example, but is less common now due to more advanced MRI scans and other methods. They found that the VEP was present and normal while she expressed a personality that could see, but was absent when she had a personality with persistent psychogenic blindness. That is a rather incredible result, indicating that there is some process in her brain that is actually suppressing her visual system. To be clear, there is no conscious way to do this (again, at least not known, but I guess this could be the way in which she is very neuroatypical). So it seems that her psychogenic blindness was do to a reversible inhibition of her visual pathway, in a way that would block the VEP.

This was exactly what the researchers were looking for, trying to determine at which neurological level the psychogenic blindness originates, at least in this subject. This also means that VEPs cannot be used to reliably distinguish organic blindness from psychogenic blindness. I really want to know what her optokinetic testing found, but could not find this information in the report. However – a 2001 study of 72 subjects with psychogenic blindness found that every one had normal VEPs. VEPs are still used to assess these patients – a normal VEP does suggest a nonorganic cause of blindness, however it is recognized that an abnormal VEP does not rule out a psychogenic cause.

As interesting as all this is, this case is being used by some promoters of a particular type of dualism, specifically the notion that the brain is a receiver or filter for an external consciousness. The case is being misinterpreted as meaning that “experience determines neurological function” rather than the other way around. This, of course, is not true, for the reasons I outlined above. Experience is in the brain, and this just represents the brain affecting itself. I always find it sad and frustrating when truly interesting science is missed because it is being misused to promote pseudoscience or magic.

The post A Unique Case of Psychogenic Blindness and Multiple Personality first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

It breaks my heart to have to report this, but somehow Vashti and her brood of seven ducklings vanished from Botany Pond sometime after Tuesday morning, and have not been seen since.

I have no idea what happened. They were last seen at the pond during Tuesday’s morning rain showers, with the brood warmly tucked under Vashti’s belly.  Now: no ducks—not a trace. The only one left is Armon, who swims disconsolately around the pond and refuses food. He has lost his family.

It was probably not predators: no bodies were found. I’ve ascertained that no workpeople were in the pond during the week.  Either someone scared them away or they walked away, something that hasn’t happened before.

Whatever is the case, the ducklings will probably perish, as the nearest body of water is too far away for little ones to walk.

The members of Team Duck and I are devastates. The seven ducklings were healthy, Vashti was being a great mother, and even Armon stepped up to protect the brood. The invading undocumented drakes left the brood alone. Everything promised a great duck season, and I was looking forward to helping the little ones grow up into adult mallards.

That, it seems, is not to be. This portends to be The Year Without Ducklings.