Pseudo-neuro-psycho-physio-linguistics for fun and profit

Quite an excellent blast from the recent past over at badscience.

Apparently a certain someone has not forgiven Ben Goldacre for, earlier this year, pointing out the absurdity of a television programme he (the certain someone) had been involved with called 'The Agatha Christie Code'. Ben links to his earlier discussion, which is...quite extraordinary.

To get a flavour of what this was about, consider the show's press release (provided at badscience). On the one hand, it essentially tried to dress up the blindingly obvious in something more profound-sounding:

Christie deliberately makes use of a repetitive core vocabulary and everyday English. These devices force readers to concentrate on the plot and the clues rather than be distracted by clever wordplay. Readers of Christie are seldom distracted by heavy use of adjectival or adverbial phrases (the statistical count of these type of phrases is proportionally far lower than any of contemporaries such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

(Ah, the good old 'repetitive core vocabulary', something you'll find quite a lot here at Obscene Desserts...).

It also made claims like the following:

A detailed computer analysis of Christie’s literary output undertaken by linguistic experts from the University of Warwick, University of Birmingham, London University and King’s College, London, has found a clear pattern of recurring literary devices that stimulate higher than usual activity in the brain.

These phrases act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction.

The release of these neurological opiates makes Christie’s writing literally unputdownable.

According to the study, Christie repeatedly employs literary techniques which at first glance appear deceptively simple but in fact resemble many of the patterns used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a cognitive science employed by hypnotherapists and psychologists which is concerned with the importance of words in ordering thoughts and behaviour.

Sounds - sort of - fascinating. If there were anything to it. Which there's not.

Back in January, Ben wrote a long and very entertaining post about this episode, including his correspondence with “project leader Dr Roland Kapferer PhD” (note: a Dr and a PhD...wow!) who turns out be a philosopher and TV producer rather than anyone who should in any way related to scientific claims about neurological opiates, physiochemical responses and the 'combinatorial structure' of Christie's writing.

Kapferer says it was all a bit of a laugh, really.

Ben says:

So I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the public are confused about science, for the simple reason that the media is full of grandiose humanities graduates, acting as self-appointed experts and science communicators, who construct their own parody of what they think science is: and then, to compound their crime, they go on to critique science, as if their parody was the reality.

(As a reminder, you can find the whole story here.)