You weren’t the first one to think so.
It seems like it would be trivially easy to prove that this poor guy really can communicate.
- Have the facilitator leave the room. Show the guy a series of objects.
- Bring the facilitator back in.
- Have the guy type out what he saw.
If you do this carefully then you’ll know instantly whether the facilitator is BS.
That’s essentially what they did (i.e., split information between the facilitator and the patient) to uncover the facilitated communication frauds back when it first became all the rage, as I understand it. I think the hard part would be getting past the “OMG HOW DARE YOU QUESTION THIS MIRACLE” barrier…
It wouldn’t work because you didn’t beeelieeeeevee!
God, I would literally give $1,000 a punch to punch some people involved in this. Attention girl scouts: Fund raiser!
H.
I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually, but that’s not how the news cycle works. First we hear the story, then the response, then the response to the response. Someone can bump this thread in 6 months and tell us the answer.
Nothing new or revelatory, but still a good read.
God, I can taste the hate at the back of my throat.
H.
There’s an easier way than that that’s less vulnerable to manipulation - the man theoretically speaks Flemish and English, so get a FC practitioner that doesn’t understand either of those languages and start asking the guy questions. When the only thing that comes out is the script to a Swedish Chef sketch on The Muppet Show, you know you’ve got your hands on some bullshit.
Interesting article on MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34212528/ns/health-mental_health//
Basically, how a family was destroyed by FC when the facilitator essentially had their “student” accuse the family of sex abuse.
Wheeler designed an experiment using facilitator/student pairs that had used FC effectively. “Students would be shown simple photographs of common familiar objects and asked to name or describe them,” Wheeler later recalled. “The facilitators would be ‘blind’ to the pictures by use of a three foot high divider running down the length of a table. The divider would end at the far end of the table in a ‘T,’ allowing pictures to be hung on each side. The facilitator could not see the student’s picture and the student could not see the facilitator’s picture
Over a period of three months and 180 trials with 12 students and nine facilitators, FC didn’t work, not once.
This reminds me of the McMartin preschool trial, which is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in our lifetime.
Jesus. I had not heard of this particular brand of bullshit before, and now I’m really angry. I certainly hope that most of the so-called facilitators are unconsciously rather than consciously influencing the output, because otherwise the ones who reported sexual abuse (21 cases referenced in that article!) are the lowest scum in the universe, rather than simply gullible idiots with no scientific aptitude.
Six weeks later, the story is completely different.
The Associated Press mistakenly claimed that Laureys taught Houben how to communicate and later noted that Laureys used sophisticated brain-activity scans to diagnose Houben (he hadn’t—though experimental scans were later made, the CRS was all it took for an accurate diagnosis). None of its coverage mentioned the Coma Recovery Scale. Even worse, the presence of the much-debated facilitated-communication technique took the story in a different direction. …
In reality, Laureys didn’t need advanced technology to diagnose Houben, who doesn’t meet the definition of a locked-in patient. Laureys actually can’t verify that the patient was fully conscious for all those 23 years. Nor did Laureys acquaint Houben with “facilitated communication”…
In fact, facilitated communication is so rare that it’s a nonissue for most brain-injury patients. Neither Laureys nor Giacino has ever seen another brain-injured patient use it.
The plot thickens…
Laureys performed an unscientific test of his own: with the therapist out of the room, Laureys showed Houben objects. When the therapist came back in to facilitate, Houben was able to name the objects.
Okay, not foolproof, but that’s a pretty good test. It’s like . . . information is important, maaaan. However it does make a difference if he did it completely surreptitiously, or if he announced he would be testing the therapist. 90% of stage magic is cheating, and the therapist could have looked through a door crack or peephole, or any number of other methods to view the objects.
H.
More importantly, the “unscientific” part of the test raises concern. An awful lot of science is making sure you don’t dick up the test by doing something that ruins your control. I would have preferred that somebody who had a passing knowledge of proper testing procedures (or, barring that, a stage magician) had designed and performed the test.
Not that I believe in FC, but I don’t think a test like this really needs to be all that rigorous. If the therapist couldn’t see the objects, then I can’t explain the results (although it seems likely that someone cheated along the way - told the therapist which objects would be used ahead of time maybe?)
Most practitioners of anything like this are generally quite talented at cold reading - it’s entirely possible that the facilitator could have puzzled out what the objects were just by talking with the other people in the room who aren’t comatose. It doesn’t even have to be intentional - some people do this crap entirely by accident. If the test was double-blinded somehow (send a guy into the room with some stuff, he waves the stuff at our mostly-braindead friend while the practitioner stands outside the room and makes sure nobody gets in, he goes out and takes his bag of crap, the facilitator goes in and has to come up with his answers all by himself in the room with the comatose guy, and then when he’s done you take the answers that he just wrote down and compare them against the list of things that nobody but the guy who showed the things has seen yet), that would help to avoid this kind of interference.
For what it’s worth, Steve Novella went into this case in a fair bit of depth on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe about a month or so back. He’s a neurosurgeon and had been in contact with the doctor who was actually treating this patient.
Sweet, thanks for the Skeptics tip. Grabbing that episode now…
I’ve been downloading, but haven’t listened much yet - now I’m interested.
The most basic question: how would laying hands on a person who is already capable of communication enhance that effect? Either they are capable of self-motivating or not …
The theory of facilitated communication is that the facilitator is reading the incredibly tiny twitches and jutters that the person with whom you are theoretically communicating and moves their hand as indicated, allowing the user to, for example, type on a keyboard.
But how could such activity be better interpreted by a human than directly by an input device, or, failing that, some arguably more sensitive biometric scanner?
If someone can ‘feel’ through the muscles that a person is motivating for a key, then clearly there is enough going on to get an unfiltered reading of it.