\nIt\u2019s a hoax, folks. Sorry to be the spoiler of a feel good story\u2014that of Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly \u201cwoke up\u201d from a 23-year long coma\u2014but the hard truth must win out over hopeful emotions. Houben\u2019s \u201ccommunications,\u201d his \u201cstatements\u201d about how he\u2019s been aware all along of his condition, his \u201ctalking\u201d to reporters (all descriptive terms used by hardened journalists softened into bleeding heart jelly) is nothing more than the \u201cideomotor\u201d effect, where the brain subtly and subconsciously guides the hands and fingers over a keyboard, or a Ouija board, or directs the movements of dowsing rods in search of underground water……<\/span><\/p>\n…. Houben is just sitting there in a chair looking like he\u2019s in a coma, with the facilitator standing next to him, his hand firmly gripped by hers, guiding his hand over the keyboard. ….<\/span><\/p>\nA simple test to prove my claim: show a picture of an object (say, a cat) to the facilitator and show a different picture of an object (say, a dog) to Huben. Don\u2019t let either one see the other photographs. Then see what gets typed: cat or dog? As a control, show them both the same picture and see what gets typed. Prediction: Whatever the facilitator sees is what will get typed. Would someone there please run this simple test?<\/p>\nSuch a test was already done<\/strong> in the 1990s when something called \u201cFacilitated Communication\u201d (FC) was all the rage with autistic children who, just like the Coma Man, \u201csuddenly awoke\u201d from their long sleep and began talking up a storm and sounding all the world like perfectly normal bright children, some even returning to school to take classes. Only they weren\u2019t. Normal. Or talking. A facilitator stood next to a child, held his or her hand firmly in a grip with the index finger pointing down over a keyboard, then typed. In controlled tests by experimental psychologists, a photograph of an object was shown to the facilitator and a photograph of an object was shown to the child. Neither one saw what the other one saw. Sometimes the pictures were of the same objects, sometimes they were different. Result: whatever the facilitator saw is what got typed, 100% of the time, and never (0%) did what the child see get typed unless it was also what the facilitator saw. ….<\/span><\/p>\nPrediction: if the Coma Man story is not thoroughly debunked now, within a short time the families of people in comas will be snapping up these plastic keyboards and facilitating the communication of their loved ones locked up in a broken brain. Only they will be doing no such thing. They will be wasting their time, money, energy, and worst of all their emotions, setting themselves up for being crushed when awareness dawns on them that FC doesn\u2019t work. Please, would someone in the Houben family put an end to this charade before it spreads through the coma community and wreaks emotional havoc.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n(emphasis mine<\/em>)<\/p>\nNo happy endings here. We are merely seeing the ability of human beings to delude themselves, nothing more, nothing less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You’ve doubtless heard about the miracle in Belgium, where a man has been determined to have functioning intellect. I’m with Michael Shermer on this, this is Ouija board style “facilitated communication type hoax: It\u2019s a hoax, folks. Sorry to be the spoiler of a feel good story\u2014that of Rom Houben, the Belgian man who allegedly …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1136,1204,1074],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-junk-science","category-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}