What the Bleep Do We Know!?

[Hoopster81]

I watched this film last night and thought it was well done. I would love to hear from people on this board who have seen it (especially the fundamentalists).

Here is a bit torrent link and it is well seeded.

Please discuss!

[Cumulonimbus]

Awesome film. Love the part with the cups of water. This world really is mind-over-matter.

[hmkpoker]

I really didn't care for it, personally. The psychology aspect is very elementary (I saw it during my last semester as a psychology major, though, so there's a bias), and the quantum physics aspect seemed like a good plug for the possibilities and topics of interest in QP, but the science was lacking.

I was not terribly impressed by their list of experts either..."Ramtha" was pretty bad from a scientific standpoint.

[Peter666]

I clicked the link to see the movie, but got distracted by the topless girl and the masturbating girl on the left who apparently live in my area. All I know is that is something I want to know more about, and renders philosophical discussions useless.

I was really disappointed by this movie since I had such high expectations. A decent amount of real scientists and real science, but edited/mixed in with some junk science and a horrible melodramatic cheesy presentation and otherwise bad direction. I especially wanted to kill that annoying woman, who I guess is probably the one called Ramtha from the previous poster, but I couldn't remember her name. I've not heard anything to this effect, but I'm almost certain some of the legit experts featured in this will have subsequently expressed their disapproval.

Worth watching for anyone that hasn't seen it though.

Oh, what a piece of crap. Basically propaganda for a new-age cult. Should have been called "We don't know #$@!"

Here's a scientific take from Popular Science. Short version: most of the "experts" weren't experts at all, and the one who was a physicist was taken wildly out of context. His comment, on seeing the film: "Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed."

Salon has an in-depth article about the movie's cult links.

I'm all for movies about philosophy. I really liked Waking Life. This movie, however, is a lying sack of #$@%.

Also, about the water stuff. He obviously labelled the water, then looked through it to find crystal structures that supported what he wanted to find. If he found an ugly one in the "Love" cup, he didn't take a picture of it. The Amazing Randi, a skeptic-debunker type, has offered the guy $1,000,000 if he can pass a double-blind test. In other words, Randi would label water, freeze it, remove it from the containers, and give it to him, and he would have to tell whether the labels were positive or negative. Needless to say the offer hasn't been taken up.

[Hoopster81]

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Needless to say the offer hasn't been taken up.

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I agree 100%. I actually stumbled upon that guy's book a few months back, thought it was hogwash then and still do today.

Also, I have issues with the story about the Indians not being able to see the clipper ships in the sea. I just don't believe that selection would create a brain that would treat a completely unknown entity that way. Rather, it seems as though something completely unknown should really stick out and envoke a strong fear response (becauser it just might want to eat you).

Probably my favorite part was the segment concerning the hypothalamus, and people being addicted to certain emotional states. However, I come from a biochemisrty/physiology background, and it is possible that this notion is a very elementary aspect of psychology (a subject I never had the chance to study).

I saw this movie a while ago, I was pretty suspicious about the examples with the water and the ships as well. Even though I thought the movie was pretty interesting, especially the stuff about quantum physics. At the time I had also just finished reading "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", which I thought explained quantum physics really well if you just ignored the ties the author makes to Buddhism.

Yeah, I don't believe the Columbus story either. I'd never heard of it before this movie. Where would the story have even come from? The indigenous people didn't have a written language. It would have been pretty hard to transmit it orally, since they were basically exterminated in the next few centuries. Shenanigans.

As a neuroscientist, I call BS on the hypothalamus stuff too. There is a grain of truth here. The hypothalamus is involved in endocrine secretion, and that function can be altered by stress and emotional states. The idea that we can "decide" how we're going to feel is one that I wouldn't dismiss out of hand, but I don't think there's robust evidence that people can "switch off" negative emotions and "switch on" positive ones.

However, the movie goes way, way beyond that. I took this summary from a review:
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Emotions cause the hypothalamus to create and send to the pituitary gland neuropeptides (short-chain amino acid sequences) to be delivered to every cell in the body where they create profound chemical changes in the cell after docking with receptors on the cell wall. As with all chemical addictions, we become increasingly immune and need more to satisfy out craving as time passes. When the cell divides, the resulting cells have more receptors for that particular peptide and fewer receptors for vitamins, minerals, proteins and waste elimination. This inability to absorb nutrients and eliminate waste causes aging on the cellular level.

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There are three major inaccuracies.
1) Exposing receptors to a high level of any ligand (the stuff that binds to the receptor) causes a reduction in the number of receptors, not an increase. In fact, this reduction is the physical basis for tolerance of drugs of abuse. If you use heroin, your opioid receptors will begin to disappear, making you less sensitive the longer you use it.

2) Even if the first part were true, the production of hormone receptors is a very small portion of most cells' overall energy budget. Doubling the number of receptors wouldn't have much impact on the cells' ability to support itself.

3) No one really knows what causes "cellular" aging. Aging may be the result of an accumulation of small injuries that never heal 100%. It may be caused by shortening telomeres as cells divide again and again. There's NO evidence it's caused by cells having too many receptors.