Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [90]
The biorhythm cycles at the beginning of a person's life, assuming a midnight birth. Each vertical bar represents midnight following a 24-hour period. The solid line is the 23-day "physical" curve, the dashed line is the 28-day "emotional" curve, and the dotted line is the 33-day "intellectual" curve. "A" points are "potentially dangerous," according to some experts, and "B" points represent "half-critical" days. In this initial 31-day month, there are 5 "half-critical" days, 5 "critical" days, one "triple-critical" day, 3 "low points," and 6 "potentially dangerous" days! There are only 4 "peaks."
Expressed on a graph that plots time (in days) against amplitude of the cycle curves, all three cycles are shown to begin at the moment of birth at zero, ascending in the positive direction, then descending to the zero line and below it into the negative area. This is repeated exactly, the three curves weaving closer and then farther apart, not to come together at the zero line exactly as at birth for more than half a century. We are told by the experts that when any curve crosses the zero line, a "critical day" has occurred, one in which there is a tendency to fail or to be susceptible to certain weaknesses. The masculine cycle is often called the "physical" curve, the feminine cycle the "emotional" one, and the third cycle the "mind" curve. There are refinements of these basic rules, as we shall see, but this is the basis for all claims made by biorhythm advocates.
As might be expected, two of these lines coming close together at the zero line portends a particularly dangerous "double-critical" day. A critical 23-day (masculine/physical) intersection means that one's health is in danger. Similarly, emotional criticals occur in the 28-day cycle, and mental crises are due every 33 days. Of course, all cycles are critical halfway through the designated full-cycle periods, since the curve crosses the line twice in a cycle. For biorhythm believers, it would seem that life is simply fraught with danger. One hardly dares to step outside one's house during most of the month...
Biorhythm has become such a popular fad that some businesses have used it as an amusing diversion or advertising gimmick. The Bell System recently programmed one of its highly sophisticated computers to produce biorhythm readouts for passersby at an Air Force Association convention in Washington, D.C. Not to be outdone, Sanders Associates got into the act by putting its "Graphic 7" system to work on the same job. But Bell goofed and got one cycle two days ahead and another three days behind. When a theory is useless at best, its boosters should at least try to get the resulting misinformation right!
Bell's biorhythm ploy was astonishing, and not only because it generated "claptrap" for a sophisticated clientele. The telephone company also insisted on having the computer quote totally untrue and hyperbolic claims made in some of the madder biorhythm books. Under the heading "What is a Biorhythm?" the computer innocently pecked out the nonsense that United Airlines used 6,000 to 8,000 biorhythm charts for its employees, that 90 percent of a sample 1,000 accidents happened on "critical" days, and all the usual about the "firmly established" cycles. Mind you, it also called biorhythm a "pseudoscience" and suggested that" maybe there is nothing more to biorhythms than there is to some old wives' tales," but the impression given was that the Bell System believed enough in biorhythm to program a computer for the project, thus giving a measure of respectability to this notion. The biorhythmists can be depended upon to publicize the Bell System's use of the theory as further evidence that their quaint notion is a legitimate science.
If one looks closely enough at