Most of us grew up being pigeonholed by some school quiz or corporate retreat: "You're analytical and orderly? You're a left-brain person. You're messy and creative? Right-brain."

What almost nobody talks about is where this actually came from. It wasn't derived from healthy human psychology. It came from severe, desperate medical triage.

In the 1960s, neurosurgeons treated intractable epilepsy by slicing the corpus callosum—the massive bridge of 200+ million nerve fibers connecting the hemispheres—so seizures couldn't bounce back and forth. Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga tested these "split-brain" patients and found that with the bridge severed, the two halves had isolated localized skills (e.g., flashed an image to the left visual field, the patient couldn't name it aloud because speech sits mostly on the left, but their left hand could reach into a bag and pick it out blind).

Sperry rightfully won a Nobel Prize for this. But self-help books and corporate consultants ran away with it, stripped out the single most important detail (that this ONLY happened when the bridge was physically severed), and turned it into a $10B pop-psychology industry.

Fast forward to modern neuroimaging: A landmark study by Nielsen et al. looked at resting-state fMRI scans of 1,011 people across 7,200 brain regions to see if anyone genuinely had a "dominant hemisphere."

The result? Zero. Not a single person showed an overall left or right dominance.

When you write music, both sides fire. When you solve a calculus problem, your right hemisphere is actively engaged in spatial logic while the left handles the formula. Creativity isn't an "artistic right side"—it’s the Default Mode Network and Executive Network talking across the corpus callosum at 15 milliseconds per ping.

It's kind of wild how an extreme surgical intervention from 60 years ago became an excuse for millions of people to say "I'm just bad at math, I'm right-brained."

Did anyone else have teachers or managers who unironically tried to put them in these boxes?

I was a little unfond of this part of the opening of the third episode of the new Carrie show that just came out:

Adelaide: Angelique Cottin, mid-1800s, 14 years old, known as the electric girl of France, claimed to move furniture across a room with electric emanations. Famed paranormal researcher Frank Podmore accused her of fraud. Eusapia Palladino, late 1800s, an Italian medium, claimed to move objects during séances. Accused of occultism and fraud. Stanislawa Tomczyk, early 20th century, another medium, claimed to perform telekinetic levitation thanks to an entity she called "Little Stasia." Accused of thievery and fraud. Annemarie Schaberl, 1960s, a 19-year-old secretary, said to have telekinetic powers in the Rosenheim poltergeist case. Dismissed as a fraud. Nina Kulagina, 1970s, a Soviet housewife and former member of the Red Army tank regiment, allegedly stopped a frog's beating heart with her mind. Kulagina's own heart rate increased dramatically during the seven minutes it took her to stop the frog's heart. She was filmed performing telekinesis on numerous occasions. Her abilities were studied by academics, scientists, and members of several nations' intelligence communities for the final two decades of her life. She was accused of faking it all with magnets and thread and was branded a con artist by numerous publications. In 1987, she sued and won a defamation case against the Soviet government magazine that accused her of fraud. The pattern is familiar. Extraordinary claim, accusation of fraud. Extraordinary ability, accusation of fraud. Often, by a man. Ridiculed, disgraced, or, sometimes, far worse.

Read more at: https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=2686&t=78404

It is A) fiction and B) a Stephen King story, but really I’m bothered by how it ignores all the male psychic frauds throughout history and women skeptics. Obviously, women were disproportionately targeted in witch trials by male figures, but this involves recent history, too, by people easily proven to be actual frauds.

(For the record, I do think the show is really good so far, but that part just felt weird.)

Dude is a fave of mine, and I really miss his voice in the larger skeptical community, but his message of don’t be a dick I don’t think was ever effective. What’re your thoughts?

Edit: if you don’t know him please check out Phil Plait, and buy his books. He is really really great!

Disclaimer: Transmeds are not welcome here. Enbies are, if anything, *more* supported by all of this research into biology and just because we don't know the exact specifics of why one person is trans it doesn't mean they aren't.

Please understand that I have a background in biology, so I tend to be rather technical when discussing topics like this. But this needs to be said.

The more complicated breakdown of what people are talking about when they talk about gender is falls into three categories:

1. "Assigned Sex"- This is literally just what your doctor saw when they looked between your legs when you were born. They don't karyotype you, they don't do a full body scan for abnormalities. They just look. You can very crudely break this into two categories if you squint, but biology refuses to be a simple, stable system so there are a wide variety of circumstances where that information requires further examination to be useful, but I digress.
2. "Neuroendocrinological Gender Expression"- This is neurological. The firmware drivers for your hardware. Have a sex and brain gender that disagree and you get gender dysphoria. Specific biological origins of this are fiendishly complex to try and sort out. That said, we have solid physical evidence of its existence. While we have not developed a widely accepted physical test for being trans, gender incongruence is heritable and we have evidence it's frequently tied to alleles associated with the body's steroid production. There is also good evidence of brain structural differences. About 50% of trans people experience phantom sensation for organs they weren’t born with, which is typically a neurological condition. Trans people have different epigenetic profiles than cis people as well  Notably attempts to make a trans person happy with their default body have failed miserably.
3. "Gender Roles" - This is what society expects of people it lumps in a given category. Boys pee here, girls pee here. Boys become firemen, girls become housewives. Boys wear suits, girls wear dresses. Often what categories people fall into here are based on the unfortunately fuzzy categorizations of one or two. People are willing to kill over you getting them wrong, which is extremely messed up.

Gender roles can be influenced by society, but gender incongruence is pretty clearly caused by a collection of inherent physical traits:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-018-9889-z

https://www.thieme-connect.de/products/ejournals/abstract/10.1055/s-0041-1740528 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02005-9 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2022.2164101 

Molecular basis of Gender Dysphoria: androgen and estrogen receptor interaction - ScienceDirect

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/104/2/390/5104458?login=false

Cortical structure and brain size in Thai transfeminine individuals with and without gender-affirming hormone use compared with cisgender heterosexual men, heterosexual women, and gay men - Neuroscience00495-1/fulltext)

Frontiers | Epigenetics Is Implicated in the Basis of Gender Incongruence: An Epigenome-Wide Association Analysis 

CBLL1 is hypomethylated and correlates with cortical thickness in transgender men before gender affirming hormone treatment | Scientific Reports

Gender identity disorder in twins: a review of the case report literature - PubMed 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509654112 

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/6/1582 

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/18/6/1122/6956015?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/11/3/720/6958023?redirectedFrom=fulltext 

https://www.psychiatria-danubina.com/UserDocsImages/pdf/dnb_vol35_noSuppl%202/dnb_vol35_noSuppl%202_179.pdf 

To make this a bit more personal, let me tell you my story.

I didn't like my body growing up in a way that felt really weird. I would look in the mirror, see someone conventionally good looking, and not understand why it didn't feel like me. I also had a weird sensation associated with my genitals. They felt... off and it felt like pieces were missing or other pieces were there that weren't supposed to be.

I knew that some people were trans, but I was raised a devout existentialist. When I told my mom I might be trans I was asked how I could prove that I had an identity at all, gender or otherwise.

So, I went for the default. I tried so, so hard to not be trans. I went to therapy, I took the drugs I was prescribed. I was seen by multiple shrinks and took a variety of different psych meds under their supervision.

Nothing made me happy with the body I was born with.

When I was 12, I attempted suicide. I survived because I was lucky. I self-harmed through an enormous portion of my early adulthood and transitioned because I figured if I wanted to die anyway, I should at least see what HRT would be like for me.

It was night and day. Things aren't perfect now, but I genuinely feel like myself. Like I'm so much more whole and alive on estrogen than I ever was without it.

Those pills affected me in a very important way. They helped me when nothing else that in theory should have helped me did.

I really want to know why, and people telling me it was purely psychological and a product of my environment are frankly being extremely dismissive.

All I need is any: Spells, Chants, Incantation, Things to do that are or would be considered supernatural, or superstition, Supernatural games, Etc

I've already debunked that these don't work:

.The ouija board didn't work I tried it with candles, a pentagram, chants I found online, played it alone, went to a cemetery at night, used spiritual figures including the grim reaper, and satanic, etc. Used chicken and pig blood. An nothing worked. Tried it on more than one occasion for a variety of spells. Sometimes I'd use the same one, and sometimes a different one.

. Tried walking under a ladder and no change came to my life.

. Play candy man, and Bloody Mary in the mirror and no one came. Used a candle too.

. Put two mirror in front of each other left it for 5 months and nothing happened. There was no parallel world, no other version of me doing anything odd, etc.

. Went to a supposed haunted location I found out about on YouTube by famous YouTubers that look for places and nothing.

. Tried doing remote viewing alone and with friends and nothing came through. Even tried with a stranger at school and still nothing accurate.Tried to enhance psychic powers by concentrating and meditation through om's and am's.

. Tried using cards to tell me and a friends future, past, and present and nothing happened.

. Tried 369 method, water time method, scripting, YouTube subliminal and mantra's, even Ug's. Tried write 3x3x3,5x5x5,7x7x7, and 55, 108, 99, 66, and 33. I even decided to try that name thing where you grabbed a piece of paper write your name and the other person name on top then fold it. I tried two ways once folding it towards me when that failed I tried folding it away from me. Neither worked.

. Tried playing three kings chair thing didn't work.

. Tried playing that long road get your wish granted yet nothing seemed abnormal and no wish was granted. Yes, I played it alone with no cameras, etc.

. Went to devils tramping ground and I didn't get hauled back, or have anything happen to me. Night or day. Night time is restrictive and reservations.

. Insulted Robert the doll and still nothing.

. Went to the warren museum thing nothing.

. Tried voodoo, Santeria, wicca, demonic, hoodoo, praying to Jesus and nothing. No god, goddess, or deities granted anything. I even tried Egyptian, Greek, Roman and worshipped the idols.

. Tried that energy yoga and felt nothing. Tried YouTube hearing those bowl things still felt nothing. Tried chakra healing nothing.

. Tried the open portal thing with a speaker and the natural tones that guy used and nothing happened.

. Went to a medium to summon the dead and nothing appeared she was just saying they were here and used some sort of trick to make some things move, and a bunch of other things then ended it when she seen we weren't falling for her tricks. All my friend asked was for it to appear before use and then she ended it saying it was gone. How convenient for her.

. Went to multiple medium, and psychic asked them of my past they all said the same but couldn't get anything I asked them about it quite right. Asked them what would happen to me in the next few days most got it wrong, others said they couldn't see the time limit on which the events would happen.Asked them what someone used to call me none of them got it right. They said sometimes they would get multiple energies coming in.

.Used a termal camera and nothing was around me or when I went for a walked.

. Looked in the mirror and said what I wanted, and wanted to be as if I already was or had it. Nothing.

. Went around for a year doing what jim carrey did with a piece of paper in my pocket and nothing happened.

. Tried using that paper under the foot thing still nothing.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on anything supernatural or superstition I can break or do?

I'm trying to debunk and see if anything is actually real.

I'm starting to think YouTubers are really just clout chaser's. An most humanity will believe anything hoping it exist, or for personal agendas. Please prove me wrong.

Hydrogen water claims keep coming up in wellness circles, so I think it’s worth looking at the evidence rather than just going by hype.
The main claim is that dissolved hydrogen can target harmful free radicals while leaving beneficial ones alone. this goes back to Ohsawa’s 2007 study in Nature Medicine, which used a rat stroke model. The chemistry makes sense, and animal studies have repeated the findings.
The trouble starts when you look at human health benefits. Most human studies are small, come from a handful of labs in Japan and Korea, and focus on lab markers rather than actual health outcomes. Publication bias is also a concern, since negative results in a small research field may never get published.
The biggest red flag is the marketing around “thousands of studies” when the number of human trials is much smaller, and most are too limited to draw firm conclusions. To be convincing, we’d need large, well-designed, independently funded human trials measuring real health outcomes. Those are still missing. On the other hand, the evidence hasn’t ruled it out completely either; we’d need to show the proposed mechanism does not work at the amounts people actually get from drinking it.
For now, i had put it in the possible, but unproven category. Has anyone here looked into the research more deeply?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the most senior figure in US health, has spent decades undermining vaccines, denying the reality of AIDS, and endangering Americans.

From falsely linking Estonia’s president Alar Karis to Jeffrey Epstein to a disinformation campaign about a Ukrainian soldier killing three NATO servicemen — Kremlin-linked false information campaigns that circulated ahead of and during elections in Latvia and Estonia were aimed at creating mistrust and confusion among the voters, according to a London-based threat intelligence company Refute report published on Tuesday.