Masaru Emoto's Wonderful World of Water

SI N-D 2007 pgs 9/26/07 12:37 PM Page 49 Masaru Emoto’s Wo n d e r f u l Wo r l d o f Wa t e r It can read, listen to music, look at pictures, hear your thoughts, heal you, and create world peace. HARRIET HALL SKEPTICAL INQUIRER November / December 2007 49 SI N-D 2007 pgs 9/26/07 12:37 PM Page 50 A [real] scientist would have checked to see if he got the he folks in my community have been same results if he didn’t know beforehand which water was arguing about fluoride again. A nutri- clean. Emoto never bothered with even this most elementary double-check. He didn’t consult real scientists. Had he done tionist wrote in the local newspaper so, they could have told him that these snowflake crystals, just T like raindrops, form around a core of dust, so actually the that fluoride is a deadly poison and that it cleaner water is less likely to form them. Their beauty varies doesn’t reduce tooth decay. She recommended with the temperature and conditions of formation, not with the purity of the water. The idea that snowflakes could show avoiding it entirely, even to the extent of buy- anything about differences in the “molecular structure” of water is incompatible with basic physics. ing nonfluoride toothpaste. I responded with Emoto’s popularity is a sad commentary on the scientific a calmly reasoned guest column trying to sep- illiteracy of our society. His work is a morass of factual errors, misconceptions, misinterpretations, metaphors, and meaning- arate the scientific facts from policies and less assertions. He writes in the language of magical thinking and superstition, not of science. opinions. The scientific facts are not open to Most serious scientists find Emoto’s delusions too silly to even acknowledge, but one retired chemistry professor has taken the debate: fluoride in optimum amounts reduces time to debunk water cluster pseudoscience and Emoto’s tooth decay; too much fluoride can be harm- “research” on his Web site: www.chem1.com/CQ/clusqk.html. ful. The public policy question is open to I didn’t mention that I saw the What the Bleep movie and didn’t opinion and debate: should we add fluoride to find it particularly convincing as a scientific document. Its credits list the 35,000-year-old warrior Ramtha “as channeled the water or protect our children from tooth by J.Z. Knight.” decay by other means? Remember talking to plants? Emoto talks to water. He claims that if you say nice things, the water makes pretty crystals, and if you say mean things, it just makes amorphous I know that at least one person read my guest column, globs. You don’t even have to talk out loud, because water can because there was a letter to the editor in the following issue of read. Humans have to be taught to read, but water is the paper. It was written by a very confused woman who smarter—it already knows how. If you place labels with signed herself “Reverend.” She disregarded my arguments “Thank you” or “You idiot!” on containers of water, the water about the effectiveness of fluoride and the advisability of sep- will respond by making pretty or ugly snowflakes. arating facts from opinions, and she fixated on one thing: her Water can not only read, it can look at pictures: a picture opinion that adding anything to our water is wrong. She’s cer- of a tree resulted in “a large crystal that seems to be teeming tainly welcome to her opinion, but she based that opinion on with life,” while a picture of autumn leaves created a “crystal pseudoscientific nonsense that she confused with scientific that appears to be formed by leaves before they have fallen truth. She wrote: from the trees.” The one I liked best was a crystal from water I am saddened that Harriet Hall is not aware of the latest sci- exposed to the word “war” two months before September 11, entific research by Dr. Masaru Emoto. In his two books, The 2001. He says it looks “almost as if a jet plane crashed into it.” True Power of Water and The Hidden Power of Water he Emoto talks to plants too. The What the Bleep movie describes describes the healing capabilities of non-toxic water (chemical free). Our country is too toxic from pollution, food, thoughts an experiment where cooked rice rotted faster if labeled with neg- and water we drink.... I suggest people go to Dr. Emoto’s lec- ative words. Most experiments are published somewhere. I ture . and see the slides of microscope samples of the toxic, looked for this one in vain. I finally realized that he was only repulsive water crystals compared to those of pure untainted reporting what children had done informally in a private home water. Or, see the movie What the Bleep Do We Know now on and reported to him by mail. He “verified” the findings by sug- DVD, which shows slides of the difference in their molecular structure. Which would you want to drink? gesting to other devotees that they try the same experiment, and some of them reported that it worked for them, too. I wrote back that she was wrong that I wasn’t aware of Dr. A real scientist would ask questions such as: How many Emoto’s “research.” people tried the experiment, failed, and didn’t report to him? His newest book, Hidden Messages in Water holds a place of Were the rice samples kept under exactly the same conditions? honor on my bookshelves as the worst book I have ever read. Did the experimenters treat the samples with “good” words It is about as scientific as Alice in Wonderland. Emoto took pic- any differently, for instance by picking them up more often to tures of snowflakes and “observed” that clean water made pret- check them, or breathing on them? Did anyone try it with tier crystals. double blinding so the observers wouldn’t be aware of which samples had which labels? Was an endpoint predetermined, or Harriet Hall, also known as the SkepDoc, is a retired physician did the observers just subjectively decide which rotted faster? who lives in Puyallup, Washington, and writes about alternative Was any statistical analysis done to rule out “noise” and the medicine and pseudoscience. This is her sixth article for the effects of chance? Emoto doesn’t ask such questions; he just SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Her e-mail is [email protected]. marvels about the reports. 50 Volume 31, Issue 6 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER SI N-D 2007 pgs 9/26/07 12:38 PM Page 51 In another example, he unquestioningly accepted the results of an experiment with a sample size of only two. A girl grew two sunflower plants, one labeled “fool,” whose growth was stunted, and one not labeled. Emoto would like us to believe that obviously the stunted plant was reading the label, because otherwise there’s no conceivable reason why one plant might grow better than another. Water likes to listen to music, too: when one sample lis- tened to “a mournful melody,” it supposedly formed different crystals than water exposed to a song by the musician Enya. The Enya water produced a crystal that was “pure, innocent, and white, just like her voice.” All snowflakes are white, and voices aren’t white—unless you suffer from synesthesia. And how could you possibly determine the “innocence” of a crystal? He sees things in crystals like “a brilliant healing effect” and “overflowing love.” He has a great imagination, but an independent observer would have a hard time matching the photos to his descriptions. He has what he calls a “hado” machine. According to Emoto, everything emits hado. He tests patients with his hado machine, and if they are too ill to leave their bed, he prints out the person’s name and tests the printed slip or their photograph. Then he infuses water with hado to counteract their ill- ness. He brilliantly rehashes the unfounded claims of “energy medicine” and employs a new version of the quack electrodi- agnostic machines that have been fooling patients for decades. He explains how everything in the universe vibrates, and his Masaru Emoto. (Notimex/foto/Guillermo Granados/GGV/POL/) [Photo via Newscom] machine detects those vibrations. He knows a doctor who col- lected blood samples from patients, kept them for years, and was water from the Honmyo River, he found this distribution: able to diagnose the patients’ current illnesses because the vibra- Beautiful: 2 tions in the old blood samples changed as the condition of their Rather beautiful: 4 bodies changed. He knows of people who can sense from the Hexagonal pattern: 0 vibrations of a photograph whether the person is alive or dead. Radial pattern: 8 Lattice pattern: 8 He fails to explain, however, why these talented people have not Indefinite pattern: 29 applied for (and won) James Randi’s million dollar challenge. Collapsed pattern: 3 Apparently Emoto has been challenged for not being scien- No crystal formation: 0 tific, so in one of his latest books, The Secret Life of Water, he In this case, he chose a beautiful crystal to represent the sam- admits, “Photographing crystals is a subjective science.” Did ple, because although there were only two beautiful crystals you know there was such a thing as a subjective science? He out of fifty, there were others that were in the process or had says, “The methods employed to photograph water crystals the potential to make beautiful crystals.

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