Barry Beyerstein

Barry L Beyerstein (May 19, 1947 – June 25, 2007) was a scientific skeptic and professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Beyerstein's research explored brain mechanisms of perception and consciousness, the effects of drugs on the brain and mind, sense of smell and its lesser-known contributions to human cognition and emotion.

He was founder and chair of the BC Skeptics Society, a Fellow and member of the Executive Council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Associate editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine Journal as well as a contributor to Skeptical Inquirer, Beyerstein was one of the original faculty of CSICOP's Skeptic's Toolbox.

Beyerstein was a co-founder of the Canadians for Rational Health Policy and a member of the advisory board of the Drug Policy Foundation of Washington D.C. He was a founding board member of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy and contributed to the International Journal of Drug Policy.

According to long-time friend James Alcock, Beyerstein once addressed the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health during discussions leading up to the passage of the Controlled Substances Act". Along with his brother Dale, Barry was active in the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

According to friend James Alcock, Barry's father Hilliard Beyerstein had many occupations during Barry's life: magician, chiropractor, bank manager, writer of self-help books, owner of a cosmetics manufacturing business, real estate speculator and building contractor, Barry's mother was a school teacher.

When his father would build a house, the family would live in it for a while, then move.

"Barry... moved thirty times within his neighborhood while growing up".

Raised on magazines Fate and Popular Science as well as many paranormal TV shows, Beyerstein felt that this "enchantment... inclined me toward an eventual career in the study of consciousness".

Intrigued throughout high school with séances, handwriting analysis, hypnosis and other paranormal beliefs, Beyerstein with the help of his friends, conducted many experiments.

This was far before he learned about experimental controls, which explained the constant success of their tests.

Entering Simon Fraser University in 1965, Beyerstein declared his major in psychology with a minor in philosophy.

"As I delved deeper into those subjects, I began to doubt the inevitability of an eventual happy marriage between science and the paranormal... after my first course in the philosophy of science... the fundamental assumptions and modus operandi of science were seriously at odds with most of what I knew of physical research."

By his junior year in college he was hooked on studying the brain.

In 1968, Beyerstein moved to the San Francisco area to attend UC Berkeley, where "party chit-chat could accept a guest's description of his latest out-of-body experience or the need to have her chakras realigned as casually as one might receive the morning's weather forecast. I frequently found myself the odd man out... (they thought) I was a nice guy, but hopelessly 'linear' and 'left-brained', despite my de rigueur shoulder-length hair, tie-dye T-shirt, bell bottoms and cowboy boots."

Beyerstein received his B.A. from Simon Fraser University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Experimental and Biological Psychology from the UC Berkeley in 1973.

In the 1970s Beyerstein collaborated with his colleague Bruce K. Alexander on the famous Rat Park study of addiction.

He has been publicly critical of unsupported claims of techniques to improve brain function.

In the book Mind Myths Beyerstein sets out seven kinds of evidence refuting the ten percent myth including the fact that if even a tiny part of the brain is injured, there will be an effect on the subject.

If the 10% statement were accurate then the brain could take more damage without affecting the quality of life.

After writing for Skeptical Inquirer magazine (1985–88) Beyerstein was elected to the Executive Council.

Concerning Beyerstein's views of the skeptical community, "I have enjoyed my association with CSICOP so thoroughly as the opportunity it has afforded me to meet so many world scholars. I think the work that they do in the skeptical arena is often underappreciated in academic circles because many specialists fail to grasp the potential consequences of the strong antirational and antisciencific trends in modern society. They see no pressing need to oppose something publicly that they see as transparently ridiculous".

He also made an appearance in the first season of the television show Penn and Teller: Bullshit! to discuss the scientific basis of near-death experiences.

"Near death experiences are generated by brain function and they don't prove there is an afterlife... these are complex hallucinations that are taking place in the theater of one's own mind."

In an article for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, titled "Why Bogus Therapies Seem to Work", Beyerstein outlined ten errors and biases that can lead people to incorrectly perceive medical benefits from ineffective treatments.

During an interview on Point of Inquiry the official podcast from Center For Inquiry Beyerstein listed the corporate and legislative misdeeds of the pharmaceutical industry and their larger negative impacts on humanity.

Here Beyerstein lays out his views on drug advertising, political lobbying, patent creep, alternative medicine, and research being funded by pharmaceutical companies at many universities worldwide which have the cumulative effect of causing suffering for the poor and elderly while underserving the common and treatable ailments of the citizens of third world countries.

Beyerstein decried the adverse effects that corporate profit from "lifestyle drugs" have had on medicine and public well-being.

Addressing the example of restless leg syndrome, he said pharmaceutical companies are "making a disease out of the viccitudes of life."

At the Skeptic's Toolbox in 1993, Beyerstein laid out the unified theory by psychologists concerning brain function and the paranormal.

"This theory holds that all mental phenomena are products of the physical brain and that when the brain is destroyed or severely damaged, consciousness ceases forever."

The physical-brain viewpoint, "is supported by evolution, by the development of the individual human being, by pharmacological experiments, and by research on the effects of accidents affecting the brain."

While working as a professor at Simon Fraser, Beyerstein was asked to oversee an approval of a pro-parapsychology class.

He assembled the writings of "some of the leading figures in the nascent skeptics alliance that Paul Kurtz was in the process of forging."

This is when Beyerstein became aware of CSICOP "and got hooked on it".

At a meeting of the executive council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) in Denver, Colorado in April 2011, Beyerstein was selected for inclusion in CSI's Pantheon of Skeptics.

The Pantheon of Skeptics was created by CSI to remember the legacy of deceased fellows of CSI and their contributions to the cause of scientific skepticism.

CSI was previously known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).

A reporter on the trail of the story of a graphologist hired by the Vancouver School Board to review the handwriting of teachers in order to identify which were child molesters asked Beyerstein if there was any evidence to support the validity of handwriting analysis.