The Secret? It's B.S.

You may be familiar with The Secret in either book or film form. It was quite popular. Oprah Winfrey liked it, so it must be full of deep truth, right?

What is The Secret^{TM(C)(R)(AYB)} anyway?

The Secret, described as a self-help film,[2][3] uses a documentary format to present the "Law of Attraction." This law is the "secret" that, according to the tagline, "has traveled through centuries to reach you." (...) As put forth in the film, the "Law of Attraction" principle posits that people's feelings and thoughts attract real events in the world into their lives; from the workings of the cosmos to interactions among individuals in their physical, emotional, and professional affairs. The film also suggests that there has been a strong tendency by those in positions of power to keep this central principle hidden from the public.

Oooh boy. That sounds juicy! I can effect the universe with my mind!!?!? And there's been a conspiracy to prevent me from finding out about this!?!??

Eh, screw it. This is obvious instance of magical thinking. We all did it when we were little kids, and it's fun for a while - but it gets dangerous when people start to think that there's any connection between this and actual reality.

Mindhacks posted a secret not worth keeping where they pointed to a very quick and punchy rebuttal of "The Secret" from Scientific American. They said it best by quickly running down the claims in "The Secret".

"It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought." No, it hasn't. "Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we're not loving and we're not grateful." Those ungrateful cancer patients. "You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week." Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. "Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you." But in magnets, opposites attract--positive is attracted to negative. "Every thought has a frequency.... If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency."

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources.

It's worth mentioning that while "The Secret" may be total BS, its creators are bathing in champagne every night and I'm just a cranky blogger. It makes me keep wondering if I should get into the prophecy business...