random thoughts on random events in a random world

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, or so the saying goes.

Well it was reported in the Daily Fail last week, that a (not very scientific) experiment was carried out by “Britain’s leading charisma expert” Nikki Owen. And the results of the afore mentioned experiment were that saying nice things to yourself, and thinking positive thoughts can keep you young looking!!

Quite a claim there Ms Owen, and whilst i’m all for positive thinking I do have to question the experiment that was used to back up this claim. Ms Owen took an apple, cut it in half, placed the two halves in two jars, one with a rather fetching “Love” sticker on it, the other “Hate”. And just what did Ms Owens’ then do? Well for a week she said nothing but nice things to the half in the jar marked love, and was rather spiteful to the jar marked hate.

The results of this were the half in the hate jar showed slightly more decomposition than the half in the love jar, and from this Ms Owens’ declared that this is proof that being nice to apples, or yourself can hold back father time!!! Er…yeah right!

To my eyes there was not a great deal of difference in the halves and the extra decomposition could have simply been the result of the knife used to cut the apple having more microbes on one side of it than the other. Or even latent bacteria was more prevalent in the hate jar than in the jar of love.

Anyway you get the picture by now, this is hardly a news story and even less a scientific one and certainly not one to be taken seriously, yet many people do. (As seen from the comments posted on the original article)

Thankfully I’m not the only one to feel this way and Rebecca Watson @rebeccawatson founder of Skepchick has taken it upon herself to attempt to reproduced the results of the experiment, this time including a control piece of apple which will only have “Meh” said to it over the week, therefore receiving no positive or negative thoughts. Rebecca will be posting a daily video of the progress of the apple and i’ll put those up on here so you can see for yourself just what a load of bunkum talking to an apple or yourself in order to hold back the ravages of time is!

There is also a Facebook group here set up by Rebecca where if you want you can replicate the experiment and post your results.

Massive props to Rebecca for taking the time to talk to the apples and give them moustaches

Ow da ya like dem apples?!!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Days 4 & 5

Day 6  (staring Sid as Rebecca has lost her voice, but for constancy it’s her words he reads to the apples)

Better late than never, the not so scientific conclusion to the Great Apple experiment

So what did we learn from all this apple love hate? Well as you may have suspected from the outset, being nice to an apple in a jar does not prevent or slow down it’s decay and being evil to an apple does not speed up the mould either, SHOCK HORROR!

But maybe saying “Meh” to an neutral bit of apple is the way forward!