Ohlone’s Psychology Club will be presenting and hosting one of the most interesting seminars in the Spring semester. The club is happy to announce that this year they will once again have the Psychology Club Speaker Series. The club’s mission is to promote psychology as a field and as a discipline by conducting field trips, on-campus activities and educational speakers. Sheldon Helms, who is the adviser of the Psychology Club as well as a professor of psychology, said, “The club started the speaker series about a year ago and it was mostly because of my own irritation and going to other campuses and university campuses especially and finding out they had these amazing speakers coming to talk to their students.” “Eventually, I went to enough of those and I started thinking why can’t we have those at Ohlone and I spoke to the Psychology Club to come and speak to the club and eventually open it to other groups.” Each semester, the psychology club holds various forums where speakers come and present their material that they have researched in their field. In the Fall semester, the club invited two phenomenal psychologist speakers Kim Peek and Michael Shermer. Based on his bestselling book, “Why People Believe Weird Things,” psychologist Michael Shermer applies his beliefs and investigations to scientific reasoning and unexplained phenomena. Shermer also goes into great detail on what makes us believe in bigfoot, UFO’s, is ESP real, what causes mass delusion, what’s with UFO sightings and the unanswered questions that we are still unable to answer. However, Sheldon also said, “We sold out the Smith Center which is over four-hundred seats and we thought, ‘how can we follow that up?’” On the other hand, psychologist Kim Peek’s seminar was based on how he memorized hundreds of books, encyclopedias, phone directories, maps, songs and much more. This coming April the Psychology Club will be having outstanding guest speaker/ psychologist Brian Dunning.
Dunning is the creator of Skeptoid.com and hosts a weekly podcast in which he crucially examines spurious claims in a variety of areas. His training and education in computer science has prepared him to do the kind of extensive research to attract an average of 100,000 downloads per week. Skeptoid.com fully examines and has four basic types of popular pseudosciences which are: consumer frauds, urban legends, alternative medicine and conspiracy theories. In his seminar, Dunning will share personal stories about non-scientific ideas, critically examine a wide range of pop-culture myths and urban legends from bigfoot, to conspiracy theories, to New Age healing techniques, health claims such as Homeopathic Medicine, Detoxification Craze to other numerous and outrageous topics that no other psychologist would be willing to talk about. Dunning also has two bestselling books, “Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena” and “Skeptoid Two: More Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena” The Ohlone Psychology Club is looking foward to once again present and have a Psychology speaker come next month, Apr. 16. The seminar will be held at Jackson Theatre, Smith Center for the Fine and Performing Arts. The club has other planned events in the future such as the “Evolution vs. Creationism” by Dr. Eugenie Scott and ‘The Importance of Sleep” by Dr. William C. Dement. For more information, please contact the Smith Center Box Office.
By Anika Dokes
Staff writer
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