Does the date of your birth really matter?
Why did Ali lose his title? Simple. He was in a down phase in his emotional and physical cycles, only hours away from a physically critical day. A "triple low" day produced the abnormal heart rhythm that led to Elvis Presley's death last Aug. 16. And Sadat's peace initiative could not have come while Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin was in office because the Egyptian President's chart shows zero emotional compatibility with Rabin.
All these deductions are based on the theory of biorhythm, the fast-growing pseudoscience that is more fun than astrology and not as messy as reading chicken entrails. Biorhythm is now a multimillion-dollar-a-year business, serving more than a million believers in the U.S. The word is spread in books, newsletters, a syndicated column and shopping-mall computers that churn out daily charts for 50¢. There is a biorhythm service predicting the results of professional football games ($99 a season), and several dozen companies supply computerized charts and such biorhythm hardware as calculator watches ($169) and a Biocom desk computer ($3,000). One company, Kosmos International of Atlanta, supplies charts for the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League and sells 10,000 electronic biorhythm calculators a month, including a "love machine" for women who want to check their compatibility with boyfriends.
It is all a bit too much for George Thommen, 82, a Swiss-born industrial consultant who pioneered the American biorhythm movement by importing the ideas of a small Germanic number-juggling cult after World War II. "I thought of it as a hobby, like a sailboat," says Thommen, author of the first American biorhythm book, Is This Your Day? "In one way I'm happy that it's taken hold—I'm for helping humanity. In another way I think the commercialization is a dirty trick."
The appeal of biorhythm, like that of astrology, comes from the belief that one can chart the ups and downs of friends and celebrities simply by knowing their birthdays. According to the theory, there are three fixed cycles, each starting at the moment of birth: a 23-day physical cycle, a 28-day emotional cycle and a 33-day mental cycle. Every human is likely to perform well in the up phases of cycles, and poorly in the down or recharging phases. But the most vulnerable day, known as the critical, zero or switch-point day, comes in the midpoint of each cycle, when a person is changing phases. Things are very likely to go wrong on a "double critical" day, when two cycles are at midpoint. A "triple critical," which practitioners say occurs about once a year, holds terror for all believers.
Scientists do not know whether to snicker or be outraged, and most have been hesitant to dignify the theory by formally investigating it. Last month a team of intrepid researchers at Johns Hopkins University ventured into the area. Writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Psychologist John Shaffer and Psychiatrist Chester Schmidt reported that despite biorhythm's "wistful appeal," the theory just doesn't work.