Masaro Imoto was a Japanese author and alternative theorist who believed that consciousness and

emotions could alter the structure of water, and because of the internet, he built a huge

following worldwide of people who assumed that this was some kind of scientific conclusion

or had supporting data.

Was it?

Or was it just more New Age mumbo jumbo?

We're going to talk about that today on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

The Water Wu of Masaro Imoto.

Today we're going to take a look at one of the founders of a pseudoscience that has for

more than three decades, given birth to a whole slew of knockoff pseudosciences pertaining

to water.

The man is Masaro Imoto, born in Yokohama in 1943, and creator of what he calls Hado.

It is Imoto's firm conviction that water, human consciousness and human emotion are deeply

entangled, and he's become best known for his photographs of ice crystals, basically

snowflakes, that he says are either beautiful or ugly based on the emotions expressed

at the time of their formation.

If you write a positive word on a bottle of water or expose it to a picture of beautiful

animals like dolphins, it'll freeze into beautiful ice crystals.

But if you speak harshly to it or write a negative word on the bottle, it'll freeze

into ugly non-crystalline lumps.

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